This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #109, on the subject of Simple Songs.

I find myself in the awkward position of defending a practice I don’t particularly like.  Someone criticized Christian record companies.  I think that there are serious problems with Christian record companies, but I don’t think that the particular problems suggested in the supposedly satirical video were the real problems.  I will probably write more on this subject, but first I want to talk about the problem of simple, that is, simplistic, music.  The video (undoubtedly facetiously) suggested that record companies demand that all Christian songs use the same three chords.  That’s not something record companies ask or expect.  What they expect is that songs be marketable to the people who are expected to want them, and for a certain kind of Christian song that inherently means simple.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not impressed by simple songs and I do my best not to write them.  I had an argument with a piano player who insisted that the B# I wanted him to play (in a G# major chord with a minor sixth added–I know, ugly chord, but the song needed it) did not exist.  I cringe sometimes at the fact that so many of the songs I wrote on the piano when I was in high school and college are so similar, and eventually made a point of not writing songs on the piano unless I could do something really different.  I could probably be a lot more prolific if I weren’t so insistent that every song had to be distinct.

I also remember being horrified when I was in high school when someone I knew casually told me that he had been baptized in the Spirit on Friday night and over the weekend God had given him five hundred songs.  I approached skeptically, and discovered that he knew three chords, stopped the music to change between them, and sang very nearly monotone.  There is nothing wrong with the miraculous happening in connection with the Holy Spirit; this I don’t think was that.

The temptation is to think that all the musicians who write such “simple” three-chord songs with simplistic melodic lines are like my high school friend, unable to do better or even to know they are doing poorly.  The fact is they are not doing poorly; they are writing the kind of songs needed for their ministry.  One thing that helps me not judge other ministries is understanding what they are actually trying to do and why, and how that is different from what I am doing, and why that different objective requires different methods.

We talked extensively about Christian ministries.  Of particular relevance here, the 1960s and 70s were dominated by evangelist music ministry, which meant music that would catch attention of unbelievers and cause them to listen to the message.  It was frequently interesting, often intricate, always performance-oriented material.  Today, we noted, the dominant stream in music ministry is pastoral, music that benefits the sheep, with participatory worship music at the top of the list.

Don’t misunderstand.  Many great professional composers from Michael Praetorius and J. S. Bach through Charles Ives and Randall Thompson have written some great worship music to be presented by professional musicians, and there is a worship experience in which the worshipper listens and is overwhelmed by the beauty of the music and the presence of God.  However, that is not participatory worship.  When men like Luther and Wesley wanted to get people involved in worship, they took simple songs that their audience knew–usually from singing in taverns–and wrote Christian words to them, because the majority in the congregation are not musically literate and can only sing simple songs that they know or can quickly learn.  The typical congregant can’t handle complex melodic lines, intricate syncopation and time signature changes, modal and key transitions; those are for professional musicians.  Thus songs for participatory worship are best if they are simple.

Further, when someone records a song intended for worship, the expectation is less that you will listen to the recording–which is certainly part of the intention–but more that churches throughout the world will learn to play it and use it in their worship.  Johnny Smith who got a guitar for Christmas and has been trying to teach himself to play has to be able to stand in front of Little Country Church and lead half a dozen worshippers in a song they might never have heard.  If it isn’t simple, it isn’t going to succeed.

There is complex and interesting Christian music out there, because there are still musicians doing non-pastoral ministry, and pastors using music for aspects of their ministry that go beyond corporate participatory worship.  The primary forms on Christian radio though are songs of worship which ordinary people can learn easily and sing along while driving; the primary songs that get played in churches are the simple songs of worship which the congregation can embrace quickly.  They are the kind of music most Christians are buying; they are important in the scheme of music ministry; they are not the totality of it.

Returning to record companies–well, I probably have more to say about the recording industry, but for the moment to give them their due, they have to be interested in the bottom line, in producing recordings that people will buy.  That means songs that will be played on the radio and sung in churches.  That means, primarily, simple worship songs.  Sure, they produce more than that, but since songs for participatory worship are the most popular in the Christian market, they dominate product.

If you want to do something different with your music, that’s a good thing; just understand that you are not looking to reach the present core Christian market if you aren’t doing simple worship songs, not because of the record companies but because of the audience.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #107, on the subject of Miscellaneous Music Ministries.

This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment was #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and addressed each of these individually in its own article.

Someone is undoubtedly saying that I missed something, because he knows that he is called to music ministry but does not fit into any of those.

It is certainly plausible that there are ministries Paul did not happen to mention in that passage; he does not specify that it is an exhaustive list of possible ministries.  On the other hand, they do provide comprehensive coverage of most of what we can identify as the spiritual needs within a congregation.  If you have a spiritual ministry, what does it do?  Does it bring the gospel to people who have never heard it and launch churches, as the Music Ministry of an Apostle?  Is it focused on bringing God’s specific direction, timing, and confirmation to His people when they need it, and thus a Prophetic Music Ministry?  Is it about bringing unbelievers to faith, an Evangelist Ministry?  Are you drawing believers closer to God and each other, the Music Ministry of the Pastor?  Are you enabling believers to understand the truths they have embraced, as a Teacher?  If you are not doing one of these five things, what are you doing that constitutes spiritual ministry?

