“Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.”
Colossians 3:16 (NIV)
I had to drop a song from a rotation about three years ago because I realized I didn’t believe it anymore.
That’s a weird sentence to write. The song wasn’t heretical. The song wasn’t bad. It was a song lots of churches were singing that year. I had programmed it twice a month for nine months. We led it well. The team had it nailed. The congregation sang it back loudly.
I just woke up one Tuesday and noticed I couldn’t sing the bridge of that song honestly anymore. Something in it had stopped being true for me. And once I noticed it had stopped being true for me, I had to ask whether I should be putting it in front of a room of two hundred people on a Sunday.
I dropped it. I didn’t tell the team why. I just rotated it out and put something else in.
I want to talk about what your set list is doing to you. Because if the Colossians verse is right, and I think it is, then what you sing is what you come to believe.
We come to believe what we sing
Paul writes to the Colossians and says, let the message of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
The verb is teach and admonish. The songs are teaching you something. They are admonishing one another. They are doing theology in your body before they do theology in your head.
That’s the load-bearing claim. The songs you sing on Sunday are catechizing you and your congregation, week by week, into a particular shape of belief about God, about yourself, about the gospel.
You knew this already in the abstract. Worship is theological. Sure. Fine. We’ve all heard that one. But here is the version of it that I keep getting hit by.
You are also being catechized by the songs you pick. You are the one with the keys to Planning Center. You are the one approving the rotation. You are the one programming what the congregation will sing eight times in the next three months. So whatever the songs are teaching the congregation, they are also teaching you.
What is your rotation teaching you?
A test you can run
Pull up the last 12 weeks of services. Look at the song list. Each song probably appeared one to four times in those 12 weeks.
For each song, ask three questions.
First, what is this song’s central claim about God? Not its tone. Not its style. Its central claim. What does it say is true of God?
Second, what is this song’s central claim about me? About the person singing it? What does it teach me to believe about my own status, my own posture, my own relationship to God?
Third, what does it teach me to do? Not in a moralistic way. In a formation way. What posture does it form me into?
Do this for the eight to twelve songs in your high-rotation. Write down the answers.
Then read what you wrote like an outsider. Someone who has never sung these songs. Someone who has no investment in your church’s worship culture. What is this stack of songs forming?
A few weeks ago I ran this exercise on my own rotation. And what surprised me was how much of my rotation had drifted toward what you might call triumph-posture songs. Big choruses. Big claims. Big bridges. We’re going to break every chain. We’re going to see the victory. The mountains will move. The songs were not wrong. They were just heavy on one note.
What I had less of, which I needed more of, were songs of lament and songs of quiet trust and songs of honest before God in the dark. The Psalms have all of those. My rotation did not have them in the same proportion the Psalter does.
I noticed that and started rebalancing. Slowly. Not all at once. But I started picking songs that taught my congregation (and me) how to sit with God when nothing is fixed yet.
Why this matters for the worship leader specifically
Here is the part I want you to feel.
If you are leading worship every Sunday and the rotation you’ve built is teaching the congregation a particular shape of belief, then you are also being formed by that rotation. You sing those songs more than anyone in your building. You hear them in rehearsal Wednesday. You hear them in the band rehearsal Saturday. You hear them in the run-through Sunday morning. You hear them in the service. You hear them coming through the in-ears as you sing them yourself.
That’s a lot of repetition. Hundreds of repetitions per song per year. The Colossians verse is talking about exactly this kind of repetition. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly. The richness is in the repetition. The dwelling is what repetition does.
The question is, what is dwelling in you?
If your rotation is heavy on triumph-posture songs, your interior life is being formed to believe that the Christian life is mostly about overcoming. If your rotation is heavy on confessional-vulnerability songs, your interior life is being formed to believe that the Christian life is mostly about brokenness-named. If your rotation is heavy on God-the-King songs, your interior life is being formed to believe that the Christian life is mostly about majesty. None of those is wrong. All three need to be present. The Psalter has all three.
The drift happens when one note crowds out the others. The drift is slow. You don’t notice it. But after 18 months of singing only triumph-posture songs, you find yourself unable to be honest with God about your own discouragement, because the only theology you’ve sung is one that does not have room for your discouragement.
What to do
The work this week is small. You are not blowing up your rotation. You are auditing it.
Pull the last twelve weeks. Run the three questions. Find the note your rotation is weakest on. Then add two songs to your reservoir over the next 90 days that strengthen the missing note.
If you are heavy on triumph, find two songs of lament or honest-before-God-in-the-dark. The Porter’s Gate has a catalog. Sandra McCracken has a catalog. The CityAlight team writes from the Psalms regularly. There is no shortage of well-crafted, theologically careful songs that fill the lament and quiet-trust notes.
If you are heavy on lament, find two songs that name God’s majesty and his sovereignty without flinching. Both notes need to be in the rotation. A congregation that only laments has half a gospel. So does a congregation that only triumphs.
If you are heavy on first-person-singular I-language songs, find two songs that the whole congregation can sing as we. If you are heavy on we-language, find two songs of personal confession.
Three months of rebalancing will shift the formation of your congregation and your own interior life more than any single new song you add for its musical hook.
A question for the week
Look at the songs you’ve sung in the last 12 weeks. Ask yourself, what is this rotation forming me into?
Then ask, is that the formation I’d choose, if I were choosing it on purpose?
The Colossians verse says we come to believe what we sing. You are the gatekeeper for what your congregation sings, which means you are also the gatekeeper for what dwells richly in you.
Pick on purpose.
Ryan
Going deeper: when you run the audit, the tool I built for it is Worship Song Index.
This devotional is part of The Church Collective’s free 52-week worship team devotional series. Get the first 12 as a free PDF and a fresh devotional in your inbox every Monday morning.
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