Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

Music and Performance in Worship

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I’ve been a member of a number of worship bands. I think none of them have been successful engagements for me, to varying degrees, and it’s taken me a while to really work out why.

I thought for a long time that it’s about my ability to really commit to the bands, to be part of them on a weekly basis, and I still think this is a lot of it. When I couldn’t say “Yes, I’ll be there” every week, I ended up being a guest musician, a stand-in, and that really doesn’t help a band gel.

Of course, the next question is: is gelling necessary? To some degree, yes: the band has to trust its component members. The guitarist doesn’t need to be wondering if the bass player’s going to be hitting the note, or when, and inconsistent membership creates an opportunity for, well, a lack of trust.

But I think the biggest problem is still me, not my attendance or consistency. It’s a differentiation in how worship music is played, what it is, why it is, and how I see worship in music. It’s a juxtaposition that I don’t think is innately reconcilable in the context of most churches – maybe all churches, really.

The culture of the church would have to change in order to create a music ministry to which I could meaningfully contribute.

Worship music is, by and large, a cover band’s domain. You’re playing someone else’s songs – Hillsong’s, or Shane and Shane’s, or Phil Wickham’s, for example – and generally you’re trying to play them in a way that’s representative of what the congregation is expecting to hear, so they can participate in worship. You’re leading worship, after all.

What’s more, those musicians – for whom I hold a lot of respect, honestly – design their songs for that environment. They’re not pushing the limits very often. They’ll introduce a key change here and there for emotive reasons (“This is the section that’s resolving all the energy we’ve built up, so we’re going from G to A!”) or occasionally a grace note or chord so that the song stands out from a musical perspective. (Shane and Shane are really good at this.)

The result is that most worship music of a given era sounds… very similar. Derivative, really. There’s nothing wrong with this, because familiarity helps the congregation participate in worship.

I have a hard time connecting with this. I’ve tried writing Christian worship songs, and it sounds very much like what it actually is: an artist trying to write something that sounds like something else. Not only do I find most Christian worship music derivative and repetitive, but my own Christian worship music is derivative and repetitive, except moreso.

I despise my attempts in this area. I recognize experience is a factor there, but I feel that it’s dead in its origin, and I don’t think there’s a spark there to light into flame.

When I play worship music, I feel like it’s important for me to not only lead the congregation in worship – which is the main point of the worship band, after all – but to worship as well. If I’m not participating in the act of worship, I’m not even a conduit – I’m a puppet, miming notes for others to follow.

So when I play, i find myself fighting the desire to play to the utmost of my ability: not to flash, necessarily (I’m not an especially flashy player) but to feel to motion of the music, to amplify it, to play it as well as I am able to according to what I feel the music desires.

I want to play it as if I were playing it before the Holy One. It’s not just miming notes for others to follow, but for me to play.

So the result is that I play… harder, perhaps (not in a “ROCK ON!!!!!” sense, but more intensely) than most of my bandmates, and I have to work intently on playing less than I feel I can and should, in order to fit in and to fulfill the limited goals of a worship band: I play down to the audience, as opposed to up to The Lord.

I don’t resent this. I understand the goals of a worship band, and I also understand that my skills and approach may not be the same as the skills and approaches of the other band members.

But it means that for me, playing in the worship band is a slog, and an unfulfilling one, and I keep thinking that leaks into the performance as well. Because I don’t feel fulfilled in playing worship music in a church, I am unable to serve the congregation in the manner I intend.

To me, music in church should be as it was for David, leaping and dancing before the Ark: the Bible records his wife Michal scolding him for his unrestrained joy (2 Sam 6:16-23). I get Michal’s point – but I feel like I imagine David did, with Michal saying “Show some restraint, be respectable before your fellow man,” when David’s desire was to show his commitment to God and his joy at a victory God had granted him.

So what’s the conclusion here? I think that I’m willing to play to help a band, but I think they’re not especially well-served by this, nor am I. I think my long-term goal is to play the music God has planted in my heart for those who wish to hear it – which may mean just the Lord and me, and I’m fine with that – and let worship bands do what they do better than I do.

“We just want the war to end…”

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Well, if you’re saying that, or reading someone who says that, good. Know that I’m right there with you – or them. I want the war in Gaza to end, today. Same for the war in Ukraine. Same for any war, anywhere.

