On Singing, with John Piper (Pastors Talk, Ep. 216)
How should we sing in church? On this episode of Pastors Talk, John Piper joins Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever to discuss the importance of carefully considering the theological implications of the songs we sing in church. The conversation studies God’s purpose for music and emotional effects as well as how much room you should give for individual expression of worship during your service. They establish the marks of a good worship leader and emphasize the effects of instrumental accompaniments.
- Songs Composed by Those With Differing Doctrinal Beliefs
- What is the Goal of Music in the Church?
- Individual Expression in Worship
- Worship Leaders and Accompaniments
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
This is Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
This is Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
Welcome to this episode of 9Marks Pastors Talk.
Mark Dever:
Where I will be trying not to slur my words.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why do you say that?
Mark Dever:
If you listened to the first one of these interviews, you wouldn’t know. Just keep going.
Jonathan Leeman:
9Marks exists to help pastors build healthy churches learn more at 9marks.org. The first one of these was with our special guest…
Mark Dever:
John Piper.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right. In which he offered helpful feedback.
Mark Dever:
John was talking with us about preaching.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
You and I talked about if we’ve got John here for a couple of interviews, what would be interesting for pastors. And I just reflected like if you’re on vacation and you go to church, there’s an hour-long service, likely the first 30 minutes is going to be singing and the second 30 minutes is going to be a sermon. That’s just standard, it seems like in American evangelical churches.
Jonathan Leeman:
We would want to contest a little bit because, hey, you should be spending more time praying.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, there are a number of things we’d contest. We’d like to read the Bible.
Should Research Assistants Help Prepare Sermons?
Jonathan Leeman:
But I think you’re right. A lot of it is going to be on those two things. One thing I meant to ask you, John, in that conversation about preaching, and I’m just throwing this one in here, this is, I feel like a non-sequitur, what do you think of research assistants helping you prepare for a sermon? And then I’m going to take a sharp turn over to music.
John Piper:
Yeah, yeah, I have no principally opposition to it. I never did it. I didn’t know how to do it. And the way I prepare, it’s all so immediate and so textually based, I wouldn’t know what to do.
I wonder if it doesn’t lead possibly to bringing in extraneous things that might not be immediately helpful because they’re not going to be right there in the text for you to see. He’s going to have to find it in some other book, buried away in some library that you wouldn’t have found.
And then what good is that going to be if the people can’t see it in the text? Yeah. Did you have any reflections?
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I’ll often have one or two brothers here in the room looking at commentaries and they’re, they’re just conversation partners with me through the day about, as I’m looking at the text about, do you think the point here is this or what about the, it’s just, I’m just bouncing back and with them.
Jonathan Leeman:
But you’re unique in preparing a sermon with other people around, true? That’s my sense. You’re not with others.
John Piper:
I couldn’t begin to do that. I must be alone.
Jonathan Leeman:
So there’s a way to use them?
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Well, perhaps. I yeah. I don’t think you have to have them, but I think it’s useful. And I feel like at the same time, they’re being encouraged in the word, so there’s some discipling going on in that.
What Makes a Hymn Favorable?
Jonathan Leeman:
No doubt. Okay, sharp turn here back to music, as I promised. What’s your favorite hymn?
John Piper:
Well, right now maybe “He Will Hold Me Fast”. But before these beautiful new hymns came along, I would have said probably, “If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee”.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is there a beloved hymn that’s overrated?
John Piper:
“He Walks In the Garden Alone”.
Jonathan Leeman:
I don’t know that one.
Mark Dever:
In the garden, yeah.
John Piper:
You don’t know that song? You are a kid.
Mark Dever:
That’s because we have not done it since I’ve been the pastor here and he grew up in this church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, that’s not fair.
Mark Dever:
You’re welcome.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s not fair.
Mark Dever:
You’re welcome. Come on now.
John Piper:
However, I’ve heard that hymn mocked so much, that I almost want to defend it.
Mark Dever:
Wow, you just sucker-punched me there. I just walked right into that one.
Jonathan Leeman:
We can do that on another day. John, you write poetry. Does that mean you also write hymns?
John Piper:
I’ve tried.
Jonathan Leeman:
Have any of those been sung at Bethlehem Baptist?
John Piper:
Yeah, yeah, we’ve sung half a dozen.
Mark Dever:
Are they continuing to sing them?