On the other hand, there are other positions in the church, and we speak of other kinds of ministry today.  The Ephesians list gives us a rather sweeping collection of spiritual servants, but as we previously noted there are other kinds of service within the church, and our use of the word “ministry” has been in a sense selective for our purpose.  You might serve by playing the organ, conducting the choir, singing the liturgy, and be quite correct that God has put you in a place where you are using your gifts for His service.  Some of those ministries have names; the degree to which music can be involved depends very much on how the position is understood.

In some ways the simplest of those named positions is the previously mentioned diakonos or “deacon”.  In Acts 6 there was a problem concerning the distribution of food–members contributed food to the church which was delivered to widows, among the poorest with the worst prospects at that time.  The Apostles decided to have the church choose seven people to become “servers”, to deliver the food fairly to the women.  Paul later discusses in letters to Timothy and Titus how to select such “servers” for the local church, and we assume that they have much the same function, of overseeing the in-house charitable assistance.  We have expanded on that, but our expansions have gone in two distinct directions.  In one direction, deacons have become the business managers of the church, because they handle the assets and spending; in the other direction, deacons (and particularly deaconesses) have become the charitable arm of the church, because their original assignment was to attend to the poor.  Because of the tension between these two in some ways disparate objectives, the office has tended to become whatever the particular denomination or congregation wanted it to be, or even what the appointed individual made of it.

It should be noted that being a server does not preclude being some other kind of minister.  The Philip named among the seven servers is the one we discussed as Philip the Evangelist.  It is also certainly possible that music can be incorporated into service as a deacon, as for example entertaining in a mission or soup kitchen, or at a concert to raise money for and awareness of the homeless or otherwise impoverished.

The “presbuteros” or “elder” is more difficult.  We know that there were elders in synagogues, and they were quite simply the old men who had been in attendance for many years.  They had learned much and accumulated some wisdom, and so were sought to provide insight and direction.  Nowhere are we told how they are selected or identified, but in I Timothy Paul suggests that they are in charge of “ruling” the church, and that they get paid for this (“double honor” refers to what we would call an honorarium, money given as thanks, and that it is “double” for those laboring in preaching and teaching suggests that those “elders” who are not preaching and teaching are still paid for “ruling” the church).  He also suggests that some of them are involved in preaching and teaching–but that some are not, and thus again we have the suggestion that some elders also have other kinds of ministries, and also that some who do not have ministries of the sort we equate with standing in the pulpit are still very much involved in serving the church as leaders.  That might sometimes include using musical gifts at church gatherings of one sort or another.

Also unclear is the office of “episkopos”, a word compounded of “atop sight” giving us the concept of “overseer”.  It is often rendered “bishop”, derived indirectly from the Greek (Greek “episkopos” becomes Latin “ebiscopus” becomes English “bisceop” and eventually “bishop”).  We know that there is a selection process and qualifications; we don’t know what these people did.  The title has become part of the hierarchy in many denominations, ranging from the head of a local church to the head of a denomination.  It has something to do with ruling and caring for the house of God, but whether that means financial management or spiritual oversight is pretty much a guess.  It thus also makes it difficult to suggest how music might fit into service in so uncertain a job.

Some speak of a “healing ministry” and identify some persons as “healers”.  The nearest word for that in the New Testament is “iatros”, which properly means “healer” but is almost always rendered “physician”.  In most occasions it is used rather generally or often metaphorically about medical doctors.  (The familiar metaphor is “Physician, heal thyself,” which is more poignant when we replace “physician” with “healer”.) The only specific individual ever said to be “iatros” is Luke (in Colossians 4:14, in passing as a way of identifying him).  It is not impossible that Luke was a “healer” in the sense intended by those who use the term, but tradition has always maintained he was a medical doctor, and his writing supports this contention in several ways.

Meanwhile, there is an interesting exegetical issue in I Corinthians 12:9.  It is in the middle of a list of gifts the Spirit gives, immediately after “faith” and before “effecting of miracles”.  We are very uncertain what many of these gifts are, but the quirk with healing is that it doesn’t say “healing” as a gift, but lists the gift as “gifts of healings”, as if perhaps this person received a package from God that contained healings he was to distribute to those who needed them.  This person is not really exercising a gift of being able to heal people; he is working as a deliveryman who has been given these healings to give to others.  That does not make it not a position of serving God and the church; it does significantly alter our perception of it.  Yet as important as such physical healing is, our perception is that healings in the New Testament were always connected to bringing people to God.  Thus those who have gifts of healing are probably also exercising one of the Ephesian ministries, enabled by these gifts, whether apostolic, evangelistic, pastoral, or one of the others.  If music fits the “healing” ministry, it will be because it fits in the way that is appropriate to the ministry which the healing is supporting.

Music is part of life, and has been from the early chapters of Genesis.  It has been used in worship and in ministry, but was not invented originally for that purpose.  We can have Christian entertainment, which is good, and we can use music in many ways within the church.

I hope this series has been helpful to your understanding of ministry and the place of music within it.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #103, on the subject of Music Ministry of the Pastor.

This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment was #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and began looking at individual ministries with #99:  Music Ministry of an Apostle followed by #101:  Prophetic Music Ministry and #102:  Music and the Evangelist Ministry.  We now come to the pastor, fourth on the list.  We previously addressed the question of why pastor and teacher are linked as they are in the text, and suggested that it is not because they are the same ministry but because they ascend to importance in the local church together.

