WORSHIP NOTE – “Retire that Song?”

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Psalm 147:1 “Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise Him!”

My heart becomes softer, fuller and better prepared to receive God’s Word after a time of authentic, transcendent worship through song.  I know I’m ‘preaching to the choir’ here but I believe that this is a great argument for not sending a song into retirement too quickly.  There’s no question that this is especially difficult for us restless, creative, worship leader types who want to keep things ‘fresh’.  However, those we minister to may often have quite a different feeling about it.

When we repeat songs in our services throughout the year, for the congregation it becomes less and less about reading and learning the words, and more and more about the content.  The meaning of the song can begin to plunge to deeper levels of understanding and, consequently, a more engaging expression of worship.  Think about it, repetition helps us to memorize facts and figures and lots of other more trivial things.  I actually have my credit card number memorized…how scary is that?  Repetition also helps us absorb and internalize the words of our worship songs.  When the words projected on a screen or written on a song sheet are no longer part of the focus we can just close our eyes, block out the world and those around us and simply, completely and utterly worship.

Patrick DeRemer has been the Worship Leader for 10 years at Gold Coast Christian Church, a regional church in Ventura County, CA.  He is also the creator of a new website; praisevocals.com.  The site was developed primarily for Worship Leaders.  It offers downloadable audio files of vocal harmony parts of popular praise and worship songs.