John Piper:
No, that was in the early 80s. It passed. I know it. I’m not sure what it takes to, I mean, I have sung songs written by people at Desiring God that I think are really good.
The words are good? The words are good and the tune is good.
Jonathan Leeman:
Did you do the tunes?
John Piper:
No. I always sing them to some known tune. The ones I write. And they don’t go anywhere. For a song, it seems to go somewhere, it has to not only be a really good tune and really good lyrics, or you hope so, but a really good marketer for a song to catch on to.
Jonathan Leeman:
But fair to say, that you have a higher estimation of your hymns than other people do. Is that what I heard?
John Piper:
Of my own?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Is that what you just said?
John Piper:
No, that’s not what I just said. Cause I don’t, I don’t think.
Jonathan Leeman:
You don’t, you’re not saying you’ve been surprised that your hymns haven’t gone further. You’re just saying other ones.
John Piper:
Oh yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay.
John Piper:
Yeah. I mean, as long as that…
Mark Dever:
I mean, Don Carson’s written hymns, Jim Boice wrote hymns. There are a lot of brothers around who’ve, you know, thought deeply and worked with the text.
How Many Hymns Should a Church Sing a Year?
John Piper:
What can you say? I mean, how many hymns would your church sing in a year? Different ones.
Mark Dever:
We’re highly unusual for a church. I mean, maybe 300.
John Piper:
Okay. How many hymns are there? I mean, Wesley wrote 6,000. Count everybody else, what? 500,000, a million? So you don’t sing hardly any.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Relative to that, no, that’s true.
John Piper:
And so it’s not surprising to me that there are a lot of really, really great hymns that are not sung. They’re all buried away.
What is the Mark of a Good Hymn?
Jonathan Leeman:
What’s the mark of a really, really great hymn? Or let’s just say a good hymn. What’s the mark of a good hymn?
John Piper:
Stability would be the musical part. And by stability, I don’t just mean that it doesn’t go so high the men can’t sing it or so low the women can’t sing it and that it’s jerky and you can’t tell what’s coming next.
I mean, also that it has some beauty to it that makes it memorable. You’ll hum it during the week. So that’s the artistic side that makes it good. And then solid lyrics that actually work poetically and theologically.
Unbelievable number of songs today that don’t work poetically. If you read them without the music, they’re bad. They’re bad poetry. And that’s sad to me.
I just think we can do better. I find myself singing songs and it’s a close rhyme at the end and not a real rhyme.
And I say, just a little half hour more work and you could have done that. You could have done that.
Songs Composed by Those With Differing Doctrinal Beliefs
Jonathan Leeman:
Assuming the words are good, both in terms of content, but also lyrically, should a church sing songs written by Bethel, Hillsong, Roman Catholics, people of left of faith, and Mormons? That was kind of a descending slope there.
John Piper:
My answer was changing with each.
Jonathan Leeman:
That was deliberate. Where would you put down the no?
John Piper:
Well, if you don’t know where they’re from, it’s okay. Like if the pastor doesn’t know and the people don’t know, it’s a wonderful truth and a wonderful tune. I don’t think it matters.
The more you know about an author, the more you know about its origins, and the more compromised it becomes to lock in with it. And so that’s the problem I would have with, say, contemporary Roman Catholic songs.
But goodness, we sing a lot of historic songs that go back to pre-Reformation, sung by Roman Catholics just like we sing them. So yeah, we’re going to sing songs of people that don’t hold the theology we do. So I’m going to measure sermons not primarily by where they come from, but what they say.
Jonathan Leeman:
Anything to add to that?
Mark Dever:
I agree with the kind of evaluation that he’s suggesting. And I think that the amount of different hymns that the average church sings in America anyway these days is tiny. It’s not very many.
There’ll be 15 or 20 hymns that they really ride on for six months, a year, two years. So we sing, I just distributed to you guys our bulletin for this coming Sunday morning and this coming Sunday evening.
So Sunday evening we’ve got six, Sunday morning we’ve got, I don’t know, 10. 3, 6, 7, 8, 9. So we’re just singing more. So this coming Sunday morning, we’ve got, “Behold Our God”, “Before the Throne of God Above”, “Nothing but the Blood”, “How Firm A Foundation”, “My Song Is Love Unknown”, “His Mercy Is More”, “A Sacred Head Now Wounded”, “My Worth Is Not In What I Own”, and “Arise My Soul Arise”.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s a lot.
Mark Dever:
It’s normal for our church.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, I know.
Mark Dever:
And then the evening, we’ve got, “See the Destined Day Arise”, “Rejoice the Lord Is King”, “Whatever My God Ordains Is Right”, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”, “Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal”, and “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms”.
Jonathan Leeman:
I mean, you have been swimming in deep theology by the time you’ve finished that.
Mark Dever:
Well, and a number of different styles. You’ve got traditional African American, you’ve got more sort of bluegrass Appalachian, you’ve got English, you’ve got German, you’ve got modern. Yeah, there are deliberately different streams that are there, but all I think very singable.
Can There Be Too Many Songs in a Service?
Jonathan Leeman:
How many songs are too many songs on a Sunday morning or weekly gathering?
Mark Dever:
I just want to say that’s not the problem I normally find when we’re visiting churches is not too many songs.
John Piper:
It’s too many if it starts to encroach upon the primacy of the word preached. It’s too many if the people are worn out and are not singing anymore. Those would be two criteria.
Mark Dever:
Those are good.
Should Churches Include a Variety of Styles?
Jonathan Leeman:
How much should a church try to include styles, and kinds of music that are more broadly representative of the way you just described, Mark, or to put kind of a fine point on it, should white, largely white churches try to sing black church music?
John Piper:
Well, not in an artificial black church way. What I’ve heard Capitol Hill do here has enough of the, whatever it is, cadence or form of traditional African-American sound that you can tell it’s there, but it sounds like this church, this white church singing it with all their might.
It doesn’t sound artificial. Whereas if you try to sing a spiritual with the certain kind of up and down and flow, that black church would sing it in, you’re going to sound ridiculous.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, but I would tell white pastors who are listening, don’t be intimidated by that. Go ahead and try to work to cross that divide as much as you can and try to build a common hymnody.
So we started doing “Where Shall I Be?” like, I don’t know, 10 years ago. Were we doing that before you left?
Jonathan Leeman:
I don’t, yes. Yes, yes, we were.
Mark Dever:
Started doing “Where Shall I Be?” and we had an older African-American member whose mom was in the early stages of dementia. So she was in her 90s and she started, our members are bringing her to church.
And when she heard us do “Where Shall I Be?”, she just lit up. She said she had not heard that in decades. It was the members’ dad’s favorite song.
And when I’ve been in a lot of contemporary African-American churches, it’s just like the white churches. Their music has become electronic. The traditional stuff is gone.
So actually here, you’re going to hear more songs like you would have heard in a black church in the 1960s than you will actually in some African-American churches around DC. Because we’re grabbing those hymnals and trying to use those singable songs.
The Goal of Music in the Church
Jonathan Leeman:
What’s your goal in doing that? Not just, say, older African-American music, but a broader range, generally. You mentioned German, you mentioned the 17th, 18th, and 20th centuries, so why?
Mark Dever:
The early stuff, you know, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”.
Jonathan Leeman:
Prudential.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
What’s the goal there?
Mark Dever:
Well, it’s kind of what John was saying about how many hymns are out there. There’s just so much good stuff out there. I just want to try to give the church edification from all these different streams as much as it’s not, I don’t want to be distracted by it.
You know, I don’t want to deliberately have a sort of musical rainbow coalition. It’s, you know, what you notice is just the variety, but I would like to be able to have the richness that different parts of our Christian family offered a reflect on the ages.
Yeah. I mean, we’re so Sunday night Lord willing, we’re going to see “Precious Lord” and that is just a sweet song to sing. You know, and it’s shaped in trials and it’s consoling. It’s excellent.
Music Awakens Our Affections for Him
John Piper:
My answer to the question of what are you trying to accomplish is to ponder what’s the point of music. I don’t mean lyrics. I mean music. Why did God invent it?
And I think one of the reasons is it does things to the emotions and the mind that words spoken don’t do. Different kinds of music do different kinds of things to the heart. Different music does different kinds of things to different people in the heart.
So you’ve got what I want to happen in singing is to awaken the affections of people for God and for his truth and music happens to be one of the vehicles and people are touched and moved by different kinds of music. And so one of the reasons for using the different forms is because different people are going to be responding in different ways.
Mark Dever:
Well, Luther talks about the Lord using melodies to sort of screw the words to our memories. They stick in our minds. As good at preaching as you’ve given us, John, there are probably going to be a lot of people quoting your sermons on their deathbeds, but they’re going to be quoting hymns.
