In the Old Testament, it was the priests who mediated God’s presence through the rites of divine worship that Moses had received. As music came to be seen as the primary way we experience God’s presence, in the 20th century, worship leaders became a new kind of priesthood to serve the church—and, really, no one seemed to notice.

I am a pastor of a local church, and one of my interests is Christian worship or Christian liturgy, the history of Christian liturgy. The praise and worship movement placed a big emphasis on music being the primary thing in worship that mediates the presence of God. In fact, when people today ask the question, “what’s the worship like at your church?” one of the reasons you know that they’re probably referring to the worship band, or what kind of music is played—the style of the music—is because this movement placed such an emphasis on worship being equated with music in the liturgy or in the context of the service.

When Did Music Become Such an Important Part of Worship?

The verse that was often appealed to by this movement was Psalm 22:3, which says that God inhabits the praises of his people: “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.” Praise and worship music came to be seen as the vehicle that mediated the presence of God to the church. This emphasis on music resulted, as you can imagine, in prolonged times of congregational singing and the repetition of choruses until God’s presence could really be felt by the worshiper. This is all starting to heat up post World War II in more charismatic churches, but by the ’90s, many churches and denominations had adopted this style of worship with its emphasis on music. Now, if the praise and worship movement was about attracting the presence of God through our singing, the contemporary worship movement—which is a different thing but related in many respects—was about attracting people to the church through the liturgy. This is sort of the perennial issue right now: How do we get people interested in church?

There was a real concern that many people were no longer going to church, no longer interested in church. And so the church needed to change its service in order to make worship appealing again. Now, before you criticize that or before we criticize that too heavily. We should at least acknowledge that the underlying desire here is to see people connect with Jesus. For the contemporary worship movement, mission was key, and the church slowly became about how to reach non-Christians. You can trace this all the way back to Charles Finney and his New Measures. Finney lived in the 1800s, and essentially, he believed that God hadn’t established any rules for how to worship. Each generation has to discover its own new ways of worship that would stir the contemporary non-believers, the people around them.

There was a real zeal to reach the lost, whatever it took, and in time, that gave birth to seeker sensitivity and the sort of precision marketing that led to the church growth movement and megachurches in the 1980s.

Read More