Faith Works 2-16-24

Faith Works 2-16-24
Jeff Gill

Perceptions are challenging, and all we have
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"Why was all the music new and strange?"

I know I'm not the only minister to have heard this.

If you are a member of a contemporary worship style church, it comes in a slightly different flavor, but the complaint comes even there, I'm told. "Were those all new songs today?" With the inevitable raised eyebrow.

In a more traditional church, it's interesting to hear it when out of three hymns, there was one old standard, a newer hymn the congregation has heard before, plus one admittedly new song, along with familiar tunes and words for a "Gloria Patri," the "Doxology," and a choir anthem sung many times before. But that line-up can still get you "what was the deal with all new music?"

Now that football season is over, it's interesting to look back over the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, whose fortunes became entwined with the Kansas City Chiefs. Her relationship with a player (Travis Kelce already famous in his own narrower right) got her into a skybox with his mom, and being even more famous, she was shown in TV coverage on occasion. Football fans began to erupt on social media over how much Taylor Swift was displacing the old fashioned NFL football coverage. "Too much of the female singer! We're here for football!"

But ESPN personality Colin Cowherd put some interns to work clocking Swift on screen time, and found that on average viewers saw her for . . . 24 seconds out of three and a half hours of coverage. That's 12,600 seconds total, so she was seen 0.2 of 1 percent of the time.

Super Bowl sightings of Taylor Swift: 55 seconds (51 seconds before the score that ended the game) out of a broadcast that was four hours and 18 minutes long. This is counting her sightings from kickoff until the game coverage ended. That's 15,480 total seconds, so she was on screen more, to be fair: 0.35 of 1 percent of the game coverage.

Oh, and something I'm sure the NFL knows: their viewership is already 46% female. I'm not saying all women like Taylor Swift, nor that all men do not, but I think there's a very rational justification for showing a bit of successful, famous women cheering on their teams during game broadcasts. Men who expect things to stay the way they've always been, with crowd shots mostly of former players and the stray (male) politician? Nope. Things aren't changing: they've already changed.

Marva Dawn was a very articulate theologian of worship and Christian practice, and her work took her into the middle of what was called for decades "the worship wars." One of her often told stories was about a person who came up to her after church to complain about one of the hymns they just sang as being strange and unfamiliar. "It's okay," she told them. "It wasn't really about you anyway."

In fact, Dawn suggested it should worry us at least a little if we, long time church goers, love and are delighted by every last piece of music and verbiage we hear in worship. If it works SO well for us, she asked, then how is it working for newer, less familiar people coming to church for the first time, who are still working on their faith and understanding of who God is and what God is doing? Maybe it isn't a good sign if we feel perfectly at home with all the service from beginning to end.

Of course, can you have too much of a good thing? Perhaps. But when we think it's "all" new and different, it may just be our expectations that were unfulfilled, and not God's intention for the service.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's willing to admit he's terrible at picking hymns for worship. Tell him what strange song caught your spiritual attention at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.