Jonathan Leeman:
My Grandma did.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, they’re going to be things we’ve sung again and again that the Lord has used the means of those musical notes to associate the words in our memories.
John Piper:
Yep, absolutely.
Jonathan Leeman:
John, I appreciate your drawing on the point of emotions there, and I appreciate your challenge to me that it is to think, okay, not everyone’s gonna respond to the same things emotionally that I do. Nonetheless, one of the questions I had for you here is…
Mark Dever:
Wait, pause. So get that question in mind. While you’re saying that, if you’re gonna try to do different kinds of songs, not just going to have a very narrow band that typifies your church, but different kinds.
You will have to prepare if you’re the person who’s in charge of making this happen for hymn A or song B to be mocked by people in your church. And you just have to ignore that. And you have to know these 37% of the people are going to be helped.
So 15% of people who sing, just leave them alone. You keep helping 37% are going to be edified as you keep going.
That 37 will get to be 50 and it’ll get to be 60 and just keep going and just don’t worry about the naysayers because different songs are gonna be liked by different people. And if you do different kinds of songs, you’ll have different people who love it when you do this kind of song and they don’t like it when you do that kind of song.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, in helping the naysayers recognize part of being church minded is even if it’s not serving me right now, I know it’s serving my brother and sister, praise the Lord, I can go for that.
Mark Dever:
The old people wanna sing the choruses and the young people wanna sing the old hymns and that’s the kind of church we want. Yeah, sorry, back to your question.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, here’s my question and this is me being not church minded, this is me probably being Jonathan-focused. Especially in contemporary music-driven churches that I go into and I sit there and they’ll repeat a refrain over and over.
And there’ll be this heavy emphasis on emotion. And you’ve emphasized a moment, I remember you giving a sermon, the emotions are off the caboose, you know, you said at one point, or maybe it was said.
I find that often in those services, it’s like I’m being asked to be more emotional than I just am. It’s just like, stop, I can’t live at that emotional level. And I find that very distracting.
Any counsel for me on that? Is that a problem with the style of music in America or is the problem with me and I need to just die to myself?
John Piper:
It might be a little of both, I don’t know. I mean, it depends on the situation. The problem you define is real and ought not to exist, namely a working of the emotions with excessive repetition. Now repetition is as prevalent in our old hymns as it is in the new, and you can whip up a people in an old Southern Baptist, Barnesville, Georgia meeting as you can.
Mark Dever:
“In the Sweet By and By”.
John Piper:
Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say that’s a problem and it ought to be fixed partly by you, if you can submit to whether or not this is being really helpful to some people, but probably by the pastor or worship leaders by making sure that they have a fine sense of whether the repetition is serving the truth or simply serving the emotions.
Jonathan Leeman:
Because there can be a wrong exploitation of emotions or wrong provoking or wrong, I don’t know, trying to build something. Not on the words, but on the emotion.
John Piper:
Edward’s line that was modeled for me for 30 years was, I consider it my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided I raise them with nothing but the truth and emotions that are consistent with the truth. Now, I think that’s an overstatement and I don’t think he meant to exclude the effect of music, because he said nothing but the truth. I think truth is the key, the essence, but that truth empowered by music can have a booster effect on the truth.
Emotions and Physical Responses in Worship
Jonathan Leeman:
Speaking of emotions, you raise your hands in worship?
John Piper:
I do.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mark doesn’t.
John Piper:
Nobody at his church does.
Mark Dever:
That’s not true. But most people don’t.
John Piper:
I’ve been there for two Sundays and I can count on two fingers the number of people that raise their hands. I’m watching this. Okay.
Mark Dever:
You’re not watching very well, man. Just an observation. Yeah. Well, just from accuracy, if you look around, it’s going to be the folks in the back who tend to do it more. Yeah. Anyway.
John Piper:
One, there’s a black guy and there was a visiting lady from Texas.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I believe those are the people you saw.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is it a sin not to raise your hands?
John Piper:
No.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why do you raise your hands?
John Piper:
It feels appropriate.
Jonathan Leeman:
Unpack that slightly.
John Piper:
You come to a crescendo of “He Will Hold Me Fast”. He will hold me fast for my savior loves me. So he will hold me fast.
Mark Dever:
His hands are going up right now.
John Piper:
It’s just, it’s just, it’s what the body says is appropriate to do at an emotional moment like that. Now that’s maybe I learned that somewhere, but I mean, I’ll tell you a little story.
