Descriptor:
John Witvliet offers several suggestions for worship leaders as they cultivate genuine worship in themselves and their congregations, such as framing songs as "resistance to idolatry" and attending to the song's context of scripture and culture.
Paid Resource:
N
Requires FREE Account:
N
Source:
Worship Quotables
Related to Children or Youth:
N
Audio/Video:
N
Full Text:
• Frame songs as acts of joyful, life-giving resistance to idolatry. Teach us that songs are an antidote to exploitation and depersonalization.
• Learn to study the Scripture texts in, around, and under the songs you love.
• Do not become so attached to subversion for its own sake that you fail to recognize genuine, covenantal, Christ-shaped forms of subversion. Cultivate the radical theological imagination needed for that discernment.
• Teach us by example what it means to sing as gift and gifting—each song a gift, each singing of a song a gift, each song a witness to gift and giving, each singer a gift in the giving.
• Devote attention to songs that convey the weightiness and hope of hesed, God’s tenacious, covenantal solidarity and loving-kindness.
• Rescue chestnuts from the dustbin of sentimentality. Resist kitsch.
• Pay attention to context—the unique context of each Scripture text, the unique context in which each song was born, the unique context in which it will be sung today.
• Choose not only songs that express what a community already experiences but also songs that will stretch a community toward ever deeper obedience to God, ever more vivid ways of imagining God’s covenantal love and fidelity.
—John Witvliet, “Foreword,” in Walter A. Brueggemann, A Glad Obedience: Why and What We Sing (Kindle Locations 76-95)
Content Type:
This sermon-related resource is based on a topic. I have selected the correct topic from the topic tags.:
Non English Resource: