A new blog?
So I'm in the middle of planning worship songs for July. I'm realizing its a daunting task to think theologically about every song our band is able to play. I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in starting a blog or website of some sort to offer theological critiques (postives and negatives) of the widely used praise songs that are out there. Any takers? Anyone interested?
Peace,
Tom
Peace,
Tom
posted by Tom Arthur at 10:16 AM
16 Comments:
Tom,
I don't know anything like that but I readily understand the issue.
I'm not up for doing that myself.
I have written on my blog about the process by which we worked through worship planning when I was a pastor. I have also let people know about CCLI which I found very useful.
See
November 11, 2007
FAQ about Worship: Seekers, Emotions, and Me-Songs
February 18, 2007
CCLI's SongSelect - Why Every Church Should Pay $179 and Get It
October 03, 2006
How to plan and lead worship
andy
Andy Rowell
Doctor of Theology Student
Duke Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina
Blog: Church Leadership Conversations
I think that is a great idea, Tom. I believe you are referring simply to forming a group who offer song-candidates for theological critique. One could simply post the lyrics and allow the members to highlight any concerns that one might overlook. I would value such a forum highly. At my charge, we seem to be struggling with an existing much-loved-by-some-much-abhorred-by-others praise band within a high church Anglican liturgy. So perhaps we also could do group therapy on our struggles/successes with the the contemporary worship music transition.
On another note, I want to followup on Andy's CCLI point, which I echo. It may be helpful to many to have a database of hymns and songs that includes lyrics, licenses, and tracks usage in worship. Such a tool would among other things, make it easy to plan worship in which you display lyrics with a projector from a computer. Along these lines, I can tell you about one I am testing now called Media Shout (which manages presentation in worship) and Shout Music Manager (which is the database of which I speak). I am also testing LiveWorship, which is a competitor to Media Shout that runs only on a Mac. I am unable to offer an evaluation yet, but I thought others might be helped by knowing that I found these two to be among the market leaders in my research.
Craig,
I was thinking of something a bit more structured. For example, there would be "contributors" to the blog/website. If you were a contributor I'd give you a song to write a theological critique of. You'd write it and we'd post it. We'd come up together with a form for how we would want to critique the song or theological categories we'd like to critique. i.e.:
Biblical connections
Trinitarian
Christology
Anthropology
Inclusive Language
Overall theological rating
etc...
I'm thinking we could even ask profs back at Duke or elsewhere to contribute. These would be relatively short critiques (a page or less). There could be an opportunity for people to then comment on the critique.
Who's in?
Peace,
Tom
Tom,
I don't see as much merit in the idea if the concept does not allow any participant to offer songs for critique. After all, each of us will likely have volunteer worship team participants pressing for the use of songs that require inspection. So the value seems to me to be in the ability to have trusted friends weigh in with timeliness. While your idea of a single person assigning more in-depth critiques is certainly promising, I wonder if there is a way to merge that structured approach with an on-demand feature that is more responsive to the parish needs of all of the contributors?
Ah, I see what you're saying. And I can see the value of both. Maybe we have two sections to the website. Ongoing conversations about songs in a blog style format and a contributor -more-engaged critique like I was speaking of.
Peace,
Tom
With this modification, I think we will have a helpful discipline. Even if the group consists of you and me alone, count me in. If we build it, they will come.
We can always individually ask people to write critiques for us. Andy Rowell told me in another email he's open to occasionally contributing. And I bet we could get some Duke Profs to do one every once in a while. Do you think a blog is the best/easiest set-up for this or some other tool out there?
I hereby offer to host and develop this blog/wiki. Free of charge to us. If that is acceptable with everyone, someone post a comment and I'll set it up.
Also: I own charitableorthodoxy.com which i'd like to develop, perhaps as a more open common blog like this one, but for more than just dukeies. anyone interested?
Great to have you, Kevin. I love the name "charitable orthodoxy." I think I will adopt it.
I would love to have you develop this and contribute your mighty intellect. It would raise the IQ.
Kevin,
Great to have you on. Go for it. Let us know what the address is.
I propose a two-fold strategy:
1. We ask specific people to write brief (one-page) theological critiques of specific songs. We post them and allow for open dialogue on the critique (I've also played around with having two critiques on each song, one generally positive and one generally negative).
