Over twenty years ago, a very young version of me decided that I needed to learn how to play piano bar. I was pretty ambitious back then (in somewhat unhealthy ways), and I felt that I needed to give myself experience playing a variety of styles professionally. That’s why I was involved in a rock band and a jazz fusion group, as well as working in a project recording studio. I wanted the experience of it.

So I went to the local music store and asked the salesman if they had any fake books. Fake books are under-the-counter books which have (typically) unauthorized versions of songs (usually just chord charts with a melody scratched out) that professional musicians use to play the thousands of songs which make up the lexicon of jazz and other styles. If you have proficiency in a few fake books, you can play with any group of jazz musicians on the planet—because they play off these same charts too.

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There’s a relatively new term being used more and more often by Christians, one that appears both sacred and oxymoronic: “Worship Concert.”

Recently, I’ve had a few conversations about the term.  What does it mean, and what does it imply?  On the surface, a worship concert is simply a means by which worship artists perform in a concert setting.  The point of the music, and the point of the musicians, is to point people to God in some musically compelling way.  As the Christian church has done for the last two thousand years, She adopts the cultural setting and technologies and uses them to express the timelessness of the Gospel.  And there is great validity to this.

But then I got to thinking.  Just for grins, what would happen if the Old Testament worshippers adopted a worship concert approach?  Would we see Levitical priests advertising an evening concert featuring a particular name artist?  Would they sell tickets?  Would they play an encore?  Would they have a merchandise table in the back with logo’d T-shirts and hoodies? Would the band be signing autographs and having photo ops with fans?

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