How Do We Worship Well When Everyone Is Upset?

Scene: A worship team member contacts you, saying they need to step off the platform for a season—and it’s mainly due to current structure and style. “It’s too serious, too solemn—it feels like it’s all mostly hymns.”

Then, you find out another church member has stopped worshipping in song with the rest of the congregation because your songs are “too modern… we need more hymns—and don’t change or add lyrics to them!”

For you as the worship director/pastor, you’re caught with pressure from both sides, and your first reaction might be to avoid conversations and isolate yourself from the problem, praying it will all go away. Looking at the situation, it’s easy to think, “This is bad.”

But what if I told you that it’s really a good thing?

What Led to This?

Normally, I avoid playing the “blame game” when it comes to negative, difficult, or destructive circumstances. This particular approach lacks thorough investigation, thoughtful examination, and meaningful solutions—it’s mostly a surface-level pointing of fingers to immediately satisfy a sense of wrath and self-vindication.

Rather, my approach is find the cause after careful observation and investigation, determine a solution, and then implement it iteratively—that is to say, shaping the solution along the way to fit the circumstances with meaningful input from multiple sources.

In this case, we have two groups of people within one church body who have drastically different preferences for style and substance in worship:

• Upbeat, engaging, and flexible: This emphasizes a strong sense of emotional satisfaction/expression realized with a flexible ebb-and-flow in mood and intensity, mostly dictated by the “moving of the Holy Spirit.” Congregants feel that they can authentically engage in worship because the music rightly highlights the emotions they need to express, allowing them for uninhibited connection to the Holy Spirit. It’s also a pushback to more solemn styles that are perceived as restrictive, formulaic, and prohibitive to “authentic worship.”

• Solemn, formal, and ordered: This emphasizes a strong sense of familiarity, clear sense of direction, and a connection to the legacy of the church. Congregants feel grounded, appreciating the history that is being maintained and carried forward for future generations and savoring a richer lyrical content than what typically appears in radio-friendly, modern CCM. There’s a goal to preserve tradition, along with gate-keeping any unorthodox, even heretical elements from entering into a worship service.

These style preferences aren’t anything new. You’re likely familiar with more formal elements that came from generations past, or from churches in your area with a “higher liturgy.” And even though flexibility seems to be borne from modern, “hip” churches, the idea of uninhibited expression has been around for a long time. (Born approximately 100 years past, Pentecostalism has almost always emphasized a strong sense of spontaneity in worship; Shakers initially embraced ecstatic physical expression, carrying that from the late 18th century until becoming more choreographed in later years. These are just a couple of examples.)

So upon observation, these preferences are inherited through traditional practice, where one style reacts to the other, leading to a back-and-forth, or ebb-and-flow in which style dominates the popular landscape.

And it’s upon this longstanding allegiance to tradition that I would say is the cause for discontent, disunity, and disdain for “other styles” that has pitted Christian brethren against each other.

Where Our Allegiance Should Lie

I want to be clear that I don’t hold tradition to be wrong in itself. My problem is when tradition (in this case, preserving style) becomes sacramental, elevated to the same status to which Christ called us to practice communion and baptism—and of which (speaking of tradition) Christ never instructed us to preserve beyond faithful proclaiming of the Word to all nations.

So instead of continuing to preserve style and structure as a top priority in cultivating a legacy of worship in practice, we should instead give highest focus to how richly the Word saturates the songs we sing, holding cultural aesthetic values as secondary (but not unimportant).

When we bring alignment and focus to the richness of the Word in our songs, we can then turn our attention to the expression of those songs, considering the culture of our local church and making sure that mostly everyone can meaningfully access a shared expression.

In practice, this necessarily demands some kind of compromise from all parties involved. However, rather than focus on a loss of preferences, lean into what you’re able to share and cultivate together:

• Centrality of the gospel.

• Clarity and recognition of the Trinity.

• Coming alongside and highlighting the sermon themes.

• Keeping the truth of Scripture as a binding thread, rather than relying only on testimonial-type lyrics.

You’re then able to keep a pulse on how people respond to style as you curate songs for worship services—and it’s not just done through observation on a Sunday morning.

Encourage active conversations about art, culture, and music with the people of your church. Learn about their “story”; people are WAY more apt to engage in “what’s being written” when their own experiences are considered and valued, instead of being dismissively derided or critiqued.

It all really boils down to this: When you’re faced with opposition and discontent on many fronts, take the opportunity to listen, reflect, and implement meaningful solutions so that your congregation is shepherded well, at least from what you bring to the table. Sometimes, that means not much will change in practice, but in other circumstances, it might mean taking a different direction in order to truly best steward the people under your care.

I truly believe that pursuing unity and holding preferences with an open hand is the fertile soil into which God plants seeds of fruitfulness, and His plan will be carried out one way or the other…

So, are you going to “hole up,” or will you join in the labor joyfully, with humility and expectation?

Be blessed 👊✌️