The word pastor is problematic.  It appears to have been imported from the French directly, and given a meaning drawn from its Latin roots, although there is some indication that it once meant shepherd in English (as it originally did in Latin and French).  We use the word because we have imbued the office with theological significance which is not captured by the literal translation:  the Greek word for which it stands is the ordinary word for a shepherd, and any theological meaning it has comes from its metaphoric attachment to this ministry.  Unfortunately, there are reasons why we cannot easily replace pastor with the literal word shepherd.  First, it has become in some sense the title for a particular category of ministry (although it is abused, covering some persons who are not and not covering some who are spiritual shepherds).  Second, the concept of “shepherding” fell into disrepute in the last third of the previous century from its use in some rather authoritarian hierarchical church structures.  Third, the Middle Eastern method of shepherding is very different from the European approach which dominates our understanding.  We thus have to understand the image to understand the metaphor.

Shepherds in Europe, the Americas, and Australia tend to drive sheep.  This is relatively easy, and you can hire anyone to do it.  The trick is to get behind the sheep and frighten them into fleeing in the direction you want them to go.  Dogs are easily trained to assist this, because sheep are terrified of dogs, and while the dogs can be trained to protect the sheep, the job of herding sheep involves making them frightened enough to move away from the dogs.  The Bible, however, speaks of shepherds leading sheep, and explains that the shepherd has a relationship with his sheep:  he calls, and they follow him.  This is not some fantasy Jesus created; this is the way shepherds manage their sheep in the Middle East.  I am told that they will gather around watering holes such that hundreds or even thousands of sheep are mingling, trying to get water, and then one of the shepherds will start to walk away and will give his call, and all of his sheep will separate themselves from the mass and follow him.  It is his job to lead them to food and water, and to the shelter which protects against predators.  He does this by making them feel safe and secure, and because they know that he will care for them, they follow him.

Peter, as we mentioned, is the only person in the New Testament connected by name to the office of shepherd or pastor.  He uses it of himself in his first letter.  More significantly, in John 21, Jesus charges him with commands that are very much those given to a shepherd:  “Tend my lambs….Shepherd my sheep….Tend my sheep.” (Updated New American Standard Bible).  This is what a shepherd–a pastor–does.

Peter is unfortunately not a very clear example, because he is also an apostle, and much of what we see him do is based on that ministry.  Yet what we see in his letters and in the directives Jesus gave him seems reasonably clear:  pastors care for people; this means they care about people.  People matter to them, and they are nurturers.

I use to have a lot of trouble listening to pastors preach, because their exegesis was often shoddy and their statements often questionable.  It wasn’t until I came to understand that pastors are not teachers that I recognized why the standards I applied to teaching the Word were not appropriate for pastors.  When a pastor preaches, it is not his primary job to convey understanding or information, to deliver doctrine or explain mysteries.  Peter does none of that in his letters.  The pastor is there to make sure that the sheep are safe and growing.  It is about their lives, the love they have for each other, the way they live and interact, the choices they make.  Pastors are there to lead believers closer to God.  We make the mistake of thinking that feeding the sheep is about teaching truths, but that is a very small part of it.  It is truth, not truths, that sheep most need.  They need direction, someone to show them how to get closer to God and to each other.

With this understanding of the pastoral ministry, it becomes obvious that those musicians we call “worship leaders” are actually exercising pastoral ministry:  in leading people in worship, they are drawing us closer to God.  Again, as with the evangelist, part of the value of music in this is that aspect that we easily learn and often repeat songs that are simple enough for us to handle.  Thus in teaching us worship songs and leading us in worship, these pastors are also teaching us to worship, and how to worship, when we are away from the group.

Pastoral ministry also involves bringing us together in love, getting us to embrace each other and live and work together and build each other in faith and love; and it involves encouraging us to reach beyond ourselves, both individually and collectively, that is, that I would reach out to those around me but also that we would reach out to those outside the faith.  These are the ministry objectives of pastors, to show us how to live Christian lives and enable us to do this.  For the pastor, people are the most important thing, and pastors are driven to work with people individually and collectively to profit and edify through relationships with God, each other, and those beyond.

That leaves us with the teacher.

Next in the series: The Teacher Music Ministry

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #102, on the subject of Music and the Evangelist Ministry.

This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment was #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and began looking at individual ministries with #99:  Music Ministry of an Apostle followed by #101:  Prophetic Music Ministry.  That brings us to the third ministry on the list, the evangelist.

In one sense we significantly covered the evangelist when we examined the ministry of the apostle, as we needed to distinguish the two ministries.  We looked at Philip the Evangelist, the only person in the New Testament to be identified specifically as an evangelist, and recognized that wherever he went he preached or explained the gospel message and brought people to faith in Christ (but did not, we noted, found any churches).  Yet we also commented that in the nineteen seventies nearly all Christian music was connected to evangelism, to the degree that it was generally assumed that if you were a Christian and a musician you were an evangelist.  That is not so, as this series has already observed, but it is at least interesting that it was then thought to be so.

It is interesting because that was a time of revival–we called it “The Jesus Movement”, and the many converts became known as “Jesus People”.  Concerts grew into festivals–the first Woodstock-like Christian gatherings occurred at that time and are still held today largely because they have become a tradition (they did not exist before that).  The ministry of the evangelist is closely tied to revivals.  George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards are all remembered as evangelists in the First Great Awakening; Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher are leading names from the Second Great Awakening; D. L. Moody is connected to a time of revival some call the Third Great Awakening.  The Jesus Movement was marked by a huge number of evangelists preaching on streets, in coffeehouses, at outdoor concerts, and elsewhere.

We do not have that today.

