New Worship for a New Covenant

Welcome, visitors from Jonny Baker’s blog! Thanks for the link love, Jonny. In the comments of Atheist Worship you said “Many alt worship groups have been down this road…” Let me stop you right there and say, Yeah! Please don’t think I’m being original here in my disaffection, anyone. Check out these sites for people a good decade or so further along this journey than I, doing amazing things. Okay, Jonny’s comments continued: “…and let go of singing altogether for a season to find other ways of articulating liturgy. we are doing a series of pocket liturgies on proost that capture some these articulations from various communities. In the US if you go to LuLu or via Proost.”

Let me echo this with a hearty “amen”: If you want to access a creative community of people passionate for God and God’s dreams of a renewed humanity, check out the above two links. Jonny and Grace (a place, not a person; though perhaps an organism, and maybe Personified…) have been real pioneers in alternative worship, and with Proost they have tapped into some of the most fertile Spirit-stirrings going on in the UK and beyond. What’s particularly amazing is that they’ve recently made all of the material on Proost–easily thousands of dollars of music, multimedia resources, and eBooks–available for around a $US 120 year subscription. When I get some extra dough I’m gonna take advantage of this treasure trove, and then I’m gonna blog some reviews about much of this. If you’re an emerging church plant looking for ideas for real, “bottom-up” worship expressions, a house church struggling with corporate adoration beyond big-box institutionalized religion, I’d recommend Proost.

But wait–there’s more! Real quick, I wanted to spotlight two bands that I think are pioneering meaningful new contours with worship-in-song: Agents of Future and Bodies of Water. I don’t even know if “Bodies” is Christian per se, but I find their enthusiastic exclamation of both Old and New Testament narrative to be refreshing. (If it turns out they’re just being “indie ironic” with their biblical beltings, well, I reserve the privilege of “listener’s interpretation”!) I’ll give ya a YouTube of both:

Bodies of Water (I wish the sound quality on this was better; they have several free full-legnth MP3s here):

Agents of Future, with the mighty Todd:

It’s worth noting that US and UK styles differ wildly, and are rooted in their local cultures and contexts…a “new song” unto God will not sound the same every place, everywhere, packaged for consumption…and that’s why it rings true. Adios for now.

PS: People wanting to read up on ‘worship’ here, also see my “Atheist” follow-up, Restoring Worship: An Example.