Pastors have asked me, "How can you use a secular song in your
services? How can you let your team sing a song by Hoobastank? Or
Evanescence? Or the Killers?" Let's talk a little bit about secular music in the church.
As a worship leader, I'm not always comfortable on stage. I've struggled with this my whole life. Unlike my extroverted husband, I don't like being the life of the party, the one everyone's looking at. I dread the thought of people analyzing whether my skirt matches my tights as I lead them in the worship of our Savior.
In his 1981 book Jubilate, Don Hustad questioned whether the
worship of his day was "one of God's terrible springtimes - a bleak,
cold season before new life emerges. Now, 25 years later, it seems
almost quaint that guitars, sound systems, and praise choruses caused
so much soul-searching. After all, praise and worship is the
traditional church music of today! But even as the dust settles from
these worship changes, we see new movements on the horizon.
I'm often asked what I'd do differently if I could start
Saddleback over. My answer is this: From the first day of the new
church I'd put more energy and money into ensuring a first-class music
ministry that matched our target. Music is an integral part of our
lives. We eat with it, drive with it, shop with it, relax with it, and
some even dance to it! The great American past time is not baseball - it is music and sharing our opinions about it!
Since earliest times families have worshiped together. Indeed, the Bible records examples of very young children who were known for participation in worship. 
As new CDs find their way to my CD player each week, I've noticed that an increasing number are advertised as containing "worship songs." Given the unusually broad range of styles and topics found in these songs, I'm forced to ask myself a basic question: What in the world IS a worship song?
A myth is growing in some circles of the blogosphere that online church is not good, not healthy, and not biblical. If we read carefully the criticisms levied against internet campuses, they boil down to some very common and tired themes: Internet campuses and online churches are not true churches because they don't look like and feel like churches are expected to look like and feel like (in the West, anyway). Arguments against virtual church follow the idea that if it doesn't look like church, feel like church, swim like church, or quack like church, it's not a church. This may be a useful test for ducks, but churches are far more complex animals.
In my next book, Surprised By Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels (based on my sermons from Jonah), I have a section on the connection between what we worship and what we fear. After a conversation about this connection the other day, I thought it might be helpful to post that section here.
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