The art of giving good feedback
Matt MacGregor
Providing good feedback to the musicians who serve your church is essential. It helps nurture their God-given gifts and ensures that their service is a blessing and not a burden to the church.
This is not an easy task, nor is it only the responsibility of leaders. With the help of the Proverbs, here are three (conveniently alliterative) principles to help all of us in the church to get this right.
Learning from Taylor Swift’s plausible language of lament
Matt MacGregor
We need to talk about Taylor Swift. Much ink has been spilled as to how appropriate her music is for Christians; I am not getting into that debate here. Instead, my attention is on the incontrovertible fact that Swift’s music is beloved by a phenomenally large number of people.
In a culture that is hallmarked by individualism and fragmentation, Taylor Swift has garnered an unprecedented popularity and ubiquity. Her impact has been compared to that of the Beatles, an impact she has sustained for 18 years, eight years more (and counting) than the Fab Four. The New Yorker goes even further, saying that she is best compared to the likes of Napoleon or Julius Caesar.
A Wesley hymn on penguins?
Matt MacGregor
Would you sing a hymn written by a computer? I wonder how you would back up your answer to that question. I suspect the instinctive answer of many would be ‘no.’ But why not?
The answer cannot be because a computer won’t be good at it. AI technology probably became a better songwriter than you some years ago. I took the liberty of asking ChatGPT to write a hymn in the style of Charles Wesley about penguins:
Feed your church with songs full of gospel strangeness
Matt MacGregor
‘I want mystery; I want weirdness; I want strangeness.’ This is what British Christianity’s favourite historian Tom Holland looks for in a church. Holland claims no Christian faith of his own, but there are many in the church who (with some genuine warrant) reckon he’s onto something.
Hyper-atomised singing?
Matt MacGregor
Music Review
As 2023 drew to a close, I had the substantial pleasure of being hooked on Glen Scrivener and Andrew Wilson’s podcast ‘Post- Christianity?’, tracing the roots of our contemporary Western Post-Christian culture, and what it means to live for Jesus in this context.
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Serve your church - learn to play a musical instrument
Matt MacGregor
‘Your choice of career is the biggest ethical decision you’ll ever make.’ So says 80,000 Hours*. ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,’ says J.R.R. Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring. ‘A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil,’ says Ecclesiastes 2:24.
