Graham Kendrick // Singing the Story

I’m back home having recently completed a 16 date tour of the UK – nothing very unusual for an itinerant worship leader, except that I didn’t use any ‘praise and worship’ songs. I should explain that for the first time in a very long time I had taken to the road to do what I used to do before praise and worship as we know it really existed, namely performing songs many of which told stories from the Gospels.

I wrote the first few of these kind of songs whilst a student simply because I loved the characters and dramas that burst out of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s accounts, found that they went down well with the college folk club audience and noticed that they provoked lots of God-conversations that would not otherwise have taken place.

At the end of one concert on this recent tour a middle-aged lady who had come to faith two months before said how it brought the Bible alive for her, and a few minutes later a teenage boy said how he struggled to read the Bible but the songs made him want to pick it up with fresh interest.

I’m not suggesting that all worship leaders should suddenly become singer-songwriters performing story songs, it just brought home to me afresh how incredibly powerful the Gospel stories are, and how few people really know them today.

In my view one of the dangers we face today is the loss of ‘journey’ and ‘story’ in worship. For many churches, the word worship has become synonymous with singing, and if the singing only tells of the present moment, or subjective experience, or is a random collection of songs strung together merely by associations of tempo, key and mood, with no cohesive content, then it can become as one commentator put it: ‘a shapeless searching after God that never arrives at it’s destination’ [Derek Tidball].

The core dynamic of Christian worship is revelation followed by response – in other words we declare something about God and then react with praise, thanksgiving etc. If our public meetings neglect to tell the salvation story, we are in danger of demanding a response out of a vacuum. If I began a service by asking you to repeat after me: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation’, you could be forgiven for looking at me a little strangely. Yet thus begins a foundational text of Hebrew worship ‘liturgy’ [Deut 26:5-9]. It roots the story of their history with God in real events, in people and places, in what happened and why, locates the worshiper in the flow of a continuing story, and anticipates a destination as yet un-reached.

At the core of Old Testament worship is the retelling of ‘salvation journeys’, like the exodus from Egypt and return from exile in Babylon. The first recorded praise and worship song in the Bible is a kind of epic poem by Moses; and Miriam adapted part of it into a chorus with dance moves [see Exodus 15]!

New Testament worship took a similar form, using scriptures like these that compressed the events of Christ’s coming into creed-like statements:

‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.’[1 Cor 15:3-4]

‘He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.’ [1 Tim 3:16]

The famous words from Phil 2:6-11 which begin: ‘Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant…’ are believed by many to have been the lyrics of an early church hymn. Like our ancient creeds, they describe an unfolding of an incredible event.

When we share in the bread and wine, we are taken on a sensory journey, of touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing, into a kind of reconstruction of that ancient meal, re-enacting the historical events that make relationship with God possible. By faith we re-enter the story and meet the risen Christ anew.

Robert Webber said that: ‘worship is not a programme of isolated acts of worship. It is a narrative. A retelling of the story of our relationship with God in history, past and present,’

Isaiah’s vision of God’s throne [chap 6] is seen by many as a pattern for the worship journey, from a revelation of God’s holiness, to the recognition of sin, to rescue by God’s own sacrifice, to hearing God’s call to serve, to responding and being sent out. That’s quite a journey!

Look at scriptures like Psalm 95, Rev 5: 6-14, Heb 10: 19-25, and you will discern similar progressions through stages of God’s revelation of himself, and the worshipers response.

Journeys move us from point A to point B, with scenes and experiences along the way. Next time you plan a worship gathering, think about a journey where A is the call to worship, and B is the sending out to serve. Think about how we can use words, music, symbols and actions to retell the story of our salvation from God’s perspective, how to reference the epic worship journeys of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and believers down the millennia. Imagine the baton being handed to us in our generation, and look for ways to anticipate the future that God has promised.

A final quote [one for the road!] that is well worth pondering:

‘For it is only in remembering the mysterious, unconventional and unpredictable ways of God that we can imagine them in our time.’ [John David Walt, Jr.]