Introduction

Music matters in the life of a church. The kinds of music we employ in our corporate worship, as well as the seriousness with which we take our music, speaks volumes about who we are and what we are about.

In the context of the worshipping life of the Church, music has the potential to communicate the exciting truths of the Christian faith to our lives in a way that reaches deeply into the hearts of who we are. Music reaches our wills through our emotions, and can open us up to incredible, life-changing experiences. As one of the finest musicians in the church today, Richard Webster, has written,

"Hymns lift us out of ourselves and into a place where the presence of God is truly felt, a transcendence that leads to transformation."

"… a transcendence that leads to transformation." One hardly needs to point out that that is precisely the business of the church. And if a church’s music can serve the church’s mission in such a direct way, then the church can be a potent force in the world, calling God’s people, many of whom have fallen away, back into a transforming relationship with him.

One of the greatest impediments to this, I believe, is that our culture calls us to look low. As the effects of secularism have compounded, the result has been that we have lost any sense of the real measure of transcendence required to experience a real change of life. Not the sort of life changes that occur when one redoubles the effort to lose weight, say, or when in January we resolve to spend more time with our children. I am thinking of the kind of transformation that St Paul wrote about when he claimed that we could be made new, our whole lives changed more and more into the image of Christ.

A prerequisite for that sort of transformation is an awareness of and a connection with the transcendent, and that is what good music can cultivate.

Music which serves the mission of the church. Transcendent music. Music which has the power to change our lives; that is what we are about at St Mark’s Church, Glen Ellyn.