WHAT IS WORSHIP
Part two

The 1990's arrived and praise and worship hit a dead spot in it's development. Integrity Hosanna continued to produce praise and worship CD's for their customers. However, there was a feeling that we were receiving the same music over and over again even though the lyrics were different. From it's trademarked white covers and unique art style, the overkill of electronic beat box drum sounds, and the feeling of listening to over perfected and over rehearsed vocals (many people I met that participated in the later sessions told me that it really got to this point), Integrity Hosanna reached a paradigm in it's music, it's marketing, and it's ministry. Integrity Hosanna continued in this paradigmed vein of releasing it's product for many years while Vineyard Music took the live worship setting popularized by Integrity Hosanna and made it more modern sounding. While continuing their concept of promoting their worship leaders who wrote songs based on the Scriptures, Vineyard music removed the electronic beat boxes and the over rehearsed feel Integrity Hosanna gave their listeners. The music came out more fresh, more natural, and more spontaneous than Integrity's products. In fact, music as a whole was moving from a "Synthesizer" mode back to more natural and acoustic settings and Vineyard Music recognized this as it released praise and worship to reflect this musical trend. In fact, Integrity Hosanna did not break out of this rut until 1993 when Ron Kenoly released "Lift Him Up" with his dream team of Chester Thompson, Alex Acuna, Abraham Laborei, and Justin Alamario formerly of the band Koinina. If it was not for this CD and this change in thinking. I wonder where Integrity Hosanna would be right now?

As the musical sound in praise and worship went from sounding like "Christian Devo" to a more natural and acoustic sound, the praise and worship movement regained popularity and had a new energized focus. We started to see a shift of priority in the local church meetings on Sunday mornings. Worship had an equal amount of time when compared to preaching. People were using worship and music as a criteria when selecting a church whether it was liking the worship or having a chance to play an instrument in worship. Worship was being used as the bait to draw people into the church. As this shift in thinking occurred, the lyrics of worship started to show this shift where the lyrics went more from Scriptures being sung into the personal experience of worship. It was in this personal experience of worship that the focus went towards how one could both personally and within the church body offer up praise and sacrifice unto God. We started to see the word "I" be used more and more in the lyrics as people searched to be personally intimate with a holy God.

We also saw many new concepts of worship appear. The worship revolution helped reinstitute the drama and the arts in general back into the church. Drama became a ways and means of not only exposing faults within the church, but also used as evangelism. We also saw the art form called mime re-appear in the worship realm and the dancers appear trying to recreate the Old Covenant dance back into the New Covenant worship. We even saw new forms of worship of "Warfare worship" where worship was used as a means of spiritual warfare and clearing out the heavenlies for God's blessings to flow. We saw "prophetic worship" where worship was used to bring forth prophecies or in some cases, went as far as "prophetic worship leaders" enter a service with no planned songset and sing what was on their hearts and in some cases singing new songs for the first time. We had musicians who wanted to teach us the "proper" chords for guitar and piano in worship as well as "proper" tones of drums in worship. We had dance troops who wanted to tell us that a certain dance step always meant in God's eyes "repentanance" in the Spirit. Mimers telling us that a certain mime gesture always meant the Holy Spirit, etc. Worship therefore, went from a personal intimacy with God to a formulatic exercise to rise up an emotion calling it "the move of God". The dancers, mimers, musicians, etc were not bad in and of themselves, but the formula's created, implemented, and practiced placed the worship music into another rut and paradigm like the Integrity Hosanna ruts of the early 1990's.

In 1993, praise and worship music went through another upheaval, revolution, and change...

Please Click here for part three of this article.

Home
This page hosted by:
Click on the ChristWeb logo to visit ChristWeb
Why do we alter the focus, to make the wrong moves seem so right