In the interminable evangelical debate over worship music, contemporary music often takes a beating for its insubstantial lyrics. Their faults are well-known: the words are highly repetitive. They are prosaic. They lack theological substance. When they do try to effect some substance, they traffic in abstract concepts, lacking any palpable metaphor by which we might sink our teeth into airy notions like salvation or lordship or transcendence. Too often they contain no content at all but incessant restatements either of the command that we now worship God, or the vehement indicative that we will (presumably very soon) worship him, and do it with an alacrity that we hope he will find very impressive. They are in this sense meta-worship songs, not worship music proper. They talk about worshipping without ever actually doing it.
This, of course, is shooting ducks in a pond. Beating on the lackluster lyrics of contemporary worship music is not sporting, not fun, and not worth much of our time.
And even if some bold poet came along and started writing poetically and theologically substantive lyrics to be sung as contemporary worship songs, I would still not necessarily be on board with the program. It would be an improvement, to be sure, and a crucial one: the content of the text is far and away the most semantically flexible and unambiguous component of a song, and for a creedal people, a song’s propositional message will naturally dominate, bringing text along with it. However, in all our obsession over content, form gets lost in the shuffle. I want to give it equal time.
A cultural form is a kind or type of cultural artifact, a general class of things produced by human beings as they go about the business of their religious, social, political, commercial, educational, aesthetic, family lives. Forms can be distinguished from one another by appealing to some kind of internal structure or set of characteristics of the form. A form describes a certain cultural practice, work product, or manner of cultural interaction. It need not describe a physical object like a painting or a piece of angle iron, but it may involve something more abstract, like a song or a handshake. A form is not a specific instance of cultural output (like a particular handshake between two actual people at a certain time), but a category into which many individual artifacts can be placed (like a social greeting ritual).
For example, nearly all people speak, but not all speech is of the same kind. Sermons are in some sense all alike, and lectures to disobedient children all sound something like one another, but sermons are not the same as dressings-down of busted kids (notwithstanding the amusement pastors may find at the comparison). Likewise, gossip whispered to friends tends to follow patterns that differ from those of political stump speeches. Each of these four instances of speech takes a particular form.
Or consider an artifact of high culture, like poetry. Poems come in many different forms, each characterized by attributes like meter and rhyme scheme. Some poetic forms, like the Petrarchan Sonnet, are highly structured and exacting in their requirements. Others, like free verse, are very open and seemingly opposed to structure—but still are characterized by the decisions they impose on the attributes of a poem. Even if a poet wishes to reject all known forms and invent an entirely new one, it will be conspicuous by its departure from known kinds of poetry. In the end, no matter how hard a poet tries to avoid it, each individual poem has no choice but to belong to some form.
Poetic or otherwise, forms exist, and their existence confers on human culture the charism of rationality. This gifting is caused by the fact that forms both carry and shape the semantic content (or “meaning”) of the artifacts belonging to them. More importantly, it often has the effect of rendering forms unable to be interchanged.
Since this is difficult material, let us consider some more examples. Of all possible musical forms (minuet, girl-pop song, cakewalk, rock ballad, etc.), dirges are never played at weddings. Of all possible forms of composition (sonnet, sermon, editorial, shaggy dog story, etc.), limerick is never used to deliver a eulogy. Do weddings eschew dirges merely because no one has died? Couldn’t some enterprising Goth couple write their own lyrics of love and optimism to be played to the music that has all the characteristics of “dirge,” thereby avoiding the impositions of the form? Do eulogies avoid limericks because the rhyme scheme is overly burdensome? 
If a clever family member used that meter and rhyme scheme to pay textually somber respects to the departed, remembering all that was noble and good about the one who has passed, wouldn’t the family have put off the cold shackles of form which I claim to be so indefeasible?
No, no, no. And no.