See, we were praying all night for the first time at Bethlehem in 1982, say, first all-night prayer meeting. And I’d never raised my hands in worship ever in 34 years and mocked people who did at Bethel College Chapel.
I’d be sitting next to a guy and he’d have his hands like this in his lap. Okay, I’m holding my hands up, palms up in my lap. And I’d be sitting over here saying, yeah, what’s the point of that? That’s my attitude at age 28, 29 years old, mature Christian that I was.
And in the middle of the night, like 3 a.m. in this prayer meeting, Bruce Leafblad is leading worship and doing a simple chorus, and I found my hands in the air unbidden. That was the beginning.
Jonathan Leeman:
And you never looked back?
John Piper:
No.
Jonathan Leeman:
I was interim pastor at First Baptist Grand Cayman before Thabiti was there. A church full of Caymanians and Jamaicans, and it was a lively, more lively service than what you I’ve experienced elsewhere.
There I am, interim pastor. I’m down in front. I’m pretty still. My hands are at my side.
The church is all around me swaying, right? I think it was okay. I was doing my thing. They were doing their thing.
John Piper:
It was okay.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think that was fine.
John Piper:
It was fine.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right?
John Piper:
Yeah. My wife has never raised her hand in worship that I know of. I can name pastors at Bethlehem who raise their hands every Sunday and a pastor who’s never raised his hand.
Yeah. I don’t press too hard on that. I just let it go. You know, I’ve never in the years that I was there, I don’t think I ever preached in a way that’s tried to make it a virtue.
Individual Expression in Worship
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, sure. How much room do you see for individual expression in corporate worship?
John Piper:
I don’t know what you’re referring to.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, one person wants to raise his hands, and one doesn’t. One wants to dance, one doesn’t. One wants to bring an instrument.
John Piper:
Speak in tongues.
Jonathan Leeman:
Speak in tongues. Sure. Well, one wants to run around the room. Right. One wants to sit, one wants to stand.
Can Individual Expression be Distracting?
John Piper:
Yeah. The criterion for all of those that I can think of is going to be, is it helpful for the vast majority of the people or are you in the way?
Are you distracting from what’s going on there? And so I’m going to really discourage dancing, running around, standing up by yourself when nobody else is standing, though that one is not necessarily very distracting.
We, for example, like Mark’s in his service now, the first three songs are called preliminary or preparation was probably looking for a seat. So they don’t stand up.
I’m sitting there thinking this is crazy. That’s my first time. This is crazy. These great and glorious songs and all these people are what are we doing here?
Jonathan Leeman:
People are walking in and trying to sit down.
John Piper:
Yeah, and I’m debating with Noel after the service. Is that helpful? Can they find their seats while we’re standing up?
So anyway, this is just, you know, strong opinion Piper coming out here and I was gonna make a point out of that. What was it? What were we? What were we saying?
Jonathan Leeman:
Individual expression was my question.
John Piper:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. At my church, that couldn’t happen, even if the leaders wanted to, because people would stand up. Period. They’d just stand up. They do that. Like, we sing during the offer…
Jonathan Leeman:
They’re not submissive to the people in front.
John Piper:
Well, they’re not getting any clear signals that it’s disobedient. So we have a song during the offertory sitting down. That song never ends with people sitting down.
And the song leader never says stand up. If it’s the kind of song, now there are songs that don’t get you up, they just put you to sleep. But if the song has any kind of rising crescendo that makes you feel like, how do you stay down during this?
Then somebody stands up and as soon as they do, 10 other people do and the whole place is up. So that kind of individual expression can be of the spirit. Now you might have a person who really takes control and tries to run the service from their pew, you’d need to talk to them.
Mark Dever:
1 Corinthians 14:26, let all things be done for building up. So when you talk about individual expression in a corporate service, I would say that the guide is always what will build up the church.
John Piper:
Right. That’s good.
Worship Leaders and Accompaniments
Jonathan Leeman:
What are the marks, you mentioned the song leader, what are the marks of a good song leader or bad song leader?
John Piper:
A good song leader does what he does in order to help the people sing with all their minds and all their hearts. And the less he has to intrude himself, the better to get that done.
A good worship leader is not talking so much. There’s a lot of talking at Mark’s church here between things. They explain things and we don’t do that. It flows for 30 minutes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is that distracting to you? Mark’s talking or the people talking?