All it would take for the war in Gaza to end is for Hamas to concede, and wage war no more. If they reached out, through whatever emissary is available – and there are lots of them – and said. “no more war, we are stopping, no more rockets, no more dead Israelis,” then they’d have:

  • A nation-state, as they’ve had since 2005 (given that Israel withdrew willingly and has shown no real desire to go back)
  • No more dead children in refugee camps, as Hamas keeps storing weapons and military leaders in those places, which is:
    • A war crime
    • Converting those places into military targets with military value, and targeting them is not a war crime
  • Everything they want except lots more dead Jews

Blaming Israel for continuing a war in which the aggressors have not stopped waging war themselves is ridiculous and, really, rather evil. Stop it, people.

It’s worth observing, although it’s not original with me: if Gaza laid down its weapons, you’d have peace between Israel and Gaza. If Israel laid down its weapons, you’d have a lot of dead Israelis. Do the math, when you screech that you just want peace in the region. And this isn’t random supposition – this is based on Hamas’ own expressions on Al Jazeera and other such mediums.

The purpose of war is to get the opposing government (Hamas, in Israel’s case) to concede. There is no other end point unless you want Israel to suffer more. So if you’re going “b-b-b-b-but Israel shouldn’t keep shooting,” you’re trying to encourage the deaths of more Jews, in the short term – as that’s the goal Hamas isn’t giving up on – and more Gazans, in the long term, since the way Hamas gets more dead Jews is through having more dead Gazans. (And you know it, too, since Hamas keeps reiterating that last point, explicitly, over and over and over again… and you just don’t care, and don’t listen, because you’d rather have more dead Jews?)

All of those dead children…

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Caitlin Johnstone posted on Twitter (or X, or whatever you want to call it), this fine post:

No matter how much you talk about October 7, it will still be a fact that Israel is raining military explosives upon an enclosed area full of children, and that it urgently needs to stop.

No matter how much you talk about how evil and bad Hamas are, it will still be a fact that Israel is raining military explosives upon an enclosed area full of children, and that it urgently needs to stop.

No matter how much you say the words “human shields”, it will still be a fact that Israel is raining military explosives upon an enclosed area full of children, and that it urgently needs to stop.

No matter how much you accuse Israel’s critics of loving terrorists, it will still be a fact that Israel is raining military explosives upon an enclosed area full of children, and that it urgently needs to stop.

No matter how much you accuse Israel’s critics of hating Jews, it will still be a fact that Israel is raining military explosives upon an enclosed area full of children, and that it urgently needs to stop.

No matter how many words you use or how much narrative spin you try to put on it or how many ad hominems you throw at the people criticizing what Israel is doing, it will still be a fact that Israel is raining military explosives upon an enclosed area full of children, and that it urgently needs to stop.

In essence, I agree… but Ms. Johnstone seems to blame Israel.

I get it.

The idea of dead children is horrifying. That’s exactly why Hamas creates them.

Ms. Johnstone blames Israel for falling into a trap of Hamas’ explicit making. Hamas herds children into military targets, Israel hits those targets, Hamas gets to say “but they killed the human shields we put there!” and fine, fine people like Ms. Johnstone blame Israel instead of, you know, the actual war criminals (as using human shields, especially deliberately, is a war crime, and Hamas isn’t even shy about it, having bragged about this strategy publicly.)

I don’t want any dead children, whether in Gaza or Israel. Ms. Johnstone seems to have forgotten the Israeli children butchered by Gaza by explicit targeting, in her fury at blaming Israel for conducting a war against legitimate military targets with civilian casualties.

But if Hamas had any agreement with her, in trying to avoid dead children, they could have.. you know… not targeted children on October 7 themselves (they did) or even not herd children into military encampments (they do) or, here’s an idea, not use places where children are, like refugee camps, for military purposes (again, a war crime, but one they commit so often that it’s difficult to observe without sounding like a broken record.)

Israel and Gaza after Oct 7, 2023

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I’ve been trying to think about what to say about the war between Israel and Gaza for nearly a month, and I’ve come up empty. But I think I have something, at last.

Before I go any further, let me summarize it: on October 7, 2023, Hamas – the governing party of Gaza – sent a number of militants over the border into Israel, and they killed 1400 Israelis (including both Jews and Arabs), filming horrific acts of the murder of entire families (parents, grandparents, children, babies) and rape, including desecration of the dead, and active celebration of the slaughter.

It constitutes a large number of war crimes, at nearly all levels, and most certainly constitutes a cassus belli, a phrase that means “a legitimate cause for war.” Israel then declared war on Gaza, and bombed a number of military sites in Gaza (including places Gaza claims are not military sites, like schools and homes, despite using those sites for military purposes, which is itself a war crime.)