2. We allow for open conversation about songs that have not yet been critiqued.
This should have some kind of index or searchable feature so that it can easily be referenced when bands or music directors or pastors are looking up specific songs. I want to be able to send my staff or volunteers to it as a resource.
Hope that's helpful. Go to it Kevin!
Peace,
Tom
Friends,
Worship-review.com will be live in 24-48 hours. I'm waiting on DNS information to propagate. It will consist of two main sections:
1: a "blog" where we, the bastion of good theology in worship music, will post critiques/reviews of the latest and greatest / worst of contemporary worship music. I'd like to run this with a 50/50 mix of "use this" and "don't use this"
1a: I'd like each of us on this blog to commit to contributing *one* (or more) such reviews to seed the site.
2: There will be a moderated message bulletin board where comments on reviews, and third party reviews can be posted.
Thoughts ?
Kevin,
Please review the comments in this thread that I made in response to Tom. This seems to not have in mind the features I proposed and to which Tom assented.
Are am I missing something?
I look forward to participating.
@craig,
Craig, I may have overstated it a bit. the moderation on the forums is not intended to be a controlled conversation. Indeed, this is where I see people all over the world contributing comments and critiques of songs etc. The moderation is only intended to indicate that I reserve the right to delete posts that are intentionally inflammatory, illegal etc. We run into a slight copyright battle in the posting of full lyrics. Keeping the moderation clause is a CYA move should there ever be a legal battle. Word one of this project includes the intention to moderate infringing copyright posts.
the intention is to keep both a set of contributed critiques following a common understanding of what such a critique might be. Ie: more substantial than "this song sucks!" or "I love this song!" The site will be cross connected between a wordpress blog and a PHPBB system. The blog will be wikified, meaning that each of the contributors can wiki-link words to other posts or even other sites. Ie: this is a trinitarian song! can link trinitarian to isumma.com or the Catholic Encyclopedia. Likewise, "David Crowder" can link to davidcrowder.com
Each "blog" post will be directly linked to a message forum thread. And we moderators, can "promote" any given forum thread to post status. Does this address the trusted-friends-timeliness ?
I'm trying to elegantly engineer a unified, dual system of dedicated, non-heretical contributions and public contributions. At some level, I'd like this to be more of a yard-stick for *good* worship songs, and less of a protracted battle.
am I missing a feature as discussed here?
Kevin,
Sounds good to me. I think what Craig was wanting was also an open forum that wasn't necessarily around a formal critique. Craig, am I getting that right?
I do see the copyright problem. Is there a website out there that has lyrics that is copyright kosher? I'm not very familiar with how these things work. Does CCLI post lyrics?
Kevin,
What happened to the blog? I keep trying worship-review.com and get nothing. How's it going?
Peace,
Tom
I'm sure this will piss off the more academic theologians among us, but I believe that no denomination is right or has a corner on the truth. Methodist, Presbyterian, whatever, are all flawed in their own little ways.
Love God, Love people, Make Disciples. So, Wilson, Mu. (un-ask the question.) For our job isn't to make better methodists, or catholics or (God forbid) baptists. But rather to make christians; which as it turns out is much harder.
As far as defining who's part of the club... well fsck that. It's a waste of time and a sin. Ain't no way we're gonna get it right. And there's every chance we'll fsck it up and hurt people. Each of us begins and ends our day in sin, and draws each breath in grace. Drawing lines to define the in and out of salvation inevitably draws us outside the lines. Instead of defining a subset (x) of people who are saved and a subset of (y) who are not saved; (where X union Y = superset people.) we should look at the vectors of activity. Belief must result in action. Our actions therefore reflect our beliefs. Do our actions, "plotted" over time reflect the vectors of Christ's actions? Or do they represent the vectors of Mammon? The answer is inevitably both, depending on the moment. The question is what do the vectoral sums of our actions represent?
Of course the objection will be: how do we define what actions are or are not reflective of Christ's actions... fair enough, but we need to resist the urge to try and codify lists of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. It is easy enough to compassionately and charitably adjudicate situations, as a community, to identify right and wrong.
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