John Piper:
I can get used to it because I understand what they’re doing. Everything’s intentional here pretty much. But it took me a long time to get this church to love, to linger in the presence of God, undistracted, vertically.
That was hard because most of them grew up in churches where they say, now let’s sing 39, stand up, smile on your face, that sort of thing. And before you do the next thing, now we’re going to pray.
And I want to say, we were just praying. We were just praying. We were singing our prayers. Why are you saying, let’s pray? It clearly says they’re not in tune with what’s going on here.
So now I just, I’m not the pastor for 10 years. So when I’m talking about when I was there, I wanted it to proceed as soon as that welcome was over. When you’ve looked at people right in the eye, we’re going vertical here as much as possible and we’re singing undistracted, connecting with God for the next 30 minutes or so.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mark, any comment on good or bad song leaders?
Mark Dever:
I think a good song leader is going to help the congregation engage with the words and the music and is going to make sure that they are singing better than they would be without that song leader being there.
John Piper:
A couple of other things. He’ll make sure that the instruments are not so loud that the people can’t hear themselves sing. I had some others in my mind and they just slipped my mind.
Jonathan Leeman:
You can throw them in, they come back to you. Real question. I know this is not Bethlehem Baptist or Capital Baptist or my Cheverly Baptist, but thoughts on fog machines, video screens, and that kind of stuff.
Mark Dever:
Do you understand fog machines and video screens to be similar?
Jonathan Leeman:
I understand them operating in a similar kind of church.
Are Hymnals Important?
Mark Dever:
Why isn’t a video screen like a hymnal?
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, let me put it this way. They are things that ordinary means of grace reform churches tend not to use. Maybe video screens more so, like showing sermon clips is what I mean by video.
Mark Dever:
Oh, but I mean like an overhead projector. You just put the music up there.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, no, no. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is we’re watching little video clips throughout the sermon. Throughout the service or the sermon.
John Piper:
That’s easy then. That’s easy. I’m glad you asked that question.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, that was a good clarification.
John Piper:
I cannot imagine why you’d use fog machines in order to be a God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated church. Okay. And number two –
Mark Dever:
To give somebody a feeling of mystery?
John Piper:
That’s artificial.
Mark Dever:
I agree.
John Piper:
That’s not the way to give people a sense of mystery.
Mark Dever:
I agree.
John Piper:
There are ways to give people a sense of mystery and if they get it from that, it’s probably not very mysterious.
Mark Dever:
Excellent. Take that church budget.
John Piper:
I can’t even believe this is a problem. I’ve only seen it at conferences, but I don’t get around. My beef with using anything video during preaching is that it tends to pull the plug on the power of preaching.
It tends to communicate the word is not powerful enough. I have to titillate your senses in order to either hold your attention or to get you to understand what I’m saying.
And so over time, I think, you can’t keep up what it takes to give this media-saturated culture enough powers of being titillated. And therefore, to even start it is going down an unhelpful path.
Mark Dever:
There’s an immediacy to sight that is just not there in the same way in the spoken word. And you can see that theologically in scripture, you know, what the climax is that we see God.
And when we try to do that with visual representations of things, I think we’re kind of short-circuiting the way this is meant to be the age of the ear. Faith comes by hearing, and we’re meant to work on what does involve us in some delayed gratification.
You know, there is a lack of immediacy in centering on the spoken word and even the sung word as opposed to literally seeing God and literally being in His presence the way we look forward to one day being.
John Piper:
A couple of things, moving away from movie clips and things like that. I’m going to discourage the young men at our church from using anything like what I do in Look at the Book, where you have a text. I would not put the text on the screen.
Mark Dever:
Which you did in your T4G address in 2022.
John Piper:
That’s a conference. There’s no Sunday morning worship.
Mark Dever:
Interesting.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why would you put the text on the screen?
John Piper:
I put it up there.
Mark Dever:
Was that David?
John Piper:
I don’t know.
Mark Dever:
Oh, it was David. Sorry.
Are Sermons Starting To Feel Like Lectures?
John Piper:
It’s not so much that having the text be read up there is a problem. It’s working with it in a lecture-like way. My argument is just simply that the more you do that creates the sense of a classroom and not a point of heralding and thus saith the Lord, the more you are diminishing what the Word can and should do in worship.
So I’m gonna discourage don’t for goodness sake, bring your laptop into the pulpit and put the lid up. You know if you’re gonna preach from an iPadb keep it flat because since you flopped that lid up and people see the big Apple up there, they know computer, computer, computer.
