I have written about Christian worship from time to time on my blog. One example is this piece from several years ago titled, Modern Worship is Mostly Boring. In this piece, I wrote about how limited the range of topics are in modern worship. We often sing about the same small range of topics. These topics are good, necessary and should be part of our worship. But I have long felt that something was missing.

It was not until last year that I put into words what I think is the far bigger problem with worship, and that is that it is inadvertently misleading people. I wrote a piece called, Is Modern Worship Helping Deceive People? In this piece, I expanded on my earlier piece, but dove more specifically into the problem with modern worship, we are accidentally catechising people into a shallow, or narrow understanding of the Bible, because of our selective range of worship topics. I even gave an example of how this causes issues:

“One thing that became clear during the covid years is that most Christians had not taken to heart what the Bible says about the corruption of political leaders in this world. This is an incredibly important theme in the Bible. In fact it is one of the dominant themes of books from Judges, through to 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, all the way through to making up much of the teaching of the minor and major prophets. Yet many Christians thought there was really only one basic passage about government in the Bible, Romans 13, and that we should just inherently trust the powerful. You could not get any further away from the message of the Bible than that. The Bible’s reflections on power and the powerful in this world are far more detailed and intelligent than that, encouraging deep scepticism of the powerful and shrewd dealings with the leaders of this world. But many Christians are unaware of this.

I would argue this is the case, at least in part, because we don’t sing songs with themes like Psalm 2. When was the last time you sang a Christian song about how this world is ruled by rebellious, conspiratorial leaders, who rage against the true king? Never? Rarely? Probably never in Church. But the ancient Israelites sung about themes like this quite a bit in their worship. Just read through the Psalms and you will see many topics which you would never hear in the average church worship set…

…Christians are incredibly deficient in understanding evil. They understand the gospel, they understand the grace of God, the mercy of God, the father’s heart, and many things along these lines, because we sing about them a lot. And WE SHOULD sing about them a lot. But they don’t understand many other things the Bible talks about, because they don’t sing about it a lot. I guarantee for more Christians their worship songs give them their theology more than their pastor’s sermons.”

Because we sing about a very small selection of themes from the Bible, we are teaching people to have a very unbalanced view of God and the Bible. This is a serious problem. Most pastors who speak out against modern worship like to speak against this church or that church over here or over there, because they are from different theological schools. And while I am not completely in disagreement with this, I think these people often miss the much larger issue, our songs should reflect not just core solid theology, but also the breadth of theology in scripture. As do the Psalms.

This is just as important but often overlooked. Sometimes the songs written by churches that some conservatives don’t like are not bad songs, they can be exceptional songs. But they are focused on a very narrow band of topics. This needs to be fixed. We can fix it in part by singing older hymns, some of which are timeless. But there are other ways to solve this issue.

I am not a musician. I have attempted to play guitar and can play some songs adequately, and some others poorly. But I love music. I often have classical music playing while I am working. Sometimes it is Gustav Holst’s The Planets sometimes it is a mix of my favourite movie themes. I often have music on in the car. Sometimes worship, sometimes secular music I like. You do not need to be a musician to have a deep love for music, as we all know. And for many years it has frustrated me how skewed modern worship is, and how deaf many Christians are to the need to broaden their repertoire of worship topics.

But now we can do something about this issue with technology. This is why I have been putting the Psalms to music with AI, using various different styles of music. This is one online album or playlist that I have already created: Rock the Psalms, volume one.

This is a playlist of worship songs based entirely on the Psalms. The advantage of creating a playlist like this is that you can put it on in the car and not have to select another video until all the songs have been played or do the same while working out. Feel free to download this and make use of it as an mp3 on your phone as well. The idea here is to encourage people to listen to the Psalms more and more. Already I find myself memorizing scripture again, with this simple method of singing the Psalms as songs.

What is best about this is that my kids especially love the Psalms that I have are made into rock songs, and they are learning to memorize scripture while they are singing. This is every Christian parent’s dream, isn’t it? To have your kids asking you to play the Bible with them. This is a gift, make use of it. I encourage you to try your hand at making your own songs as well.

You can create these songs using any style of music you prefer. This song here based on Psalm 3, I have made into a blues-style rock song. Psalm 3 is about David facing many opponents and troubles. The lyrics work perfectly for blues rock. And Suno (the program I use) does an amazing job of creating songs you can sing along with and just listen to.

You can also go so far as to write your own worship songs and then put them to music using AI as well. Here is a song I wrote many years ago as a poem. Yes, I used to write poetry. These lyrics are completely mine, I did not use AI to write them or modify them. Here they are below,

“O Lord you have disciplined my soul
My heart rose up in my chest
My pride grew to a dangerous amount
On my walk with you Lord took its toll

Your firm hand is ever there
You guide us when we stray
You watch over our every step
Oh Lord my heart could not bare
If it found that you were not there

Lord my God I am not a perfect man
But I desire to live forever for you
But often my heart is deceitful Lord
And clouds my actions what can I do?

I can turn to you O God
For you have given me your name
You have made me yours forever my King
Therefore I will repent when you I profane

I need not fear my enemies Lord
Because I know that you shelter me from them
You are my stronghold, my deliverer, my shield
I know I can trust you so to you I yield

At times O Lord I would seek to be great
And would forget before you my place
That it is by faith that I should live this life
It is by faith that I should run this race

For you know all there is
You know what is in my heart and in my mind
Yet you love me anyway
As you have always loved our kind

Though we are fallen
We can lean on you
You are my crutch
And without you I am doomed

Your firm hand Lord is ever before me
And I know that when I fall
You will protect me
From my enemies, myself and all.

The point of this post is to show that we can now do something about modern worship ourselves. There are many wonderful songs and some amazing Christian musicians. The church is blessed. I love the worship at my own church because each musician brings a different flavour to the worship set and they all work hard to broaden the themes that we sing in church. We are blessed at our church. I know many churches also do a great job of worship. But many have a very narrow focus in their worship. 

Now, we can go even further, we can write lyrics ourselves and turn them into songs and sing them at home. And even better, we can use the very words of scripture to make incredible music. If you have issues with modern worship you can now do something to help fix it.

This is one of my favourite songs so far Why Do The Nations Rage. You will notice if you read my article on worship from last year, the one quoted above, that this is the Psalm I referred to as one that is so different to the songs we often sing. But now I can sing this song whenever I want, and at the same time memorize the message of this incredible Messianic song. I encourage you to put your own hand to making music yourself with AI. This is an incredible gift, and I am sure more skilled hands will make even better use of this technology.

Here is my second album/playlist. I hope you are blessed by it: