Musical and Social Meaning…part 7

Musical and Social Meaning…part 7

 All music that includes words communicates understandable meaning to all who experience it through the text and also from how its formal properties (the music part of the music) have been arranged into a coherent whole.  Whatever meaning that the music transmits to the listener is understandable meaning that relates to real life. This is evident because no performer musics in an artistic “bubble” that is detached from the world around him.  Since all musicing is done in community, all meaning that the music communicates to those who experience it has moral implications. Therefore, all religious musicing has the potential to have a positive or negative spiritual effect on the listener. Metacognition, i.e. a person’s thinking about his or her thinking when that person experienced the music, further empowers what the music earlier triggered in the mind of the observer through brain stem responses.

Because of this phenomenon, the onus probandi of how and what one musics unto God in the presence of others is placed squarely on the shoulders of the worship leader.  Ministers of music who lead music in worship are responsible for what the music ultimately does to the whole life of the listener.  Luke 17: 1-2 reminds us all of Jesus’ warning, “Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”  It is foreign to many worship leaders in this century that what and how one musics in the context of public worship has the power to be spiritually offensive and to do damage to the worshiper and actually be responsible for the debauchment of public worship.  There is no doubt about it, we are constantly bombarded with social and spiritual offences caused by musicing, but these offences should never be caused by a musicer who is a Christian.