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Evangelism Media and Teaching Megachurches Worship

Is Congregational Singing Seeker-Sensitive?

Singing Last Sunday I visited Willow Creek DuPage, one of Willow Creek’s Regional Campuses, which meets at Wheaton Academy.  I actually just made it for the end of the service because I went to another church service first. 

The Willow Creek DuPage room seemed quite full.  All of the rows were 70% full.  400 people perhaps?  After the service, they had lemonade and cookies set out at different tables labeled with different high school names in the area.  The idea is that people can more easily find people who live near them. 

But I had one question.  At the end of the video message by Mike Breaux, the worship leader came up and led three songs.  He invited people to stand and later to clap their hands.  It didn’t seem to me like many people were singing.  Then again, I was in the back.  Perhaps many of the people visiting are "seekers" and thus feel uncomfortable singing. 

For this reason I thought that Willow Creek did not invite people to sing very much in their weekend services.  I thought the focus was on performed music as opposed to congregational singing.  Is this still the line of thinking?  Or are Willow Creek and other seeker-driven churches incorporating more congregational singing?  Just curious.

P.S. I’m sorry for not asking the regional pastor this question but I felt bad because I hadn’t been at the whole service and he had invited people who were hurting to talk with him.  I threw away my brochure but I have sent an email to the general DuPage regional church email address to see if someone wants to comment. 

I’m also sorry for not carrying my camera and taking a photo.  The law of copyrights with photos is that you usually don’t get in trouble if you post your own photos.  So I’ll have to do that more often.  This photo is free to use because I found it on stock.xchnge

See my recent post about video venues for more discussion about this concept. 

5 replies on “Is Congregational Singing Seeker-Sensitive?”

I was up at Willow and talking with Frazee a couple of months ago. I do think their style is starting to shift somewhat. From Randy’s comments it seemed that Willow’s leadership saw a generational shift and were trying to do things differently to reach this new generation. I don’t know if the practice you noticed was an intentional part of that or not, but it seems that the “Willow” approach might start looking a lot different in the near future.

Thanks for the post, Andy. There is no doubt that Willow has changed over the years on this count. When we started attending there in 1994, it was still very much “performance-heavy,” with only one short, simple, almost non-committal song that the congregation was invited to join in on. By the time we moved away in 2003, this had changed. Now, the weekend services often include 2, 3 or 4 congregational songs. It seems to me that this is one way in which Axis probably had an influence on the Big House. From the beginning, Axis featured more singing and more worship content to the songs themselves.

By the way, Axis as a separate service is no more. The announcement was made two weeks ago at the weekend service, while we were visiting. Mike Breaux chalked it up to the fact that Axis had made its mark in affecting the whole trajectory of the church, and so it was not necessary anymore as a separate thing. My understanding is that attendance was down to 400 or so recently, and the service time had been switched more than once in the last 2 years. In its own time slot, they offered no childcare, so the demographic with kids disappeared. Interesting.

I asked the question a couple of years ago when Willow interviewed me… the bottom line is that the shift is as to what a postmodern seeker is versus a boomer one. Every teaching pastor has his own praise team that he works with to match his message with music – Bill’s team is a bit more Willow old school, while Mike’s is more emerging gen.

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