Some would say that we do not have revival at present because we do not have enough evangelists, or enough people doing evangelism.  There are groups trying to train believers to be evangelists.  This is wonderful, of course, as everyone needs to be able to share the faith with others; but you can no more be taught to be an evangelist than you can be taught to be female.  As we noted, Christ gives to the church people who are the gifts, the ministers, among whom are evangelists, evangelists since before they were born given as gifts to the church.  Thus arguably it is not that we do not have revival because of a lack of evangelists, but that we do not have evangelists because this is not a time of revival.

That does not mean there are no evangelists.  God always has people calling others to salvation, some of whom are specially given for that purpose.  However, revivals are special times–Dr. J. Edwin Orr has identified them as “God’s periods of recruitment”, and a significant number of those who are in church ministry today accepted Christ in that revival.  Billy Graham, Bill Bright, Dick Halverson, and a host of others who were leaders in the church then became believers in the previous revival.

It also does not mean that there are not evangelists growing up among us right now.  After all, those of us who were in our teens and twenties in the seventies are in our fifties and sixties now, and God is going to need a new crop of leaders and believers.  It will be in His timing, and He has been known to skip a generation or two, but He will not allow faith to vanish from the world.  Revival will come, and the number of evangelists will explode anew as the message is brought to the lost once again.

To the evangelist, Jesus is the answer to every problem.  It is a simple gospel, a simple message, that whatever the problem is, Jesus is the answer–absolutely true, but often overly simplistic when dealing with human problems.  That is why there are other ministries besides the evangelist, because believers need the nurturing of pastors and teachers to help unravel how Jesus is the answer to all the problems.  The focus for the evangelist, though, is always on Jesus, pointing people to Him as the solution.

The Booths used music in their evangelism, having brass bands and singers attract crowds on the streets by singing revival hymns, creating a “Salvation Army”.  Music was used much that way in the Jesus Movement, as something of a billboard to attract the attention of people who needed to hear the message–and the message was preached, but it was also sung.  In the preface to his book Inventing Champagne:  The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, music historian Gene Lees comments that music is an incredibly effective form of advertising because people voluntarily memorize the words and repeat them.  Getting the gospel message into music that people will want to hear and sing is a significant part of the evangelist’s music ministry–and many of the musicians and bands of the early Jesus Movement did that extremely well.  The modern musical evangelist has a solid collection of examples from that era, some of whom continued ministering for decades thereafter.  Learn from them.

Which brings us next to the pastor.

Next in the series: Music Ministry of the Pastor

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #101, on the subject of Prophetic Music Ministry.

This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment was #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and began looking at individual ministries last time with #99:  Music Ministry of an Apostle.

The ministry of the prophet in the New Testament church is much more difficult to assess, for several reasons.

1. There are Old Testament prophets under the Old Covenant, and we do not know to what degree New Testament prophets under the New Covenant are distinct from them;
2. There are at least two persons in the Gospels identified as prophets–John the Baptist and Anna–and because their ministries are entirely prior to the resurrection and ascension we do not know whether they are Old Covenant prophets or New Covenant prophets;
3. There is also a “gift of prophecy” identified in the New Testament, and we do not know whether having that gift and being a prophet are the same thing or different things;
4. On at least one occasion in the New Testament we are told that someone who was definitely not a believer in Christ prophesied, when the High Priest Caiaphas said that it was best for one man to die for the nation.

All of this adds up to a complicated collection of information about prophets.

On the other hand, there are more than half a dozen prophets identified within the New Testament church, including several leaders of the church at Antioch, the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist, and a pair named Silas and Judas.  Of these last two, we are told that because they were prophets they encouraged the believers in the gentile churches they were visiting, but little more.  There is only one person in the New Testament identified for us as a prophet about whom we are told anything significant concerning his ministry.  He appears twice in the Book of Acts, and his name is Agabus.

The very word prophet means “foreteller” that is, “saying in advance”, the English being drawn directly from the Greek.  For a lot of reasons, we don’t like the idea that God lets some of us know the future, particularly as that seems so useful and most of us are unable to do it.  Thus some argue that there are no longer prophets in the church because they are no longer needed, and some argue that it is not foretelling but “forthtelling” that matters, that every preacher declaring the message of God from the Bible is acting in the role of a prophet.  These, though, do not fit with the ministry we see of Agabus.

We might describe Agabus’ first appearance as a minor mention of a major role:  he warns the church of an impending famine in Acts 11:28.  It was because of this warning that the Christians in Antioch (where Agabus was at that time) started collecting resources for the Christians in Judea, ultimately delivered by Barnabas and Paul.  Thus it appears that in this specific instance, the ministry of the prophet involved announcing a future event for which the hearers would want to prepare themselves.

His second appearance is sort of the reverse, a major part in a minor role.  In Acts 21:10ff he visits Caesarea to see Paul, and rather dramatically (literally dramatically:  he takes Paul’s belt and uses it as a prop in a show) announces that Paul’s visit to Jerusalem is going to result in his arrest.  Once again it appears that the prophet is telling someone what is going to happen.

This, though, proves to be rather intriguing.  All of Paul’s companions in Caesarea immediately start begging him not to go, but he responds that he was quite prepared for this, seemingly already knowing what was going to happen.  In any case, he is not in the least surprised.  It seems that the message was news for Paul’s companions, but it was only confirmation for him:  he knew he was headed into trouble.

