Music: As Accessible As Tap Water

Music can be heard in virtually every public place, as well as in your own little universe via the iPod. But rather than passively absorb our surroundings, we ought to intelligently engage our culture. Like the well-worn passage in Acts 17 that tells the story about the Apostle Paul in Athens, we ought to mine the culture intelligently and use what we can for the sake of faithful gospel communication.

Going Beyond Consumer Guide-ism

Reviews may be helpful—occasionally. But single paragraph synopses rarely do justice to music. Besides, the world doesn’t need more cheap consumer guide-ism, and I’d like to encourage Christians to engage more deeply. With that said, I’m not going to recommend “must hear” CDs (my tastes are suspect anyway!), but hopefully I can offer a starting point to what I think thoughtful engagement of popular music might look like.

Learning to Listen Well

• All music is “worship music”

We are all worshippers all the time; it’s not an issue of if we will worship, but who and or what we will worship, and music is ripe with worship / idolatry language.

• Christians should discerningly engage “secular” content.

We shouldn’t passively absorb music anymore than we should necessarily allow a “parental advisory” sticker to be our guide for listening appropriateness.

• Develop culturally generous listening habits

Worshippers from all cultures of the globe will be represented in the new Jerusalem, so we ought to be good students and appreciators of those cultures. In the coming articles, I’ll unpack each one of these bullet points in more detail.