Pronouns and God-centered worship music

Here is a rant post.

Remember like 15 years ago, when a big deal in worship music was people complaining about songs that were so vague they could either be about God or your girlfriend? There were people running around saying that a song had to specifically mention a Member of the Trinity or it wasn't pleasing to God. Even as a kid I thought that was a pretty ridiculous thing to say, even though I did agree that it's pretty weak sauce to sing songs that were so vague. The problem is that a stupid grammatical rule is not going to fix our corporate worship, because the grammar is not the heart of the problem. A songwriter can put a name of God in the song, and it can still say nothing substantial.

If you have ever talked to me about worship singing before, you know that I'm all about the content. I am more convinced every day that the songs we use in corporate worship should be substantial (meaning they should say something coherent) and God-centered (meaning they should be focused on glorifying God). Recently, however, I have been hearing alot of nonsensical talk about the God-centeredness issue. It seems everyone thinks that the key problem with songs today is that there are too many first person pronouns. I have even heard it argued that in the good old days of hymnody all the pronouns were in the second person (you, your, thou, thy), whereas in contemporary worship music it all "I, me, my, mine". Now, another thing you'll know about me if you have ever heard me talk about worship music is that I love hymns, and, furthermore, I completely agree that worship music these days tends to be "me-centered". But let's not miss the point by making it a grammatical issue. The point is that our culture is obsessively ego-centric, and that is reflected in the music our culture's Church produces. Also, I think the self-obsession reflects our theological vacancy. Our songs tend to default to our feelings, impressions, promises, intentions and desires simply because we have an extremely difficult time thinking coherently for a sustained period of time about God and the gospel. We think it's boring and irrelevant.

Kevin Twit defines hymns as "mini-meditations on the paradoxes of the gospel that drive us to worship". While that definition may be a little too limited, since there are good hymns that don't fit within that conception, I think it's worth considering whether that definition can be applied to anything being produced today in corporate worship music. Are any songs being written today mini-meditations on anything that drive us to worship? No, they all just express our feelings or try to manipulate us with hype (an unfair blanket statement, I'll admit, but generally true).

Last year Jono (an excellent worship leader who highly values substantial, God-centered worship music) forwarded me an email he had gotten from someone in the congregation complaining that the songs didn't use the same kind of language in which we typically talk to God. I get the impression that most folks think along those lines, but my idea of the purpose of corporate worship music is that it should be formative. It should shape the way we think about God. It should paint for our forgetful minds a vivid picture of God's greatness--vivid as in sharp, specific, and detailed--and it should call us to increase our trust in and submission to him. At least that's, in part, how I understand the biblical injunction to "teach and admonish one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs".

Another problem with defining the problem in terms of the first person pronoun count is that, if we in any way see the Psalms as prescriptive of our worship music (which I think we should), we have to recognize that the Psalms are by no means lacking first person. And this of course accords also with Piper's whole "God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him" thing. God reveals himself to us in the Bible in terms of "all that he is for us in Christ Jesus now and forever", so we'd better not try to define God-centeredness in stricter terms than God himself!

So let's not try to put a band-aid on these deeper issues by making it into a grammatical issue. I'm afraid this problem is a little bit beyond the pronoun police. It's going to require some careful and courageous shepherding, and it's going to require that we recognize and repent of our self-centeredness. May God do a work in our congregations to ween us off our self-obsession and give us a taste for truth about him--in other words, a taste for him, as he has revealed himself to us.