On his blog, Ben posted some of his thoughts about modern worship in a post titled Community and My Glorious:

I've basically been at the forefront of a movement in our church to move to a modern worship style. There are a hundred reasons why I've argued that this is vital to our church, but over this past week, I've started to question them.

I've been thinking a lot about this kind of stuff lately, as well -- as a worship leader, you tend to do that, especially when you've lost members of your worship team over issues of style. Go read Ben's post first, but even if you don't, the following will still be plenty readable. What follows is the comment I posted on his article, but I thought it might be good to capture my thoughts here as well.

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Good thoughts. I've always thought that people who want a church to only do hymns are virtually no different from people who want a church to never do hymns. I lead worship the way I do because that's who I am, and that's the way God made me. That includes my background both as a kid raised on hymns, and as a teenager yearning to be famous in a rock band.

That said, I think there is something to be said for staying current and relevant. Most of the great hymn writers were controversial in their day, especially the ones who broke new ground in terms of arrangement, harmonization, accompaniment, terminology, rhythm, or any other number of things. And most of those changes were in response to the church holding onto a style that had lost its relevance to the community because the modern culture had moved on while the church stayed right where it was.

I see it no differently than new translations to the Bible. It used to be that all scripture was read from the Latin Vulgate -- it was a difficult transition for the church to move into using translations that the common person could understand in the form of the King James Version, which dominated outright until a new controversy broke out in the 1970's with the release of new translations. Thankfully, the Christian community, as a whole, is much more accepting of a new translations now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

In the same way that we need to update the translations of the scriptures every few years, I think we need to update the language of our music. I see it as no different.

The reality is that what some see as "holy" in terms of song selection, music style, or presentation, was considered by many to be blasphemy when it was introduced. In the same way, when rock music was creeping into the Christian culture in the 80's, it was considered blasphemy. It is beginning to be considered "holy" now, and will one day lose its relevance to the wider culture, but will still be held firmly in the grip of the church that won't let it go.

Instead of trying to mimic modern culture, I think the church should instead be leading it. We should be controversial not because we're picking up remnants of the modern culture, but because we're challenging the modern culture, and revealing Christ through our cultural leadership.

But we're not going to do that by demanding only traditional hymns and sticking with styles that were popular years and years ago -- neither will we do that by forsaking our own history and repeating our prior mistakes. We must learn from our past -- both in accepting new musical styles, and in not treating them as anything other than what they are -- simply another "translation", that is used as a tool. Musical styles come and go, and the sooner all of our church's generations embrace that, the sooner we can move on to the real business of being that community of love that the world so desperately needs us to be.

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