Music
Music through generations
“While we may have choirs within our churches…., the congregation of a church is the ultimate choir, and it is without auditions – everyone can be in it and should be in it.”
“Your voice may not be of professional standard, but it is of confessional standard.”Keith and Kristym Getty, Sing! Worship Transforms Your LIfe, Family, and Church
At FPC, the most important elements of our music comes from our congregation. We invite all those participating to worship freely in spirit and truth. Please feel free to stand up or sit down, raise your hands or not raise your hands. Just come, Worship the Lord. And be the church.
Volunteer Opprotunities
Chancel Choir
Praise Team
Celestial Bells
Children’s Music
Information for volunteers: Director of Music Louellen Myer [email protected] or call the church office.
Practice Times
Celestial Bells: Wednesday 4:00 – 5:00 in the Bell Room
Chancel Choir: Wednesday 5:30 – 7:00 in the Choir Room
Praise Team: Wednesday 5:30 – 7:00 in the Sanctuary
Children’s Music: During Sunday School at 9:15.
Reasons For Eclectic Worship
Intergenerational Ministry
“It seems self-evident that becoming fully and intentionally intergenerational will call for some degree of blending styles. To insist on traditional hymnody entirely, ignoring all worship music written in the last several decades, assumes an elitist historical stance that ignores the fact that God is still at work among twentieth- and twenty-first-century believers, pouring out new songs about old truths. However, insisting that the exclusive use of contemporary music and lyrics is necessary to keep churches vital overlooks inescapably the needs of one or two generations as well as the powerful theological and aesthetic contributions of past spiritually gifted musicians and poets.” (Intergenerational Christian Formation, Allen and Ross, 196)
“A church that sings together – across generations, standing side by side, putting community unity before personal preferences – is making a powerful and attractive statement to those who yearn for community more authentic than can be enjoyed online and friendship deeper than is found in counting your Facebook friends.” (Sing!, Keith and Kristyn Getty, 79)
Intentional Focus on Loving God (worship) and Loving Others (community)
Mark Labberton describes the call to love God and neighbor by saying, “We lose our lives, and gain them too, in the action of laying them down in worship and love.” (Called, Mark Labberton, 19)
“Christian community begins in gratitude, is sustained by our promises and truthfulness, and is expressed in hospitality.” (Living into Community, Christine Pohl, 13)
“Hopefully, your church includes members who are very different than you – and who have very different musical tastes than you. Singing as one united church body reminds us all that we are not defined by the rugged individualism promoted by modern society.” (Sing!, Keith and Kristyn Getty, 76)
A Counter to Consumerism, Discipleship
Christian worship, we should recognize, is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life. This is why worship is the heart of discipleship. (You Are What You Love, James K. A. Smith, 25)
“The practices we submit ourselves to in Christian worship are God’s way of rehabituating our loves toward the kingdom, so we need to be intentional about the Story that is carried in those practices.” (Smith, 78)
Why use liturgy? Liturgy provides an Arc of Worship which reflects the redemptive narrative of Scripture, the story of God. (Note: This is not about music, but about form of worship.):
“The drama of redemption told in the Scriptures is enacted in worship in a way that makes it ‘sticky.’ Study and memorization are important, but there is a unique, imagination-forming power in communal, repeated, and poetic cadences of historic Christian worship.” (Smith, 84)
Across an array of traditions, historic Christian worship reflects a basic plot or narrative arc that centers on God’s gracious reconciliation of all things to himself (Col. 1:20). (Smith, 95)
But when you see worship as an invitation to a top-down encounter in which God is refashioning your deepest habits, then repetition looks very different; it’s how God rehabituates us. (Smith, 80)
An intentional integration honoring All the Gifts of Christ’s Body.
Just as the climax of creation, the introduction of God’s own image-bearers into the world, only happens in the context of the divine community, so we often find that our own creative vision does not reach its full potential until we bring others into the process. (Playing God, Andy Crouch, 34)
Sources
Allen, Holly Catterton and Christine Lawton Ross. Intergenerational Christian Formation: Bringing the Whole Church Together in Ministry, Community and Worship. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012.
Crouch, Andy. Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013.
Getty, Keith and Kristyn Getty. Sing! How Worship Transforms Your Life, Family, and Church. Nashville, TN: Publishing Group, 2017.
Labberton, Mark. Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014.
Pohl, Christian. Living Into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012.
Smith, James K. A. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2016.
