Last Sunday at church, I noticed that a guy in front of me was drinking a diet energy drink. It was a bold move.
But I love my church and one of my favorite thing about it is the music. The great thing about living in Nashville is that 87% of the general population is comprised of professional musicians. (The other 13% are photographers.) And our church is no exception. They’re talented, honest and God driven musicians.
They introduced a new Christmas song.
We’ve talked about this before, about the difficulty of trying to talk an early morning crowd into singing something new. It’s an unruly task and I do not envy worship leaders who tread on this new ground. But even more difficult than just a normal Sunday, is actually trying to introduce a new Christmas song in the month of December.
That is some black belt worship leading right there and if you’ve ever experienced it, you know there are a few rules to make this work:
1. The new song has to really be about Christmas.
I don’t like when someone says, “Here’s a new Christmas song,” and the only thing Christmasy about it is that one of the verses mentions, “baby Jesus,” once. Your new song better sound like Norman Rockwell, meets Oh Holy Night, sprinkled with a bit of nutmeg. It can’t just be “kind of a Christmas song.”
2. You have to give us a traditional song also.
God bless Crosspoint Church. In addition to the new Christmas song, they rolled out a more traditional one. That is the way to do it. We’ll go with you on the new song. We will, but let’s have a favorite one too. Think of it like this: If you went to a U2 concert and Bono started it by saying, “Tonight we’re going to sing all new stuff you’ve never heard,” that would be a horrible experience. You want “One” and “Where the Streets Have No Name.” There’s a great difference between a concert and a worship experience, but we still want to sing “Silent Night.”
3. There shouldn’t be complicated clapping.
I’ve been in church before were we’ll have some complicated, salsa level, Phd kind of clapping. You want to clap along but it’s hard. The clap ends up dying faster than the horrible, “Joey loves Rachel” Friends plot or a Kardashian relationship with a professional athlete. (Joey/Rachel reference plus a Kardashian shout out? I’m on fire. Bring us a figgy pudding! We won’t leave until we get some!) The problem with a complicated clapping routine during a new Christmas song is that we’re distracted. We’re still trying to figure out the lyrics, we’re too boggled to clap too. And name an awesome Christmas song that involves intense clapping. There aren’t any.
4. A crazy techno remix of a Christmas song doesn’t count.
If your song sounds like Moby is sitting in on the ones and twos, or that instead of lighting candles on Christmas eve we need glowsticks, I’m not sure that counts as a “Christmas song.”
5. If you want to go new, make sure somewhere else you’re going old school.
Again, Crosspoint is coming through by supplementing their Christmas music with a kid’s choir. I love to see Christmas performances from kids. The only thing better is when you have a choir that sings in the formation of a Christmas tree. All irony aside, I love that.
I hope you try some new Christmas songs this year. I hope you get to learn some crazy new ones, but I hope we have some traditional songs in there too. Hip, relevant churches need to know we’ll cut them slack in December if they want to get a little old school. We like the old songs, we miss the old songs, we want to sing the old songs.
Have you been singing traditional songs at church this Christmas?
