What Is Worship Music?

The power of music

“This is my song, O God of all the nations, a song of peace, for lands afar and mine.” As a teenager, I learned “Finlandia” in church, but it really took hold of me when I was a camp counselor. As we sang it around campfires and in the dining hall, it taught me that God’s world is much bigger than the “cloverleaf and pine” in my own backyard and that God loves every land, not just mine. Years later, shortly after the United States invaded Iraq, I attended an Indigo Girls concert. Throughout the evening, the energized audience danced and sang along with the exuberant folk-rock music. To the audience’s surprise, the concert closed with an a cappella version of “Finlandia.” I was stunned at how still and quiet the concert hall became as the song seemed to bind us — people of different faiths and none — together in a prayer for peace. Such is the power of song.

In their book A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice, Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls and her dad, Don Saliers, write: “The act of singing praise, lament, thanksgiving, or prayer to God goes beyond the surface of words and beyond the passing sound of the voices. . . . If the words and the musical forms are adequate to the mystery of being human — to suffering and joy — then the sound itself becomes a medium of formation and transformation.”

As Professor Emeritus of Worship and Theology at Emory University, Don Saliers is widely known in ecumenical circles for his writing about worship and music. In writing about “the integrity of sung prayer,” he says that music is “not an ornament,” but “an embodied form of praying.” For Saliers, music offered in worship shapes and expresses the patterns of emotions which constitute Christian life. Music helps the worshipful embody the full range of our spiritual experience, from gratitude and joy to humility and even to our sorrow over sin. Read More