Praise & Worship

“Praise & Worship” Music

It’s that time of the day when you know you should go to the gym. But after a long day at work, you really don’t feel like it. But still, you know going would be good for you. So you slip on the head phones, and put on “Till I Collapse” by Eminem to help get you off the couch, into the gym, and motivated to work out. This is a pretty common experience, especially for the youth. What is it about that Eminem song that pumps us up, or any song that we classify as “motivational music”? Just open Pandora and add the “Workout Radio” and I will guarantee that Mozart or Beethoven will not play on that station. That is because classical music does not give us that “pumped up” feeling. Clearly then, different melodies cause different emotions to be felt. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Music is an art that can express all sorts of realities in life, including the type of things we go through personally. This also applies to the way we worship God. While there are certain melodies that can help play a role in directing our mind and soul to God during worship, there are, however, melodies and a certain genre of songs that can do the opposite by deceiving us with sentimentality and feelings of pleasure as form of worship.

There are a large number of Catholics that listen to a certain genre of music known as “Christian Music”, “Contemporary Church Music” or more commonly “Praise & Worship” (P&W). This type of music is created and typically led by lay people who are known as “worship leaders”, “worship bands” or something similar. Not coincidently, this type of music contains the melodies that seek and cause emotional experiences, usually sentimental or “feel-good” experiences. The genre is well known to be very similar to pop music. This “new” genre of music, if you can even say “new”, since it is just stolen from the world with a “Christian” label on it, is wrongfully believed to be true praise and true worship of God....