I still remember the crunchy, dissonant chords coming through the speakers of my music history classroom and the repetition of the phrase, “Are you washed within the blood of the Lamb?”
We were studying Charles Ives’s modern American art song concerning the founding father of the Salvation Army—“General William Booth Enters into Heaven”—and at the same time as I attempted to navigate the cacophonous chords and angular vocal lines in my rating, I discovered the language and themes familiar and meaningful.
But the clarinet player sitting next to me had a special response. He leaned over and whispered, “Gross.”
Those of us who’ve grown up within the church singing songs like “There Is a Fountain,” “Nothing however the Blood,” and “The Wonderful Cross” are used to singing about blood. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are the middle of our faith, and the blood spilled from the body of God incarnate is an emblem and physical reality for individuals who consider.
So when Elevation Church opted to avoid words or phrases like blood of Jesus in promotional materials for this 12 months’s Easter services, a chorus of online voices accused the megachurch and its pastor, Steven Furtick, of watering down the gospel.
“We’re not going to make use of the words Calvary, resurrection, or the phrase the blood of Jesus. We won’t use language that can immediately make someone feel like an outsider,” said Nicki Shearer, Elevation’s digital content creator, in an interview with Pro Church Tools.
“If you check with someone who doesn’t know Christ, they’re never going to make use of the word resurrection … Jesus got here back to life again after dying for us. I’d moderately say that. It’s clearer,” she clarified.
Since the seeker-sensitive church movement gained momentum within the late ’90s and early 2000s, much has been written about what it means to present the gospel to those that are curious but still on the “outside.”
Practices like Communion, baptism, and even corporate singing are unusual for individuals who don’t repeatedly attend church. And with no preparation or explanation, talk of being “washed within the blood of the Lamb” sounds bizarre and even cultish.
Elevation has gained popularity largely due to its musical output; Elevation Worship has solidified its position as one in all the “big 4” worship music producers within the industry.
And although the messaging the church is using to publicize its Easter services avoids mention of blood or Calvary, Elevation’s music (arguably its strongest outreach medium) doesn’t exclude words and phrases that evoke the physicality and violence of the Crucifixion.
Elevation’s “No Body” was in the highest 25 on PraiseCharts’ weekly list of hottest songs between Palm Sunday and Easter. The first verse describes Jesus’ death:
Behold the Lamb
Upon the cross
Who takes away the sins of all
Forgiveness flows
From hands and feet
As violence meets the Prince of Peace
Behold the King
Its very talked-about “Praise” includes the violent and vivid lines, “praise is the waters / My enemies drown in.”
“RATTLE!,” one other popular Elevation song, includes a variety of references and phrases that may require explanation for a newcomer: “Pentecostal fire stirring something latest,” “resurrection power runs in my veins,” “the bones of Elisha.”
At least in its music, there’s not much evidence that Elevation avoids the “insider” language that Shearer mentioned in her interview. The messaging strategy she described seems limited to the act of inviting someone to church for Easter while trying to not confuse them by calling it “Resurrection Sunday.”
Though Easter is the top Sunday for church attendance, “Only probably the most visible church locally is prone to get visitors who simply appear at church on Christian holidays,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. Much of the bump comes from high turnout from existing members or from people being invited personally.
The backlash to Shearer’s statements within the interview got here from a contingent of Christians who see it as priceless—crucial, even—to foreground themes and concepts like blood and resurrection.
“One of the things that’s fallacious with our world … Everyone is made to be too comfortable,” wrote one commenter on Instagram.
But a take a look at the highest songs leading as much as Easter shows that, a minimum of among the many churches that use PraiseCharts, persons are singing concerning the blood of Jesus.
Charity Gayle’s “Thank You Jesus for the Blood” currently sits at No. 1. On CCLI’s SongSelect, “The Old Rugged Cross” holds the highest spot on its list of “Top Songs for Easter,” and Hillsong’s “O Praise the Name (Anástasis)” and Chris Tomlin’s “At the Cross (Love Ran Red)” hold the third and fifth spots, respectively (the primary lines of “O Praise the Name” are “I solid my mind to Calvary / Where Jesus died and bled for me”).
Few contemporary songs paint an image as bloody as “There Is a Fountain,” however the suspicion that today’s congregations shrink back from songs concerning the death—the blood and body—of Christ appear to be unfounded. Brooke Ligertwood’s recently released “Calvary’s Enough” is one other counterexample:
You resolved to die, scarlet flowing out of your hands and side,
Covenant is sealed and ratified, you knew the price
As the darkness fell and the temple curtain tore,
The death that I deserved you made yours upon the cross
In her book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge argues that a failure to embrace the language and imagery of sacrifice impoverishes Christian faith:
The motif of sacrifice, and specifically blood sacrifice, is central to the story of our salvation through Jesus Christ, and without this theme the Christian proclamation loses much of its power, becoming each theologically and ethically undernourished.
If there’s an absence of meditation on Christ’s sacrifice in church services, it doesn’t look like we are able to blame it on popular contemporary worship music. There will all the time be dissonance once we talk concerning the goodness of a bloody death in a fallen world where the dead stay dead.
Dissonance, I feel, is what I liked—and still like—about Ives’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” It’s fitting to listen to “Are you washed within the blood of the Lamb?” set to discordant piano music. It’s an odd query and a grotesque image. And I do know I won’t fully grasp the wonder and glory of those words until the brand new heavens and earth.
