Brandon Lake’s criticism of jargon in worship songs doesn’t stack up

Shock news everyone: someone on the internet has said that maybe worship songs have too much Christian language in them.

This bombshell comes from Brandon Lake who, despite having a name which sounds like a caravan park, is, I am reliably informed, “an award-winning Christian music artist and worship pastor”.

I have thoughts. First, I’m not sure anyone who calls themselves a “worship pastor” has any right to be lecturing others about Christian jargon. But my main thought is: You’ve only just noticed this?

Christianese in worship music is not a new problem. I don’t want to sound bitter, but I was writing about this years ago. In 2003, I wrote an article for this very magazine, which I later expanded into a book with the not-at-all provocative title of And Now Let’s Move Into a Time of Nonsense: Why worship songs are failing the church (Authentic Media).

A jargon-free zone

Anyway, better late than never. Lake’s argument is that the language of worship songs is off-putting to the casual churchgoer. That phrases like “Holy, holy, holy / Lord God Almighty” only serve to alienate them. Instead, he puts forward one of his own songs, called ‘Hard fought hallelujah’.

Now, I listened to that song and I’m not sure it entirely supports his point. I mean, it’s not exactly a jargon-free zone. For one thing, it’s got the word ‘hallelujah’ in the title, along with the lines: “Cause faith isn’t proven like gold / ’Til it’s been through the fire”. I mean, that’s a prime example of what I called in my book the “’I can’t believe it’s not the Bible’ school of songwriting”.

Along with hymns of praise, the Psalms contain howls of pain and tears of lament

Rather than struggling to find metaphors which are modern, relevant and real, writers simply select from the same set-menu of biblical images. So, we don’t mention ‘suffering’, we sing about ‘refining’. The word ‘money’ never appears in songs; we have ‘silver and gold’. Of course, it’s hard work to think of a new metaphor; much easier to wrench it out of the Authorised Version. Just get ChatKJV to do the work for you.

But I think this issue goes beyond the words. The really big question is that, even if you were to de-Christianise these lyrics, would there be anything in the song worth singing?

Music to do life to

Worship is an intellectual act, not just an emotional feeling. The brain fastens onto something: a truth, a revelation, a reality – and that inspires us to respond anew to God. But too many worship songs are just, well, shallow. They have all the depth of a car park puddle. You could wade through their most profound thoughts and never get your ankles wet.

We come to church bearing heavy loads of reality. But what connection to our real life do we find in our worship? What do our songs say to the single parent worrying about putting food on the table? How do they speak to the teenager who looks in the mirror and hates what she sees? Or the man who knows that after church, he will go to visit his wife in the care home and she will not recognise him? Where do we find those issues in our songbooks?

To Lake’s credit, ‘Hard fought hallelujah’ has real empathy. It’s about worshipping when you don’t feel like it, which at least acknowledges how many of us sometimes feel around 10:30am on a Sunday morning. (And lots of other times come to that.) But even then, it feels like the gist of the song is simply ‘sing louder’. And sadly, I think that is often the expectation.

Numbing the pain

It seems to me that many ‘times of worship’ are more like a kind of spiritual anaesthetic. Turn up the volume, crank out the rhythm and fire up the smoke machine. Maybe, if you sing loud enough, the pain will go away for a bit.

Look, we all need an escape. I’m not arguing that instead of a time of nonsense, we should move into a time of despair. But I would like some recognition that life is hard; some hint that maybe people are not raising their hands in worship so much as waving for help. And this really would be biblical.

Too many worship songs are just shallow. They have all the depth of a car park puddle

The Psalms were the worship song book of the temple. Along with hymns of praise, they contain howls of pain, tears of lament, anxious expressions of doubt and even bitter accusations that God is asleep. Why? Because they were about reality.

Brandon Lake is right, the Christianese doesn’t help. There are songwriters who have tried to address these realities – the lyrics of John Bell spring to mind. But we need more than just a change of vocabulary. We need empathy. We need courage. We need poets and prophets more than we perhaps need worship pastors.

We need to understand that worship is for life, not just a Sunday morning service.