Worship Spaces: Radio Songs

Worship Spaces is a series of "favorite things" I've seen done in churches. These could be rituals, physical setups, or something else that worked really well. 

Today's post discusses blending song selection with older songs, newer songs...and "radio" songs.
A couple of years ago, I redesigned our youth songbook at church. I added new songs that we'd learned over the past 5-10 years, and I cut out some songs that our students didn't know at all. The final product was a great, almost comprehensive blend of older songs, newer songs, "camp" or "devo" songs...and "radio" songs.

Radio songs are a product of the worship-music craze that began in the late 90s and progressed throughout the 00s, eventually taking over Christian radio. CCM shifted their focus from Christian Pop to a new genre of Praise and Worship. The most popular Christian artists were now worship leaders, and the formerly most-popular Christian artists starting writing worship music to keep up. (At the same time, many churches began to update their instrumental worship services from a piano or organ to a full rock band.)

All of this happened in the broader realm of Christianity, but it had trickle-down effects for Churches of Christ. Worship-focused groups like ZOE and Hallal overtook general-Christian groups like Acappella in popularity.

The bigger change, however, was the shift in song selection. In the past, Christian worship songs and hymns were written primarily for organ accompaniment, and we could adapt them to a cappella four-part harmony relatively easily. Now, however, Christian worship songs were written for rock bands. They had more musical freedom, but we have fewer songs that easily adapt for congregational singing.

In churches today, we have older congregation-friendly songs, newer congregation-friendly songs...and radio songs. Radio songs sound great with instrumental accompaniment, but if you don't know the original song, they're...not the greatest when sung voices-only. If your primary goal in song selection is to select the best vocal music available, you'd probably skip radio songs altogether.

However...

Worship isn't just about church members; it's also about the church visitors. And often, visitors don't grow up in a church. They don't know the classic hymns or the newer songs. The only songs they've heard recently...were on the radio.

If our goal is to reach others who haven't committed their lives to Jesus, we need to consider every possible avenue. Our song selection is one of those avenue.

My goal when preparing a worship service is to have at least one "core" song for each person in the audience, a song that speaks to their heart, often one that matches with their generation. For outsiders, none of our standard songs work, but sometimes a radio song might.

(As worship leaders, we can seek out the radio songs that work best in our congregations. We still have some radio songs that work very well, and we have many talented arrangers in our heritage. But if we choose to ignore radio songs altogether, we're limiting our reach to newcomers.)

I remember leading a youth devo about a year ago. It was a song request night, and we had sung about fifteen songs so far, both older songs and newer songs.

Then one of our newest teens, whose family had placed membership recently, requested the song "Oceans." We sang it, and afterwards she thanked me, saying, "that's the only song I really know."

Let's sing enough songs, and enough variety of songs, so that everyone can have a song they really know.