The chapter on Guidance in What Does God Expect? and my web page on Objective and Subjective Christian Guidance go into some detail explaining why Paul needed that confirmation.  The point for us is that the ministry of the prophet, as we see it in action in the New Testament, appears to be that of alerting believers to trouble on the road ahead so that we can prepare, or be prepared, for what is coming.

There is one other aspect that might be part of the prophetic ministry.  In Acts 13:1ff we are told that there were “prophets and teachers” in the church at Antioch, among whom were Barnabas, Saul, and three others.  We are told that this group heard the Holy Spirit tell them that it was time to separate Barnabas and Saul for the work for which they had already been called, which was the beginning of their apostolic ministry.  It seems likely that it is part of the prophetic ministry to provide guidance to other ministries, concerning when to take significant steps, possibly what steps to take next.  I have heard enough stories and had enough personal experience to believe that this happens, that God has some in the church who are given messages helping others be certain of God’s direction for them, often without themselves understanding the meaning of the message.  This prophetic ministry keeps us moving in the right direction.

It is also significant that it is second on the list, because it contributes greatly to enabling the congregation to identify the ministers among them, as well as preparing us for struggles ahead.

How does a prophet integrate music into his ministry?  I face this question with some reservations.  I have only twice knowingly spoken with prophets, and they were not musicians and we did not discuss their ministries.  A prophet with musical gifts might well align himself with another minister with musical gifts–it seems likely that Barnabas was a prophet and Paul a teacher (both were apostles), and that Paul did most of the talking because he was in some sense the frontman of the ministry.  That is admittedly guesswork based on the facts that both appear on that list of “prophets and teachers” and Paul is known to be a teacher but not a prophet which increases the probability that Barnabas was one of the prophets in the group; and when they were in Lystra together the locals observed that Paul was the speaker and Barnabas the leader.  There are those who only speak when they have something to say, and one might expect prophets to be of that sort.

At the same time, there is a phenomenon which might be part of the music ministry of a prophet.  I have only once spontaneously sung an entirely new song at a gathering.  I do not mean improvised something on the spot, but realized that there was a song I needed to sing that neither I nor anyone else had ever sung before, and did so.  I might expect that to be part of a prophet’s music ministry, as the Lord gives him a word couched in a melody with an accompanyment.  On the other hand, I don’t know that this would necessarily be part of such a ministry, or necessarily mark such a ministry as prophetic.  I am not a prophet and the song was not prophetic; yet I can see how God would use such songs to deliver unique messages to specific persons or groups.

The third ministry is the evangelist, which we will tackle next.

Next in series: Music and the Evangelist Ministry

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #99, on the subject of Music Ministry of an Apostle.

We have been talking about being “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment, #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, made the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Last time we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and said we would begin looking at individual ministries this time.

A man speaking on behalf of a major missionary organization once said that Billy Graham was not an evangelist.  His contention was that evangelists didn’t merely preach the gospel; they founded churches.

I knew that had to be wrong, not merely because Doctor Graham is perhaps the quintessential modern example of an evangelist but because it didn’t seem to fit what I knew of the first century church–so I looked it up.  The New Testament gives us only one example identified for us (in Acts 21:8) as an evangelist, known to us aptly as “Philip the Evangelist”.  Of his ministry we know three facts, which we will present in reverse order.

The third fact was that after he was some distance to the southwest of Jerusalem he traveled north and east (Acts 8:40), preaching the gospel in towns along the way until he reached Caesarea.  It does not say that he founded churches in these places, nor even that he stayed any time in each.

The second fact was that after his major effort preaching in Samaria he was directed to travel to Azotus in the southwest (known as Ashdod in the Old Testament) where he met an Ethiopian eunuch and explained the gospel to him (Acts 8:27ff), then after the eunuch’s conversion and baptism he let the man continue to Ethiopia and did not travel with him or say anything about starting a church.

It is the first fact that is most interesting in this regard, though.  In Acts 8:5ff Philip, fleeing persecution in Jerusalem along with many others after the lynching of Steven, arrived in Samaria and began preaching the gospel, and many were converted.  Word reached the apostles, still in Jerusalem, and they sent two of their own, Peter and John, who prayed that the Samaritan believers would receive the Holy Spirit.  Philip brought people to Christ, but it appears to have been Peter and John who started the church.

We see this also in the ministry of Paul, who said that he wanted to preach only where the gospel had not yet been heard, who told the Corinthian church, which he founded, that they were proof of his apostleship.  He was an apostle, that is, translated more precisely, an emissary or envoy or representative, whose job it was to found churches, to bring the gospel to people who had not heard it and get them organized into gatherings (ekklesia, which we often render “churches” but which generally refers to groups of people assembling based on some commonality that distinguishes them from the general population) through which they could grow–and then move elsewhere.

But then, aren’t apostles infallible speakers on behalf of God?  Isn’t that why we respect everything they say?  No, and not exactly.

In Galatians Paul tells of the occasion on which quite a few leaders from the Jerusalem church visited the church in Syrian Antioch.  The Jerusalem church, being in the heart of Judea, was almost entirely Jewish believers; the Antioch church, being in a gentile country, was much more integrated.  Jewish and gentile believers sat together at meals.  (This did not mean they ate the same food; Jewish Christians in the first century were clearly still observing kosher diets, while accepting that gentile Christians were not obliged to do so.)  When Peter arrived, he saw that this was the way it ought to be, and joined the party.  However, when James (probably “the brother of the Lord”) arrived, he created a “Jews Only” table around himself, and gradually all the Jews in the Antioch church–including Barnabas and Peter–were separating themselves from the gentiles during meals.  Paul publicly rebuked them:  they were wrong, they were sending the wrong message, they had bought the lie.  Jews might eat different food than gentiles, but all were equally embraced in the family of God and called to embrace each other as equals.  That was the important point in Galatians–but the important point for us is that Peter and Barnabas, both called apostles, were wrong.

