Lovin' on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship

by Lester Ruth, Lim Swee Hong

Overview

Swee Hong Lim and Lester Ruth have filled an important gap in the study of worship. Lovin’ on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship is the first scholarly work of its kind on this topic. Lim and Ruth trace the origins and development of what we commonly call contemporary Christian worship, exploring it thoroughly and methodically. Their research includes early recordings and interviews with many who were directly involved in the early stages.

The authors were students of James White, and their book is, in a sense, a much-needed addition to White’s classic Introduction to Christian Worship. The thematic structure of Lovin’ on Jesus mirrors that of White’s Introduction, making this book exceedingly useful for students and practitioners in the study of Christian worship as a whole.

This is an essential resource for all students, scholars, worship leaders, and pastors who are serious about understanding the worship they lead.

“Meticulously researched, accessibly written, generous in its praise, and balanced in its critiques—this is the book for which many of us have long been waiting.” —Melanie C. Ross, Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT

“Particularly useful for teaching is the way Lim and Ruth organize their account by practices of time, space, music, prayer, technology, and scripture. This will immediately become a required textbook for the courses I teach on Christian worship.” —Ed Phillips, Associate Professor of Worship and Liturgical Theology and Coordinator of the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology, Candler School of Theology, Atlanta, GA

“Readers will find Lim and Ruth’s one-of-a-kind history convincing and rigorous. The authors show how a modern genre of Christian worship claimed its place, what it all means, and where it is heading.” —Gerald Liu, Assistant Professor of Worship and Preaching, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ

“Lovin’ on Jesus is an important book for every pastor, worship leader, and worshipper. This wonderfully prepared study will help you keep your worship experience biblically centered, dynamic, and growing.” —Rick Muchow, Founding Worship Pastor, Saddleback Church, worship leader and coach

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426795145
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Lester Ruth (Author)
Lester Ruth is the Research Professor of Christian Worship at Duke Divinity School. Ruth holds degress from Notre Dame, Candler School of Theology of Emory University, and Asbury Theological Seminary. He was a student of James F. White - the

Lim Swee Hong (Author)
Swee Hong Lim is the Deer Park Assistant Professor of Sacred Music and Director of the Master of Sacred Music Program at Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada. He was a student of James F. White - the former University of Notre Dame Professor of Theology (Liturgical Studies).

Swee Hong Lim is the Deer Park Assistant Professor of Sacred Music and Director of the Master of Sacred Music Program at Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada. He was a student of James F. White - the former University of Notre Dame Professor of Theology (Liturgical Studies).

Read an Excerpt

Lovin' on jesus

A Concise History of Contemporary Worship

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By Swee Hong Lim, Lester Ruth

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2017 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-9513-8

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CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY WORSHIP?

Before beginning any journey, it is always good to know the path to be taken. And so, before offering a history of contemporary worship, it is good to give some sense of what this book means by contemporary worship since this name has come to mean different things. Defining it is necessary, too, because some "contemporary" congregations have never used the term. And other churches have used other labels. Even others reduce the term to a single aspect, usually the musical. Say "a history of contemporary worship" and some hear "a history of contemporary Christian music."

But, by attempting a history of contemporary worship, this book aims for a history of something broader than just the music. We want to tell the story of a multifaceted worship style (to use a term popular with its practitioners) that within the last several decades has come to be an identifiable, widespread liturgical phenomenon.

To provide a better sense of this term and the history of this liturgical development, initially we will address two questions: what is "contemporary worship" and where did it come from? To answer the first question we will describe the observable markers that characterize this new style. When a congregation has worshipped within this style, these are the qualities that normally were present, regardless of whether the worship was labeled "contemporary" or not. Finally, to answer the first question, we will also give a history of the term itself as well as looking at alternative names that have been used.

Where did contemporary worship come from? To answer that second question we will outline the multiple sources that contributed to developing contemporary worship. Like a river drawn from several headwaters and fed by a variety of tributaries, contemporary worship had neither a single point of origin nor solitary influence shaping it. Indeed, the complexity of the phenomenon itself reflects the intricate weaving of impulses and influences that have shaped it.

And so, let us begin our journey.

