Congregational Songs – New Songs for Corporate Worship

Planning a Corporate Worship Service: What about Tempo?

January 25, 2011

In the last post, I focused on what kinds of songs make sense to choose for a worship service and a general guideline for song placement within a service. If you read it, you might be asking, “The theme and the natural flow of divine revelation and our response makes sense for choosing songs and placing them in a service, but doesn’t tempo matter just as much?”

Yes, it does. We worship leaders have a weighty tool in our hands: music. Most everyone would agree that music has the ability to strongly influence the emotions. Martin Luther says it well: “Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.” This is why tying musical beauty to theological truth is so powerful for the church. So, it’s very important to choose songs as a whole that lead the worshipper to an appropriate place emotionally as well as theologically.

The first consideration to be made is about the lyrical and emotional quality of a song. A good songwriter will match the content of their lyrics with its melodic mood and tempo. You never want your congregation to be singing about the victory God has given us over sin with a song that matches that kind of content with a minor, slow, funeral-dirge kind of musical bed. It messes with the mind! So make sure, when choosing which songs to sing in your congregation, to begin by double-checking that the message matches the mood.

Secondly, we need to make sure as worship leaders that we remember the meta-narrative of scripture when we pick a set of songs for a whole worship service. The story of the Bible is about God’s holiness, man’s sinfulness, and God’s gracious redemption of man through the death and resurrection of Christ. It is “good news.” That means the predominant emotional quality of the normal Christian worship service should be that of celebration and joy. I believe that if a church emphasizes a different emotional tone through their music, the joyful, light-bearing quality of the gospel could be lost over time. I don’t mean that the church would no longer be evangelical, but that the overall mood of the church gathering begins to stray from the awe-inspiring, love-provoking mood of the gospel.

What I’m emphasizing here and what I emphasized in my previous post go hand in hand: If you are choosing songs that magnify the character of God and our response to him, and if the mood of the songs match their lyrics, your service will probably have an appropriate progression through tempos and moods. For example, a service could progress from exaltation (majestic songs) into confessional response (reverent contemplative songs) into thankfulness (lighter, mid-tempo). Or it could be praise (joyful, faster songs) into a response of desiring sanctification (prayerful, mid to slow tempo songs). Whatever the theme is for the day will probably drive whether it would be one or the other, but in both cases, the songs flow naturally in tempo and feel from more “up” or celebrative to more “down” or contemplative. This may not be the norm in all cultures, but because of the way our culture understands the meaning of musical tempos and major vs. minor, it overwhelmingly is for ours.

There certainly are exceptions to this flow in tempo and feel – there may be a service where you pick songs that are deliberately emphasizing the wrath of God for a good portion of the service. These songs might be minor and slower right from the get-go. There may be other times when it’s appropriate to keep the tempo up for most of the service – Easter is a good example. It’s hard for me to pick songs that are slower-paced when we’re focusing on the resurrection of Christ! But in general, the tempo should go from faster or broader to slower or lighter as the service progresses, because it matches the progression of singing declaratively about God’s character and then singing responsively to his revelation.

Next post: fitting songs together – does the content of one song transition logically to the next?

Filed under: Leading Worship,Planning a Worship Service