The authority of an apostle derives from the fact that he is the person who brought the message and founded the church, and it’s his responsibility to get it organized and see that it thrives.  We have apostles today–most of them we call missionaries in places where there are no churches, working to bring people to Christ and join believers in organized mutual support groups.  The apostle tells people what to do to make that work, and ultimately to make himself obsolete.  The New Testament apostles in a very real sense founded all the churches, and so what they wrote has authority in part because they are the founders of our churches, and they told us the best ways to do things to make them work.

The writings of the apostles have another basis for being authoritative, in that they are “scripture”, that is, we believe God was behind those writings specifically giving us His directions for how we should live and work together.  Note that Mark, Luke, James, and Jude are never said to be apostles in the New Testament, and we do not know who wrote Hebrews, but we do not consider their books any less authoritative than those written by Matthew, John, Paul, or Peter.  They are the divinely-preserved record of our founding principles, and as such are the written basis for all we are.

The apostles of today are on the front lines of ministry, some of them in places like former Iron Curtain countries where faith had been obliterated, some in Islamic countries where a confession of faith can mean death, some in primitive regions where the message has barely penetrated.  They work with people who need to have the gospel, but who need more than that, help and direction in building a community of believers who can work together.

That is not to say that there are no apostles in modern civilized western countries.  Faith has been fading in many of these, and there are mission fields in the cities and the countrysides, places where no one is proclaiming the message of grace and peace.  God sends people into these places to bring hope, to save the lost and unite the dispersed, to build churches not so much as buildings but as gatherings.  These are the first people to minister to a local church, because these are the people who create that church and set it on the path toward unity and love and service.

The apostle’s response to the needs he encounters can vary greatly.  He will of course use whatever gifts he has to meet needs directly, but his greater interest is in creating a community of believers who can meet each other’s needs.  One person’s need within the community is an opportunity for another person to meet that need, and the apostle seeks to make that happen, to make himself obsolete as the community learns to minister within itself.

There is a degree to which the apostolic ministry uses music in the greatest variety of ways, because the apostle has the broadest ministry objectives.  He needs to evangelize like the evangelist, but also shepherd like the pastor and instruct like the teacher, at least until he can find persons in those congregations who are called to those ministries.  Then, once the church is established, he goes somewhere else and starts the process anew.  His job is not to be the ruler in the church, but to be its first servant, and see to it that others are moved into positions of service that allow him to leave.  If Paul is our best example, the apostle will return from time to time to help with any problems, and sometimes stay for a while to support the ministry efforts in one place or another, but the job is to start the church and then get it to a place where it runs itself without him.

So apostles are vitally important to the existence of churches, but they aren’t special in any other sense, and we need them and should recognize them–and particularly if you have that calling, you should understand what it is you are doing.  If indeed you are called to found a church, you probably are not called to stay there long, but to leave it in the capable hands of other ministries while you go found another.  There is no long-term job security for an apostle, one of the reasons Paul and Barnabas did not bring along wives.

Next on the list is the prophet.

Next in the series: Prophetic Music Ministry

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #98, on the subject of What Is a Minister?

We have been talking about being “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment, #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, made the point that although all Christians are called to minister and do all things to the glory of God, and all Christian musicians are to use their gifts for God’s glory, most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”.  A large part of that proved to be that you simply and quite unintentionally acted like a particular kind of minister, and thus to know whether you are a “minister” you need to know something about what motivates those who are, and what they do quite naturally.

Immediately we hit a problem:  It does not appear that the New Testament uses the words “minister” or “ministry” in quite the, shall we say, technical way we do.  Everyone in the church has a “ministry”.  It is perfectly proper to speak of as ministers those whose ministry involves making the coffee for the break, or driving the shut-ins to services.  Where the words are used, they mean “servants” or “servers” or “services” or “serving”, what it is that we do to help others.  In that sense everyone is a minister, and everyone has some kind of calling.  Indeed, our musical “entertainers” can reasonably be said to have “ministries” of entertaining and encouraging and enlightening us with their music.  Yet there are some who are distinguished in what we might think leadership positions, people we call “ministers” because they in some sense stand apart from those we sometimes call “laymen”.  Sometimes we distinguish it by what we call “ordination” or “being ordained”, but we also give “licenses” to preach and other forms of recognition to various ministries, and in some churches and denominations it is much less formal but still structured, that some people are seen to be the pastors or leaders of the church who do the ministering and others the congregants who benefit from it.  The New Testament does not give us a word for this beyond saying that these people are “gifts given to men”.

This is not entirely foreign to the New Testament, though.  We previously noted that in Ephesians 4:11 Paul identifies five types of people who are given as gifts to the church, by the designations apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher.  These are apparently distinct, serving specific but related functions and purposes within the body of Christ.  No one is called to be “a minister”; rather, an individual is called to be one of these–an apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, or teacher.  There is precedent in the New Testament to support the notion that an individual can be more than one of these, but these are the five categories we mean when we speak of “ministers” being “called”.