He’s following it on a computer. It goes through their minds as a technical thing
Mark Dever:
So John your tone is shaming those who would use a laptop in the pulpit.
John Piper:
Is that okay?
Mark Dever:
I don’t know. I’m just observing I mean you really feel strongly about this.
John Piper:
I don’t think they should do it. And I can name some people who do it. I’ve gone straight to them and said, that’s not helpful. If you’re going to use a technological thing, hide it.
Mark Dever:
And I should hide the notes of my sermon.
John Piper:
The less you can see of your notes, the better. But I’m talking about a laptop. But yeah, I mean, in front of the little thing, we’re talking about finding little things to improve. So guys who preach from a manuscript like me, why in the world do so many of them take the top page lift it up, and turn it over?
Jonathan Leeman:
Like a book.
John Piper:
And put it down. I know why. Instead of just shuffling underneath. Because in the next service or whatever, they’re going to be in the right order.
All you have to do is preach is just slide it aside. Nobody knows you do it.
Jonathan Leeman:
I had a preacher, lecturer, and professor of preaching. He taught me the same thing.
John Piper:
In other words, the principle is to get everything out of the way between the people’s eyes hearts, and minds and an encounter with the truth and the reality in the truth.
Jonathan Leeman:
Last question. And this is the sort of thing we often talk about when we talk about.
Mark Dever:
Have we talked about the, have we talked about the mere-ness of accompaniment yet?
Jonathan Leeman:
No, we haven’t. What would you like to say about the mere-ness?
Human Voices Should Be the Predominant Instrument
Mark Dever:
Accompaniment should be mere.
Jonathan Leeman:
Explain?
Mark Dever:
The human voice should be predominant.
Jonathan Leeman:
The most important instrument in the room.
Mark Dever:
The sacred harp.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Those don’t necessarily exclude each other.
Mark Dever:
I agree.
John Piper:
Meaning you can have several instruments and still have a mighty sound roaring out of the congregation.
Mark Dever:
Of course.
Jonathan Leeman:
But the goal is to facilitate that.
Mark Dever:
Exactly. There’s a point of whatever you do have, whether it’s acapella with no accompaniment or 50 instruments to support the human voice, enunciating the words and singing out.
John Piper:
Totally agree.
Jonathan Leeman:
Have you enjoyed this? You’ve been at CHBC.
John Piper:
Oh my, I love it. I love it. Yeah. In fact, I wish. So here’s the plus of putting the text on the screen. You can raise your hands.
Jonathan Leeman:
But the minus is you lose the tenor line, alto line, bass line, and getting to hear the congregation singing parts.
Mark Dever:
And all kinds of families take those home and use them in devotions.
John Piper:
Yeah, yeah. That’s beautiful… I gave up on that goal early on.
Jonathan Leeman:
Did you?
John Piper:
Yeah. Just thinking, I can’t read music. How am I going to teach my people to read music? We work with our limitations.
Jonathan Leeman:
Who selected music when you were a pastor? Did you select the songs?
John Piper:
I didn’t. I did in the first five years. I put everything in the service together.
Jonathan Leeman:
Who should select the music? Is there a should there? At least a matter of wisdom, not a matter…
Should The Worship Leader Be an Elder?
John Piper:
An elder. Should be an elder. Yeah. And I want my worship leader to be an elder. That was a criterion.
I don’t believe in mere song. You got a guitar, you got a good voice, you’re a song leader. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Jonathan Leeman:
And you were trying to connect the music to the sermon, presumably, the sermon song selection to the –
John Piper:
He was. We want it that way.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mark, any other territory in the whole world of music and song selection that we’ve not touched on?
Mark Dever:
Yes, I would encourage the pastor to take responsibility for the public services, for all of the teaching, and that includes the song teaching.
John Piper:
Taking responsibility might mean delegating to a responsible person.
Mark Dever:
Of course.
Jonathan Leeman:
You would say it probably should be an elder too, wouldn’t you? As a matter of wisdom, not as a matter of absolute necessity.
John Piper:
Yeah. A theologically astute person who’s in sync with you theologically and who has some artistic sense of what works.
Mark Dever:
That’s more important. Yes. I would put it more like that than being an elder.
Jonathan Leeman:
In the whole world of music and songs, anything we’ve not covered that you think is important to say.
