The key line, perhaps, to Bellarive's hit worship song "Taste of Eternity" points to a relatively new phenomenon that's been occurring in our churches' worship music for the past few years. If you're unfamiliar with the song, it might help to check it out below before moving on.
The song is simple, catchy, relatively singable, and sincere. It has everything that one might imagine that it needs for it to be 'successful' in the ever increasing worship music genre. Bellarive, as a band, is catching on in popularity. They're a great band with a unique sound and a strong following. The world is likely to hear much more from them.
For fun though, let's parse the trend we see in the video above.
A trendy band, gathered in a circular fashion, singing a psalm-like text together, as one. The communal nature of the singing is evident in the group around them as well. Many eyes are closed, hands are raised, bodies moving passionately. The video conveys to me this: these people love God and are singing their love to God, together. This is typical of what mainline Christians are often calling "charismatic" or "evangelical" worship. As someone who falls somewhere in between those two sides, I can testify that I find what you see in the video above very powerful.
The comparison to David's Psalms is not that far off. Many of his Psalms are emotional. The experience you see above is emotional. Many of David's Psalms are personal. This song is, without doubt, very personal (while using the pluralized first person to describe the community). Compare this song, though, to many Wesleyan texts from the beginning of the Methodist movement. Wesleyan hymns (written mostly by Charles, John's brother) were often very personal and often didn't use the pluralized first person (but were still sung communally). They were, however, written on a different intellectual level than what you might hear above. Charles, after all, was interested in conveying theological insight of the goodness of God's grace and love into the text of the hymns. It's a sung theology. This kind of singing was high on Charles's priority list.
In a Wesleyan text, you get a clear in-depth theology in the music. Above, you get a heartfelt communal response to God but you don't get a clear in-depth theology.
And so we find ourselves at the same argument that's been made for years about the state of contemporary music: there's not much lyrically there. Some even make the argument that our communal theology has become weaker as a whole in our pursuit to fall in love with God. A summary of such an argument might be to say this: our love for God has overshadowed and replaced a deep understanding of God's infinite grace that used to be explicitly expressed in our worship music and no longer is. Sure, Bellarive's lyrics acknowledge "all that [God] has done," but a Wesleyan text, for instance, would likely describe it in further detail.
I observe a lot of worship groups in many many different situations. I even participate in a fair amount of them. After all, my age group is currently leading this revolution. I think it is inevitable that groups like Bellarive will form and shape the future of worship music in our churches. They already are. If you ask me, that's ok; they're a really good band. But it is undeniable that a sung theology that you might see in a hymn writer like Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley is lost in most of our current music. It used to appear to me to be something the "theological astute" would argue about because they disliked the style of music. I now see it plainly: it's simply the truth of our current situation.
A rich, sung theology is traded for an excitement in a singable melody, a band using musical elements to engage the emotions (at 2:20 you can hear the band building, the lead singer taking his melody up an octave, the band pausing for the anticipation of the coming hit on the word "sing"…it's like waiting for the drop in Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble"), and simplistic, heartfelt, personal, and emotional lyrics.
Perhaps within this movement the church is returning to a more Psalm-like (and yes, I recognize that this is a shallow and over-generalized interpretation of the Psalms) approach to worship. Perhaps. You might argue that this is bad. Or you might argue that worship is once again "authentic" (as if it ever wasn't).
Imagine, though, a band like Bellarive using the musical elements that build the excitement through their musicality (that inevitably convey a strong sense of power within the music), mixed with singable melodies and unbelievably deep texts about who God is, who God is calling us to be, and what eternity really looks like. That sort of music, that sort of movement, gets me really excited. Then perhaps the taste of eternity, in all its fullness, might more fully be on our lips so that with every breath we could sing to the one who reveals that very fullness to us.
-B
