On Geoff Bullock And Worship

Thanks to Duncan for link­ing to the Sign­posts dis­cus­sion on Geoff Bullock’s rewrit­ing of some of his Hill­song era wor­ship songs (also check out Geoff’s com­ment on Hills’ thel­o­gical mis­dir­ec­tion). Geoff is now trying to reword some of those wor­ship songs to reflect a more theo­lo­gic­ally cor­rect view of divine grace.

For example, his reword­ing of Have Faith In God attends to exactly the prob­lems thought­ful Chris­tian thinkers had with that song when it first became pop­u­lar. With pre­ci­sion Geoff sums up this theo­lo­gical error we asso­ci­ate with Hill­song as “present(ing) human per­fec­tion as an out­work­ing of faith.” This kind of mis­dir­ec­tion seems to be part of the min­istry of Joel Olsteen, as I com­men­ted upon earlier and which has Jason Clark has noted is now high­lighted in a BBC doc­u­ment­ary. It is worth noting the way the wor­ship songs rein­force the theo­lo­gical misdirection.

I was part of the church Geoff Bul­lock atten­ded after leav­ing Hill­song and it was cer­tainly obvi­ous that he was keen to move away from this mis­dir­ec­tion. This was a very cre­at­ive patch For Geoff, when he wrote a string of songs that were not only theo­lo­gic­ally meat­ier, but also more reflect­ive than the typ­ical Hill­song mater­ial. It is inter­est­ing that with this shift in emphasis also came a shift in present­a­tion. I only ever spoke briefly with him ( a few times at church and once at a World Vision con­fer­ence), but on those occa­sions he expressed a desire to strip back wor­ship from the ‘con­cert’ idea into some­thing more per­sonal (he men­tioned ‘in the round’ set­tings and we even did that a couple of times at church). What was inter­esing was that a smal­ler and less “the­at­rical” church gave rise to a dif­fer­ent tone of wor­ship and since Geoff sub­sequently moved to an even smal­ler and even less the­at­rical church, the change in emphasis was fur­ther cemented.

In the end we always have to embody wor­ship (or do some­thing with our bodies while we wor­ship), which brings us back to a ques­tion not just about words, but about archi­tec­ture. Whether we wor­ship in a sucess-driven megach­urch, or a relationally-focussed emer­ging church, or any of the myriad options inbetween, we are faced with decisions about how we organ­ise our space and those may often have more impact on our theo­logy than we might assume. In fact, I would sug­gest that maybe our wor­ship influ­ences our ideas about faith more than the other way round. Cathed­rals focus us on glory and unchage­ab­il­ity, mul­tipur­pose halls on prac­tic­al­ity and liunge rooms on rela­tion­al­ity and the every­day. Sure all these ori­gin­ally arose from an idea, but for those who first exper­i­ence faith (or renewed faith) through them, they become part of the mes­sage itself.