9 Reasons to Start Expanding Your Church's Worship Through New Styles

I completely agree: the worship wars sucked. A lifelong Baptist, I’ve got the scars that mark my battles, advocating for the “contemporary” viewpoint for years as a teenager growing up in a church that thought Bill Gaither was a little too radical, and then for years as a youth pastor trying to get my church to help teenagers relate to church music. A fellow Patheos blogger recently wrote a great post titled “9 Reasons to Stop Dividing Your Church’s Worship Over Style.” It’s a solid piece with completely valid arguments (be sure to check it out). I don’t necessarily disagree with anything he says, but I’d like to offer a counterpoint as a pastor who’s led through multiple worship styles. Here are 9 Reasons to Start Expanding Your Church’s Worship Through New Styles:

1. It’s a picture of what heaven could look like. No one knows what heaven is going to be like (I’d rather not take the word of a 4-year-old’s who sold a best seller), but I suspect that there will be lots of worship in heaven. I think we can agree to that. If there is going to be lots of worship, and if music is a central aspect to worship, what style of music will we experience? Will it be simply voices like the Benedictine Monks and the Church of Christ? Will it be loud and boisterous like a Hillsong Conference? Perhaps stately and refined like you’d see in a First _________ Church. Will it even be with Western instruments? What about the cacophony of world Christians that utilize untold instruments and styles to worship God? I’ve got a suspicion that heaven might be more varied than we expect. A variety of worship styles (done right) can honor that.

2. It teaches people to celebrate how God uniquely designed each one of us. None of us are the same. Some worship through songs, others are inspired through the spoken word or a compelling thought. The Bible teaches us to celebrate (not disregard) our differences, and to lift up Jesus higher than anything that could separate us. God designed us uniquely for a purpose. I think multiple worship styles taps into the creative uniqueness placed inside each of us.

3. It’s a compelling reminder that the church is a family of believers, not time and a building. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes American Christians make today is to equate church with an address and time: “Church is a building.” “Church is a service.” “Church is a program.” Only it’s not. Church is the family of God, not a bulletin and a pew. Having multiple worship styles (done right) can reinforce that the church is a family, not merely a service or building.

4. If a church has more than one service, it’s already ‘divided.’ This isn’t really a reason to have multiple styles, but a reaction to one of the greatest arguments churches use to keep from expanding into different styles of worship. “You’ll split the church!” “You’ll divide the church!” Here are two things I know as a pastor: If you have more than one service, your church is ‘divided.’ If you have a 9:00 am and a 10:30 am service, your church is already ‘divided.’ Secondly, and this is even more important, if a church splits over styles of worship, then it wasn’t healthy to begin with. Splitting over styles of worship is a symptom of a much bigger problem, one perhaps exposed (but not caused) by a different style of worship.

5. New worship styles can help reach more people. It’s that simple. They don’t always do, but they can. The worship service has become the new front door of the church. As believers, one of our duties is to try and remove as many roadblocks as possible that keep seekers and nonbelievers from encountering Jesus. If a church has a style that does an incredible job of preserving the historical elements of the faith but a horrible job at engaging a rambunctious 8 year old, than that church will probably excel at maintaining the already convinced and struggle with reaching young families and the next generation for the Kingdom. Who does the church want to reach? Can a church do both? Yes, if done right.

6. Multiple worship styles allows more to serve. I’m not saying that multiple worship styles are easy, in fact the opposite. The easiest thing to do is to keep everything together in one place. When the church I currently serve at launched a third service with a new worship style, we engaged not only a new community of people, but we enlisted new people to serve and utilize their gifts in ways they probably would have never been able to do in the other style.

7. It reminds us that unity is not the same as conformity. A united church doesn’t have to be a homogenous church. If we unite around the core issues of God, Jesus, salvation, etc., we can celebrate the diversity that God gives a church when it comes to race, socio-economic status, life experiences and even musical preferences. Sometimes when people call for unity in worship wars, they’re really calling for conformity. Those are two separate things.

8. You can become ‘all things to all people’ without bowing at the altar of consumerism. The whole term of “seeker-sensitive” has become a straw man that churches love to poke at. If ‘seeker-sensitive’ is bowing at the altar of consumerism, then we need to have a conversation with the apostle Paul about what he meant when he said in 1 Corinthians 9 that he became “all things to all people so that he might save some.” There’s a way to effectively reach people, even by utilizing varied worship styles, without feeding our innate self-centeredness. Paul figured out a way. So can we.

9. I’ve seen multiple worship styles work be a net positive to the churches I’ve served in. Now in full disclosure, I also served at a church that was very divided over worship styles, the classic “traditional vs contemporary” war. Although that was the boogeyman given as the cause for the division, that controversy merely exposed much deeper issues that had laid dormant (but unresolved) for years. The past three churches I’ve served at have had multiple worship services and styles, and they’ve all been a net positive. Yes absolutely we had to have hard conversations about styles, preferences, and what type of music was God-honoring. But I saw our people grow through those experiences, as well as new families enter the front doors of the church.

At my current church, we moved from traditional to purely contemporary about a decade before I got there. Last year, we started a third service called the Gathering, which is actually a stripped-down hybrid acoustic service that has a slightly more liturgical feel. It looks and feels different than our two main worship services. We have had a dedicated audience flock to and rally around that service, including teenagers and senior adults, a very multi-generational audience. We’re still trying to figure it all out, but in my experience multiple worship styles can be a net positive if approached correctly and embraced by the church family.