My Music

My wife and I love to sing. Above every kind of singing we love the harmony and the stir of praising God a cappella. I'm from the Church of Christ, and that's just how it was. My first encounter with worship was in a sanctuary with 600 people who all seemed to know their parts. The basses tuned it in and the sopranos carried the melody, while the tenors and altos made it all flutter. I loved it.

My wife is Episcopalian, so she didn't get a lot of that growing up. But when she came to our Church of Christ college she was in awe. There's just something amazing about hearing people sing to God with all of their energy that you can't hear when instruments are involved. Not to say that instruments are bad. I love leading worship with guitar. But it sometimes feels like I'm competing with the guitar's voice, and it's harder to connect with the people around you if you can't hear them.

My students, even the ones in choir, are pretty wary of singing without some accompanyment ("You want us to just sing? Yeah, right."), so I try to always have a guitar around for worship. But I miss those times in high school when we were on the van going to this event or that, and we just started singing. Or at camp when a few of us would get together in an impromptu session and belt it out. I miss the songs like "Someday", and "O Lord, Our Lord", and "Mansion, Robe, and Crown" that you can't do unless you sing it with parts.

Instrumental worship, though, has a lot to offer that I had no idea about before. Like the ability for people who can't carry a tune to carry their praise to God without worrying about the person next them hearing. And it gives the opportunity for musicians who wouldn't be able to share their gifts with the church to do so. As Bart says over at emergentHouston, we're all from a tribe, and there's always something we love about where we come from.

What about where we're going?