Mark Dever:
A couple of things. I want to really emphasize pastors, if they want the scene to improve, get rid of or tone down their accompaniment. I think almost always…
John Piper:
Tone down what?
Mark Dever:
The accompaniment. Almost always the organ…
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s a really loud organ or a really loud guitar.
John Piper:
Right, Absolutely.
Mark Dever:
An electric bass or whatever. It’s just, I don’t have anything against any of the forms of instruments, the drum set, you know, the castanets, whatever they are. I mean, anything is okay, but if you’re going to be doing it loudly, it will overpower the human voice.
It’s not a great key, but nobody figures it out because everybody thinks the more noise we make, the more it’s praise to God. We quote a Psalm and we think, oh, this is great cacophony or great, you know, a symphony for God.
What’s not the people? We’re just going to be quiet. That’s right. So if you really want the people to sing out, it’s not like you have to do everything a cappella. You can. That’s what Calvin did.
That’s what Spurgeon did. That’s what centuries of Protestants did. But we don’t have to do what they did.
We can do, you know, our modern thing and have musicals played at the same time. But we have to realize how easily those sounds overwhelm the human voice.
John Piper:
And once they are toned down, oh, how helpful it is when the leader gets how you lead. In other words, he has to help the people on the first note. Wherever the notes break, he’s got to lead so that they have the courage to go in there with him.
If he slips into the note because he’s not sure where things start. Everybody’s going to be slipping and sliding all over the place.
Mark Dever:
Until eventually you get a congregation like ours who, you know, the poor leaders who don’t lead well enough, the congregation just marches right over them. I mean, the congregation will…
John Piper:
That didn’t come out of nowhere.
Mark Dever:
No, that took many years of the congregation just learning to sing as they sing. Yeah. Yeah.
John Piper:
And clearly they sing like a choir. They don’t need a strong leader. But that’s almost deceptive.
I mean, it is deceptive if people walk in there and say, oh, we can do that tomorrow. You won’t. Those people have to be helped and emboldened and especially the men have to be released.
One of my biggest beefs even now is that I’ll lean over to Noel and say, you know why the men aren’t singing? They can’t reach these notes. And I just want to say –
Mark Dever:
Hopefully, you’re not saying that here.
John Piper:
No, no. I just want to say to the music leader, that criteria number one after theological, is to keep it in the range of men to sing.
Mark Dever:
Well, that’s where parts help. The bass parts are always nice and low, and the tenor parts are. I mean, when I was at a large church, I liked the pastor, I liked the theology, I liked the preaching.
The music, in the first half, was exactly the thing I was just describing. They were singing these songs that I didn’t know, and it was just like what John was describing. Everybody was standing and all the girls were teenagers and the younger ladies, like 35 and younger, they were singing.
Nobody else was singing. And they did like four or five songs. And like the third one, they went into an old hymn, like “Jesus Paid It All” or something. All of a sudden, everybody starts singing.
The men are singing, the old men are singing, the older ladies are singing because everybody knows it. And then they went back into another song, which I assume they do there regularly, but you were back down to like a quarter of the congregation singing.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think to some extent that has to do with the kind of melodies that are being used pop song melodies, which are not very good melodies.
Mark Dever:
Kind sing along with the radio.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, in which it’s kind of on a steady line, steady note, and there’s not much of a melody as opposed to, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, which is very singable. Right? Along with a little.
I think in general, back to your masculine point, it’s not masculine in our culture to sing. It’s just Clint Eastwood, you know, Tom Cruise, you know, Indiana Jones. You don’t think of the American man as singing.
There’s something different. Now this is different in other cultures, but I’m thinking in American culture. And I do think pastors have a great opera…
Something that really struck me was when I showed up at Capitol Hill in 1996, Mark, front row, singing loudly. And other men started to copy him.
John Piper:
Yep, exactly.
Jonathan Leeman:
And then pretty soon enough, it’s like you hear men’s voices in the room as a kind of counter-cultural masculinity in an American context that I thought was beautiful.
John Piper:
Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right, so I think you put your finger on something that we need to work at. So it’s not a cultural conception, American cultural conception. Hopefully, it’s a heavenly culture.
John Piper:
That’s true. There is an ultimate built-in creation reality of manhood and masculinity that is not merely culturally formed.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Thank you again for the conversation.
Mark Dever:
Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, John.
John Piper:
Thank you both.
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A weekly conversation between Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever about practical aspects of the Christian life and pastoral ministry.
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