Again to be clear, these are not the only people who have what we might call “positions” of “service” or “responsibility” within the church.  The New Testament also mentions “episkopos” which we usually render “overseers” or sometimes “bishops” (which is from the Latin for overseers); “presbuteros” which means “elders” but is sometimes transliterated to “presbyters”; “diakonos” which technically means “waiters” as in the people who serve food at meals but is often generalized to “servants” or transliterated to “deacons”.  However, we are told that it is good to aspire to these offices and given requirements for them, which makes no sense if we’re talking about who you were born to be.  There are people with gifts of healings, gifts of administration, and many other kinds of gifts, but there is at least the suggestion that you can pray for gifts you believe would be useful (specifically interpretation if you speak in tongues), and that gifts come at some point during your life, so again this is not who you were born to be.  These five, though, are identified here not as jobs people assume or gifts they have received, but as five kinds of people who have been given, and with the purpose stated as (quoting from the Webster Bible) “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.”  These seem to be the people who do what we might call the “spiritual” work, whose job it is to build the church into what we, individually and collectively, are intended to be.

Interestingly, the list appears to be built as a stack of contrasts.  It uses a Greek grammatical form known as a “men…de” construction, typically read “on the one hand…on the other hand”, although in this case there are several hands, on the one hand the apostles, on the other hand the prophets, on the other hand the evangelists, on the other hand the pastors and teachers, and so the list seems to be in some kind of order.  Because of our reverence for apostles and prophets, we often make it a hierarchical order of authority:  the infallible apostles are in charge, followed by the divinely-inspired prophets, and then the others–but we don’t really like putting evangelists above pastors, and many of us assert that there are no longer any apostles or prophets in the church today.  Those conclusions are probably all mistaken.  I believe that when we understand what these ministries are we will also understand that they are listed in the sequential order in which they are needed in a local church.

Some argue that there are not five items on this list but only four, the fourth being properly understood something like “pastor-teachers”.  My own experience and observation suggests that there are some excellent pastors who are not very good teachers, and some good teachers (among whom I might number myself) who are not pastors.  That, though, is too empirical for the basis of an exegetical conclusion.  Rather, I observe that although there are several persons in the New Testament who are specifically identified (by name) as teachers–most prominent among them Paul–only one is specifically identified as a pastor, Peter, who is never identified as a teacher, and obviously none of the teachers are identified as pastors.  That is either a remarkable coincidence or an indication that the two words identify distinct ministries within the church, and the latter explanation fits the empirical observation.  Thus it would seem that if you are called to ministry in that sense, you are probably called to one of these five ministries, and it is important to understand which one you are.

Again, this applies even if you are called to music ministry.  An evangelistic music ministry is going to look very different from a pastoral one, because in the one case the music is being integrated into a primarily evangelistic outreach ministry while in the other it is connected to pastoral care and shepherding.

It would be overmuch for this one post to tackle all five of the named ministries, so we will stop here and begin at the top of the list next time.

Next in series: Music Ministry of an Apostle

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #97, on the subject of Ministry Calling.

We began this series with post #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect.  My reasons for writing and my credentials are in that article.  We finished with the observations that

1. All Christians are to do all things to the glory of God and minister as they are able;
2. All Christian musicians should glorify God in their music;
3. Only some are called to be what we call “ministers”; most are “entertainers”.

Our continuation in this article is really about that aspect of being “called” into “ministry”, what that means, and how to recognize it.

There is a sense in which the two aspects–being a musician and being a minister–might be linked, but there is another sense in which the question of being called is entirely separate from the question of being a musician.  That means I am, perhaps rather hazardously, embarking on asking the question of how to know whether you are called to be “a minister” of some sort.  I do not want anyone to suppose that I am questioning or challenging the calling of some minister–I make it a rule not to do that, and to remember that God deals with us as individuals, giving us individual tasks through individualized guidance.  If you are a minister, I presume you know that you are called, and this should not in any way be taken as suggesting otherwise.  This is intended to help people who don’t know whether they are called or not.

I should also repeat that musicians who are not “called” to ministry are not thereby excluded from using their musical gifts within the church.  When Paul told the Corinthians that some attending their gatherings would have “a psalm” (I Corinthians 14:26)–a Greek word for a type of song–he appears to have meant that ordinary members of the congregation would be encouraged to share songs with the group.  The fact (if it is a fact) that you have no calling to ministry does not prevent you from singing in the choir or playing in the worship band or sharing a song sometimes.  It means something entirely different.

When we think about New Testament examples of someone being called to ministry, Paul’s Damascus Road encounter often comes to mind.  Jesus appeared to Paul and told him he was fighting against the truth, and thereafter Paul repented and became an apostle to the gentiles.  We conclude that this is when and how and where Paul was called to be an apostle.

And we are wrong.

Paul himself tells us in Galatians 1:15 that God called him to this ministry before he was born.  He was called to be an apostle before he was breathing, and certainly before he was a believer.  The entire time he was persecuting the Christians, he was already called to be one of our most prominent apostles.  He received extensive seminary training–they would have called it rabbinical training, from Rabban Gamaliel I, the only person cited in both the New Testament and the Talmud–long after he was called, and before he was a believer.  A calling is with you from before birth.  It’s only a matter of when you realize it and understand it–and that might take some time.

This, though, fits with what Paul says in Ephesians 4:11ff.  We misread that quite often.  We think it says that Jesus gave some the gift of being a pastor or an evangelist or one of the other ministries, but it does not say that.  It says that Jesus gave the church gifts in the form of people who are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.  I once heard Evangelist Tom Skinner say that if he were not an evangelist he would be an excellent used car salesman, because he had the “gift of gab”.  That’s a glib way of putting it, but it makes the point:  if you are called to be a minister, you already are that minister, you were born that minister, and you cannot help being that minister.

