Worship Weblog

Will Willimon: in praise of contemporary worship

Posted by cicw

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

From Will Willimon’s blog:

I hear that a number of our thriving churches are taking a critical look at their “contemporary worship” services – the services that we began over a decade ago that feature electronic, “contemporary” music and images. We appear to be moving to more eclectic, “ancient-future,” blended sorts of services.

I’ve sure had my questions about some of our contemporary worship – the music seems dated, highly personal, lean on biblical content, too much performance rather than participatory, etc.

However, looking back on the move of some churches to have a contemporary service, I think that perhaps the greatest, most lasting gift to the church will be that for most of our churches, their contemporary worship service gave them experience in change for the sake of faithfulness to the gospel. In about a decade, our worship changed more than it had changed in two hundred years. The risk, pain, and disruption caused by the move to these services required our clergy and churches to do work that many of us were ill equipped to do – lead the church to change.

continued…

Tags: change, contemporary, history, music, pastors, z00011