It hurts to read all of it. I don’t want people to be at war. I don’t want anyone celebrating the deaths of others, including those who actively call for my death.

And I haven’t really been able to coalesce a coherent set of thoughts about any of it, but I finally started making some progress a couple of days ago.

It started with reading something someone posted to defend Gaza, I think: it was that “hurt people hurt people,” meaning that Gaza’s actions were sourced in Gaza’s people’s collective trauma.

I understand that on a few levels. Not many, though, because their trauma is largely self-inflicted, and blaming Israel seems like a convenient excuse more than anything else; according to Hamas’ charter, articles 7 and 13, Hamas wants nothing less than the genocide of all Jews (article 7) and the destruction of Israel as a state (article 13).

There’s no compromise they’re willing to make when it comes to genocide of Jews or destruction of Israel, so it feels a little silly to even try – yet Israel has tried. In 2005, Israel withdrew, completely, from Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza is self-determining. Gaza “buys” medicine, food, water, and power from Israel – yet Israel doesn’t collect what it should on that, as part of an acceptable loss for the purpose of a peace that has never been realized, as Hamas keeps launching rockets indiscriminately at Israel.

Indiscriminate targeting is a war crime: targeting military emplacements is not, but Hamas doesn’t care; as its goal is total destruction of every Jew, they just shrug and say, “For our purposes it’s all military, we guess,” and the world nods wisely and agrees for some stupid reason. You might say it’s hatred of Jews, but… just because it seems targeted at Jews and the only country that actively harbors them, well, that seems a little pointed, no?

The thing that struck me about “hurt people hurt people,” though, is that it’s… not one-way. There’s a reason Israel exists, after all: it’s the literal harbor state for Jews. It’s the only harbor state for my people. Israel was created when Jews finally recognized that there was no assimilation complete enough such that we Jews would be allowed to survive as equals among Gentile nations.

Was the creation of Israel burdened with pain? You bet. There’s a long set of stories associated with the creation of Israel. I do not believe there is a purity, or innocence, in that creation. For multiple reasons, there was a displacement, although it was nowhere near as total as the PLO would have you believe; there was no Palestinian national identity, and what we know as the Palestinians today was formed largely as a way to resist Israel’s mere existence.

That existence was due to “hurt people” – the Jews, largely of Europe and Western Asia – hurting, coming off of a pogrom that killed upwards of six million, who had nowhere else to go. So they chose their ancestral homeland, what with every other option being discarded (Australia and Madagascar were requested and rejected). If the Jewish option was living among their murderers and those who accepted murder of Jews… they chose to go “home.”

And were attacked for it. If you look at the wars Israel has been engaged in since its creation, every one since that creation has been instigated by the Arab countries surrounding it. Israel has still survived.

Many of those wars were in defiance of ceasefires and treaties between Israel and it attackers. Israel has still survived.

Israel’s gone above and beyond, in my opinion, to pursue peace and, often, preserve the same people who howl for Jewish blood. When Israel took the Sinai from Egypt – thanks to a victory in war, the typical way such land is acquired – they gave it back for the purpose of peace. They accepted a two-state solution with the West Bank and Gaza … for the purpose of peace, and left both territories, only to have both the West Bank and Gaza reignite tensions, although not quite as horrifically as we saw in October of 2023.

As I’ve said, I don’t think there’s “innocence” in the conflict. The initial comment that got me thinking was that “hurt people hurt people,” and it was meant to excuse Hamas’ incursion (“Hey, Gaza doesn’t like being isolated by Israel just because they howl for Israeli blood every day, you know!”) and it struck me how essentially unbalanced that sentiment was:

After all, Israel was created from two thousand years of my peoples’ agony, and that, too, creates a burden.

I pray constantly that the people in the region could decide that loving their children was more important than the deaths of their enemies. I pray also that their leaders could pursue peace earnestly – when you look at Israel’s current leaders, you see that they benefit from the conflict, and I hate that. And there’re many matrices of responses to observations about the conflict that have both justifications and completely rational rebuttals.

But at no point can I condone anything Hamas did in any of this, even if I find myself somewhat able to understand the rationale. The application is evil, and there can be no peace until Hamas is no longer effective and no longer indoctrinating Palestinians.

We’ll only have peace after Jesus comes, or after Arab and Jew can see each other as humans, and not parasites, a situation Israel was trying to create back in September when it granted ten thousand work permits to Gazans (which have since been cancelled, given the rapacious attack by Gazans on Israeli citizens at Hamas’ request.)