One of my friends went through a very bad time in his life.  He had been in Bible college preparing for the pastorate, and working full time to support his family, and it all became too much so he ran away with a younger girl and got a job as a custodian in a bar.  While he was there, people brought their problems to him, and he gave them solid biblical advice–because he was a pastor, even when his life crashed, and he couldn’t help being a pastor.  If you’re called, you are probably already doing the things that fit your calling–you just haven’t recognized it.

This also tells us that you don’t become a minister by developing specific skills or getting special training.  We are told that Paul was, in addition to being an apostle, also a teacher.  He was presumably also a teacher before he was born, before he had that extensive training in scripture.  God didn’t call him because he had been to college; he sent him to college because he had called him.  My degrees in Biblical Studies aid my teaching significantly, but they are neither the reason I am a teacher nor the qualification for my calling.  Observation suggests that a calling to ministry is seen in personality and motivation:  what you find yourself doing, and why you do it.  If you are frequently acting like a pastor or teacher or other kind of minister, there is a very good likelihood that you are such a person, such a minister, born that way and possibly unaware of it.  I was constantly learning and teaching before it ever occurred to me that I might be called to teach; it was just something I naturally did because of who and what I am.  You probably can’t completely avoid being whatever it is God called you to be–as Paul said, “woe is me if I do not preach the gospel.”

The other half of it, though, is that other people are going to recognize this in you.  People with needs that fit your calling will come to you, whether it’s for understanding or guidance or something else.  Other people in ministry will recognize your place, and some will try to help you move into it.  There are two issues here, though, and they both concern what we should call confirmation.  The short form is that God is not going to send someone else–not even a prophet–to tell you something He hasn’t already been telling you directly.

The one side of that is that you should not permit yourself to be pushed into a ministry that does not fit you by someone who thinks you have a calling you honestly do not believe you have.  This goes back to my experience with The Last Psalm and my observations of many other Christian bands of the time:  a lot of us trying to do evangelism were not evangelists.  I remember when one of our members left the band, he said to me that it was his impression that we had a tremendous amount of impact on the members of the band, but nothing of note on the audiences.  That was undoubtedly because he was a pastor and I was a teacher, and we were the ministry front of a band that was desperately trying to fit the mold of an evangelist without having a clue how to do that beyond copying what others did.  People will attempt to fit you into their expectations, their molds; but even if you are called God does not use molds but individually crafted vessels.  If you really are not called, if God is not trying to tell you that you are a minister, He is not going to tell someone else what He has not told you.

The other side is that we can be notoriously poor listeners.  I was completely obtuse.  The fact was that I was on the radio six nights per week opening the Bible between songs and sharing what I had learned of what the scripture taught with some unknown number of listeners, many of whom made a point of joining me at that time for that sharing, but it had not occurred to me that I was a teacher; I only knew that I was not a pastor and was looking for my place in “music ministry” which I still assumed meant evangelistic outreach.  It was not until someone I knew as a man of God introduced me to a complete stranger who was said to be a prophet, and in his prayer he noted that I was a teacher, that I realized it–and at that moment I saw that he was right.  (That happened to me again decades later, that another prophet in another place recognized the same fact about me.)  You might not get word from a prophet–you might be more aware than I was of what God is saying to you–but you will find that others recognize and acknowledge your ministry.  If others seem to think you have a calling of which you are not aware, take some time prayerfully to consider whether they might be right, whether God has been nagging you about this and you have been ignoring Him.  It is easy to miss, either because we are too modest to imagine that God might have made us for something special (which is silly, because He made everyone for something special, it’s just that your special purpose has a name and function within the body of Christ), or because we are unwilling to follow the path God has for us if it does not lead where we wanted to go (which is again foolish, since that’s the only place we will ever be content).

So what has this to do with being in “music ministry”?  In a sense there is no such thing.  There is music, and it can be a tool used in ministry.  Being a musician is about skill sets and ways of processing information, talent and practice.  Being a minister is about who you are more fundamentally, about something that consumes your life, becomes the very definition of who you are and what you do, how you relate to others and to yourself.  When I say that I am a musician, I mean only that I have musical abilities that I use in various ways; certainly if something happened that prevented me from using music, I would miss it, but I would still be who I am.  When I say that I am a teacher, I mean something much more basic, that this is who I am, what I do, that if you chat with me in the kitchen while I’m washing dishes it’s very likely that I will start teaching you about something, whether it’s the basics of relativity or the concepts of Lord of the Rings or the fundamentals of law and grace.  It’s who I am.  It becomes “music ministry” when I figure out how to integrate my musical abilities into that calling, how to use music as part of the teaching.  It is the same for all the ministries:  ministers are people with specific tasks for the building of the body of Christ; some learn to use music as part of the pursuit of those objectives.  The same can be said of visual artists, dramatic artists, and indeed of computer programmers and game designers and basket weavers and taxi drivers, that those with a calling integrate their skills and talents into that calling.

A music ministry, then, is simply a ministry that has integrated music into the process.

A calling, meanwhile, is a fundamental aspect of who you were born to be which unfolds and is discovered by you and others during your life, as you grow into the place for which God made you.

We’ll talk more about ministries in future articles.

Next article in the series: What Is a Minister?