DEFINING QUALITIES

Take a random group of Protestants and ask them this question: what is contemporary worship? Our hunch is that the answers might be dramatic. Detractors would speak in terms of contemporary worship being the bane of everything that had been good, reverent, and decent in church; advocates would draw a sharply contrasting vision of it being the boon to bring revitalization to the church. Our goal is not to agree with one apocalyptic scenario or the other but to point out that it would be rare to find a Protestant worshipper who does not have some idea of "contemporary worship." That ability suggests contemporary worship has become an identifiable phenomenon, one that has a history. Even though the term itself has been fluid and has its own story, nonetheless the name has become widespread since the 1990s and the phenomenon to which it points even before that. Like a Supreme Court justice once said about obscenity, it might be hard to define but we know contemporary worship when we see it. (Of course, we are not saying that contemporary worship is in any way obscene.)

What does one see when looking at this liturgical phenomenon? Generally, whether in recent forms of contemporary worship or their historical antecedents, there have been nine qualities that have tended to characterize the phenomenon. These nine qualities can be organized into four larger groupings. While it is tempting to begin by discussing music because that is the first thing that many think of, let us begin with qualities that were as foundational and, indeed, more critical at one time in contemporary worship's early history.

Those foundational qualities can be gathered under the category of fundamental presumptions. There have been three fundamental presumptions that underline all forms of contemporary worship, including the initial forays in the 1960s. At that time, these qualities were the first features that people often thought of as making worship "contemporary." Contemporary worship today still presumes these qualities even if our consciousness of them has receded as they have transformed into commonplace assumptions. In the 1960s their radical nature was obvious; today we just assume them, even for forms of worship other than contemporary.

The first of these presumptive qualities is the use of contemporary, non-archaic English. Contemporary worshippers expect to worship in language that they use outside of worship. Regardless of the specific act of worship, contemporary worship utilizes current, updated language. That presumption was especially evident in the materials describing contemporary worship in the 1960s. The setting aside of the King James Bible and the dropping of archaic English as the go-to language for Christian worship was the major development that characterized the phenomenon in its earliest expressions. Not surprisingly, this time was characterized by a surge of new translations of the Bible, all aiming for a more contemporary expression of the faith. The goal, whether biblical or liturgical, was not a rejection of distinctive Christian terminology, although that concern occupied some of the early adherents, as much as it was about the level of colloquialism. For worship to be authentic, an important goal, it had to be in the regular language of the people. The updating of worship language was the first and most critical domino that fell in the developments that led to current forms of contemporary worship.

The second presumptive quality is a concern that the content of a worship service be relevant to the contemporary concerns and issues in the lives of worshippers. Since the 1960s, those who designed contemporary worship desired to avoid a to-whom-it-may-concern generality in a service. In the late 1960s that might mean addressing the burning social issues of the day such as tensions about the Vietnam War (as seen in a mime troupe dramatically presenting the trial of war protesters instead of a standard liturgical text); in the 1990s this concern for relevance might mean sermon series based on the pressing felt needs of suburban life; in the 2000s it might mean searching for just the right popular movie clip to set visually and emotionally the theme for a service. And the saga continues. Even as we write there is a flurry of Facebook posts about how churches are utilizing the look and terminology of the latest Star Wars movie as the basis for shaping their upcoming Advent and Christmas services.

The desire to address contemporary concerns leads to the third presumptive quality: a commitment to adapt worship to match contemporary people, sometimes to the level of strategic targeting of specific groups. Behind this commitment normally lies the sense of anxiety that inherited forms of worship do not match contemporary people. The regular solution in contemporary worship has been to adapt worship to fit the people, not presume that people should change significantly to fit the worship. Although language and relevance to present-day concerns have been two of the central elements in adapting worship to fit contemporary people, they have not been the only areas in which the desire to adapt has been shown. Updating architecture, leadership style, and technology have been the most common within contemporary worship, not to mention music.

Indeed, updating music has been so important within contemporary worship's history that music has almost become synonymous with the whole phenomenon. Although originally just a part of the cluster of what made worship "contemporary" (language and relevance being the others), music now dominates as the central observable marker of when a church has contemporary worship. Its dominance is not really surprising when one considers music's central role within a contemporary service. Within the history of contemporary worship, there usually have been three aspects of the contemporary nature of the music. Each is a quality that has tended to characterize the phenomenon. Together these three musical qualities create the second large grouping of characteristics in contemporary worship.

