It has you sing praises of God for the glory of God and to shift your mindset so you’re ready to hear the Word of God.
Traditional worship mainly uses the music portion of its service to transition to the sermon. In the Bible, musical worship has been used to celebrate, to mourn, to ask for victory, to declare God’s promises, to mark special occasions and plenty of other tasks. Beyond that, however, there are many options. In any case, however, the primary purpose is to life our praises unto God. Musical worship is all throughout the Bible and is used for a variety of reasons, so to say the purpose behind one church’s worship is wrong and another is right is pretty asinine. There’s a lot of motion in contemporary worship, and the generally attitude is that there’s just as much for us to gain from worship as there is for us to give unto God, which leads me into the final difference: Purpose of Worship Sometimes that’s closing their eyes, or lifting their hands, or dancing, or falling to their knees. Many people in a contemporary service will reflect on the music, meditate on the words, and give an emotional response. Usually the worship team are the only people who are heavily focused solely on the content of the music. Contemporary worship tends to focus more on a physical or emotional response.
That uniformity isn’t really present in contemporary worship. No one is really leading or following, but they are all uniformly singing together. Instead of just one worship team, even with a choir present, the general feel is that the church is all singing together. The congregation sings along to the (admittedly pretty complicated) melodies.
#Contemporary christian worship full
The hymns are songs of praise, full of words that God deserves to hear. In traditional worship, the most important thing the congregation can do is sing along. Both styles are designed to praise and worship God for who He is. In each case, you’ll find people responding as the worship leaders intended, but you see very different results. Most people could identify the real difference between traditional and contemporary worship through the response of the congregation. The goals of contemporary worship are mainly to come as you are and experience God in the most intimate way possible. People often have a deeper understanding of the easier to understand lyrics in songs like Good Good Father and Holy Spirit. The lyrics to the songs are about God’s closeness to us, with the instrumentals and the lyrics together guiding us to a sort of emotional high in which we recognize both God’s greatness and His goodness. Often the lights are brought down, delay is put on guitars, and it begins to feel like a spiritual setting. The music is simpler, but the fuller band and the style of the music is designed to set a particular atmosphere. It’s a symbol that God is worthy of the absolute best of our dress, our culture, and by extension, our lives.Ĭontemporary services accomplish the same through intimacy. There’s always a certain ceremony to traditional worship, encouraging you to wear your “Sunday best” and sing along to these hymns, full of well-written classical accompaniment that contains sophisticated lyrics full of words we wouldn’t use in our everyday speech. In traditional worship, this is accomplished through a sense of reverence. The goal of musical worship is to shift your mindset away from what you’re seeing in the world and get you into the mindset that you are in the presence of a God who is to be worshiped. The fact that congregational worship includes music goes to show that a key purpose of worship is to bring up your emotions. The main differences actually come down to the emotion of worship, the style of worship, and the underlying purpose of worship.Īnd again, before I hear anything from people who are ardent defenders of one style or another, both types are equally valid, holy and necessary for Christian living. I think anyone who’s been in both types of services can tell you there are more differences than musical styles. But there’s a bit of a misconception that contemporary worship is the exact same as traditional worship but with different instruments or a different musical style. I think we’d all say that the two styles are equally acceptable to God and equally holy.
So, this time I thought I’d tackle a much less controversial topic: what’s the difference between contemporary and traditional worship? A few months ago, I wrote about the different versions of the Bible, and I was surprised at the flack I got for thinking the Message was completely worthless.