What these enterprising artists have done is to create irrational cultural artifacts; they have not transcended the dictates of the forms they have adopted. The rhythm, melody, and chord progression of the dirge (and any other attributes experts might care to point out—I am no musician) make it sound sad. The semantic content “sadness” is embedded in the music itself, and the text accompanied by the music will be interpreted by its hearers in a context of sorrow. Likewise, the musical lilt of the limerick lends itself to flippancy. Lightheartedness is communicated by the poem’s meter, totally apart from the words themselves—words which will inevitably be shaded by the form’s natural sense of trivial mirth.
Grafting joy onto sadness and solemnity onto banality might possibly have some use as an ironic device, but this would only succeed inasmuch as the form survives the union intact. (And seldom is irony our goal when celebrating a marriage or paying final respects to a loved one.) Any attempt to push aside the form’s semantic content in favor of the raw, unfiltered meaning of the text cannot succeed. Dirges are still sad, and limericks are still silly little poems.
It is at this point that my globally-minded interlocutor (who is otherwise feeling the heat) usually objects that these are only cultural associations which I am habituated to make; they are not universal attributes derived from some Platonic Dirge or Limerick floating abstractly in heaven. I only think dirges sound sad because I am used to that kind of music being played when someone has died, accompanied by words of mourning. I only think limericks address vulgar trivialities because the overwhelming majority of limericks are about the man from Madras, or one of his close cousins. The Noble Savage in Africa, untouched by Western Civilization, doesn’t know any of this, so he is free to pick and choose. And since he is unbound by our forms, surely we savvy postmoderns are also free to recast received forms to our heart’s content, happily playing with the shattered pieces of our civilization in order to make something more functional or more amusing than our Modernist parents’ constricting limits would have allowed.
I consider it to be an interesting question whether, say, a piece of music can have a universal effect on human beings, or whether we are born as cultural blank slates, ready to be programmed with knowledge of what to think and how to feel when we hear certain sounds. It might be that the Innocent Native thinks of an angry Sky God when he hears Night On Bald Mountain, rather than just wondering what these strange sounds are coming from the white man’s magic box. It should be clear that I suspect that the former is the case, but I don’t know for sure. And it doesn’t matter. Whether the semantic content of forms is universal or contextual or somewhere in between, the fact remains that we receive our forms within our cultural context. Even if you insist that their content is arbitrary and constructed, we are still faced with the problem of that content. It isn’t going away.
If you haven’t guessed already what this has to do with worship music, I’d better tell you before you quit reading.
All of this talk about form directly addresses the common refrain that God can be honored with an electric guitar and a fuzz box (or something else contemporary) just as well as with Bach and a pipe organ (or something else traditional). Now, I have said nothing to disprove this statement by itself, but I hope to have done serious damage to the statement that usually follows: that God can be honored with any kind of music at all, because musical style doesn’t matter. Of course musical style matters! This is not some indifferent choice made for bare, pragmatic reasons. The choice of musical form carries enormous semantic weight and profoundly shapes the meaning of worship music’s supporting texts. Any proposed form (Bluegrass, Grunge, camp meeting hymnody, etc.) must answer for the claims it makes on what kind of subject matter it addresses; how its singers should relate to that subject matter, to each other, and to the rest of the world; and what kind of occasion it is supposed to accompany.
If adult contemporary pop is to be our music form of choice when we sing to God, then we must be able to show that it excels on all these fronts. We cannot choose it because we like it, or because we believe it will increase attendance in our churches. Instead, we must show that it expects its subject matter is nothing less than the supreme object of value in the universe. It must be addressable to a Deity who is both intimately personal and terrifyingly other. It must be able to encompass the joyful celebration of God’s deliverance of his people as well as their careful reverence and awe before the one who is a consuming fire. It must move us from the vulgar routines our lives into a place where we do not dictate the terms of our own comfort, but instead are brought graciously to kneel before a Throne which will not much longer await the prostration of every human soul.
As much as any music can, it must be music whose character matches God’s character. Can contemporary music do this well? It takes a very well-educated person to answer this question, one who is trained in music, theology, literature, and broad intellectual history. Clearly, I am not he.
But I think you know what I suspect the answer to be.