The earliest, and first, of the three musical qualities is an intentional use of current types of popular music to provide the musical style for music in worship. Which type of popular music used has varied quite a bit. Contemporary worship services have featured music drawn from a range of genres. The earliest experimentation among youth, for example, used the popular sounds of the 1940s and 1950s, including jazz at a national Methodist youth convention. More commonly folk, pop, and rock sounds have predominated over the history of contemporary worship. Other churches have branched further out, using country and western, hip hop, rap, and bluegrass styles of music. While the sound may be different from church to church, what stays common is the same: fashioning the music of worship to sound like some form of popular music.

This fashioning has shown itself in at least three ways in contemporary worship. One is the instruments used. What instruments a worshipper sees in worship is the clearest clue that the worship will be contemporary. Thus the "victory" of contemporary worship is seen in its instruments: the guitars have beat out the organ. Another way of showing the use of popular music is in replicating a popular sound. In contemporary worship, instrumentalists, vocalists, and the sound technicians usually work to replicate the sound of popular music heard outside the church. Finally, the fashioning after popular music has shaped the nature of the songs themselves in both their lyrical expression (contemporary worship songs tend to be more colloquial than older hymns) and lyrical structure (the use of verses, choruses, and bridges).

Almost as early as the drive for using popular music is the second of the musical qualities to contemporary worship: extended times of congregational singing. In contrast to sprinkling songs one at a time in the order of worship, most contemporary services now allow for a time of extended congregational singing, with several songs following each other. The result has been the entrance of new words into the vocabulary of Christian worship, such as flow (how well the songs and the sense of worship transition over time) and set (the list and sequencing of songs). So critical is this time of congregational singing that in many churches worship has become a word synonymous with this time, not a word designating the whole service.

The third and last of the standard musical qualities in contemporary worship is in the centrality of the musicians in the service. Part of that centrality is architectural: the space occupied by musicians is usually large with clear sight lines from the congregation to them. Chancels have become stages in many cases, both figuratively and literally, with musicians and band facing the congregation. The musicians are central in terms of time as they tend to occupy the key spot for quite a while given the length of many worship sets, that is, the extended times of congregational singing. Finally, the musicians have a centrality in terms of the role in leadership. Usually there is a key musician known as the "worship leader" who handles much of the service apart from the preaching. Older models of leadership in which nonmusicians (most commonly the pastor or preacher) lead the bulk of the service have been modified or eliminated. In many cases it is difficult for a worshipper to tell who the preacher is until the sermon since the preacher is off stage until then.

Another overarching grouping of qualities that have characterized contemporary worship deals with how people act within a contemporary service. These qualities are behavioral. The first of these behavioral qualities is a higher level of physical expressiveness. People tend to move in contemporary worship, usually in a way that is not totally scripted or overtly directed by those leading the service. People stand, dance, shout, weep, and — in what has become almost a ubiquitous sign of this way of worship — raise their hands. Of course, the amount and kind of physical expressiveness varies between congregations and among different ethnicities, but it is unusual to not find at least some raising of hands in the service.

A predilection for informality is the second of the common behavioral qualities in contemporary worship. One informal dimension is dress. From early expressions in southern California in the 1970s, such as services in which young worshippers came straight from beach to sanctuary, contemporary worshippers have tended to dress down to encounter God. Dressing down affects all involved: preachers, musicians, technicians, and the people in the pews (or on seats, or on the ground, as the case may be). While level of dress in worship (and culture) has drifted generally toward the informal in America over the last half century, contemporary worship seems to have been on the vanguard of the trajectory. And, since people tend to act in ways that correspond to how they are dressed, contemporary worshippers and worship leaders tend to exhibit an overall casualness in worship, too. One reflection of that casualness seen in my congregations is a truly novel development in the long history of Christian worship: widespread snacking during worship. In many contemporary services, people eat and drink, but not the sacrament.

The final quality that characterizes contemporary worship is dependency on electronic technology. To state it bluntly, this dependency has grown so much over the phenomenon's history that it would be rare to find a worship service not deeply reliant upon a machine or even on electricity itself. Indeed, some contemporary worship spaces have been designed so that there is no possibility of natural lighting whatsoever. No electricity equals no light equals no worship. If you take away electricity generally then contemporary worship is hamstrung. This dependency has increased over time and has become pervasive: electricity is needed for planning, playing, hearing, and seeing worship. Contemporary worship unplugged today is not itself.

Nine qualities together define the phenomenon of contemporary worship. While other developments in Christian worship in the last fifty years share some of them, including a number of new forms of Roman Catholic worship, these qualities collectively have given shape to what we know as contemporary worship.

A HISTORY OF THE TERM

A factor that contributes to uncertainty about contemporary worship's history is that churches worshipping in this way have not always used the term. That is true even for a few congregations that have spearheaded the phenomenon's historical development. And so, to finish answering the question about what contemporary worship is, we wish to give a history of the term itself along with looking at alternative names for the same phenomenon.

The term contemporary worship saw a surge in use three times in the twentieth century. The first upswing in use occurred from the 1920s through the 1930s. The term did not have a specific, technical meaning in this first upswing. Instead, it became a way of speaking about the worship of a particular people at a certain time and place. Thus contemporary worship could have happened far in the past. (Think medieval Europeans of the eighth century and their "contemporary worship.")

The next surge of usage of the label contemporary worship came in the late 1960s through the late 1970s. This upswing actually corresponds to a period of experimentation in worship. One such liturgical experimenter, James White, reflecting on the increased interest in innovation, believed at the time that the period began in the mid-1960s. Some experimenting churches labeled their new services as "contemporary" and announced them as such. Within a couple of years there was a dramatic increase in the use of the term in publications as people wrote about what was happening. This upswing in the term continued the earlier sense of worship of a particular people in a certain time and place. The difference was that the people in mind were the people of today (contemporary people of the 1960s and 1970s) who ought to have worship in their contemporary English addressing their contemporary concerns (remember the social upheavals of the 1960s) and using their contemporary music (that is, music of the 1960s and early 1970s). In the late 1960s, "contemporary" English, relevance, and music made up a kind of trifecta of what makes worship "contemporary."

Updated English was the dominant of the three aspects of 1960s contemporaneity. This sense that being contemporary meant current English parallels the sense of "contemporary" as found in the surge of popular new Bible translations occurring in the same period. But the freshness of worship experimenting was not limited to modernizing English. As stated in one Methodist article in 1971, the chief characteristic of "contemporary worship" was innovation that expressed itself in a variety of ways: "Variety! Continuity! Now sound! Participation! Relationship! Action! and Celebration!" The excitement of experimenting was captured by the exclamation marks found in the original article.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Lovin' on jesus by Swee Hong Lim, Lester Ruth. Copyright © 2017 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Preface ix

Chapter 1 What Is Contemporary Worship?

Defining Qualities 2

A History of the Term 7

Other Names 12

The Sources of Contemporary Worship 16

The Overarching Development 22

Chapter 2 Time in Contemporary Worship 25

Contemporary Worship and Classic Rhythms of Time 26

Flow as the Construction of Time 32

Tensions in Time in Contemporary Worship 36

Chapter 3 The Space of Contemporary Worship

Historical Developments in Contemporary Worship Space 42

Technological Advancements in Contemporary Worship 46

Classic Liturgical Spaces and Centers Within Contemporary Worship 51

Fluidity of Space in Contemporary Worship 56

Chapter 4 The Music of Contemporary Worship Origin through the 1980s 59

The Music of the Jesus People 60

African American Developments in the 1960s and 1970s 67

Developing Worship Song Sets in the 1980s 68

Chapter 5 The Music of Contemporary Worship: 1990s to the Present 73

The British Invasion 74

The Australian Invasion 76

English-Speaking American Developments 79

Spanish-Speaking American Developments 81

Asian and African American Developments 82

The Possible Future of Contemporary Worship Music 87

Chapter 6 Prayer and Contemporary Worship

Prayer and Contemporary Worship's Defining Qualities 90

Praying, Singing, and Worship Sets 92

Praying in the Sets beyond the Songs 96

Praying Elsewhere in the Service 98

Contemporary Congregations as Praying Congregations 101

Chapter 7 The Bible and Preaching in Contemporary Worship 105

A Contemporary Word in Contemporary Words 106

Singing Scripture 108

A Biblical Foundation for Contemporary Worship 111

Contemporary Preaching and Service Planning 115

The Headword in Contemporary Worship 119

Chapter 8 The Sacramentality of Contemporary Worship 121

Praise and the Presence of God 123

A Journey toward a Sacramentality of Praise 124

Other Sacramental Dimensions 132

Varying Levels of Sacramental Discernment 138

Conclusion-Contemporary Worships Future 141

For Further Study 145

Index 153