Over the past few years, my reading habits oscillate from fiction and graphic novels to history to religion and beyond. Sometimes I have a plan for what I want to read next, and sometimes a book just falls into my hands, as if out of nowhere. The latter is what happened recently when I picked up Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming Faith. I read Bass’ most recent book, Freeing Jesus, a couple of years ago, and I was perused our lending book closet at church, I came across her 2006 book Christianity for the Rest of Us. While it appeared almost two decades ago at this point, Bass’ insights about the dangers of Christian nationalism and how the church creates a fostering space for everyone to connect with the divine remain ever prescient.

As I read Bass’ signposts for renewal, I really started to think about what she writes about worship, reflection, and beauty. I grew up in Souther Baptist, in a denomination and church that put an emphasis on worship and, at times, spectacle. I think back to the massive Easter pageants we hosted depicting Jesus’ final week. Later, I attended churches that catered to the flavor of the week, churches that relied on market research and gimmicks to get people in the door. At these churches, I came into contact with contemporary worship music, a style I have never really embraced. I didn’t know, at the time, why I didn’t embrace it, but as I grew older, I realized I never truly embraced rock-band, arena tinged, worship music because it never really spoke to me and relied on the ebbs and flows of the music to illicit an emotional response from me, a response that had nothing to do with actually worshiping God.

“At its core,” Bass writes, “worship is an experience that transforms the heart.” For me, and for mant others, I must navigate the heart and the mind, the emotional and the intellectual. Each working together informs my faith, helping me to engage in different ways with the divine. Art, in its myraid forms, does this form me, and Bass points out that beauty serves in concert with worship to bring us into “right harmony” with God with “all sounds of discord gone, all injustice banished.” When we allow ourselves to worship, to be moved by the heart, we open “ourselves to sensing the awe and wonder of the dance” that brings us into shalom, peace with God.

This dance takes many forms. I remember sitting next to a bayou one day, just taking in the scenery, when all of the sudden a crane flew down and grabbed a fish out of the water, gripping it in its mouth as it ascended back into the air. I remember standing walking back to my car one day after work at Auburn, passing Jordan-Hare Stadium and seeing a hawk descend from the light pole high above the stadium to the ground to snatch a chipmunk and fly back to its perch with its prey in its mouth. I remember staring at the fjords in Norway, gazing at a wooden church at the mouth of a fjord, surrounded by mountains. (This picture is above.) Each of these moments, and more, brought me to worship. They made me think about Matthew 6:26 when Jesus asks, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

These moments occurred in silence, in times of reflection, but I also find myself worshiping through music and art. As I mentioned, I have never been a fan of praise and worship music because I truly find it, for the most part, disingenuous and theologically shallow. Yet, I find music and art that leads me to worship and to the “wonder of the dance” with God. One such song is Stavesacre’s “At the Moment,” which, is some ways, sounds like a contemporary worship song. However, when it came out, it didn’t sound like anything I would hear in a Sunday service, and during that time, the song stayed with me, reminding me that God will be there when I am in need. God will remain my comfort and my refuge.

When I think about worship, I don’t think about the sappy nature of how the music makes me feel. What leads me to worship comes from not just the reassurance of God’s presence, but it stems from the questioning and pilgrimage towards a deeper faith and engagement with God. Mineral does this for me with songs like “Take the Picture Now” and “Parking Lot,” songs I’ve written about before. Chris Simpson’s questioning, in songs like “Sounds Like Sunday,” “&Serenading,” and “The Last Word is Rejoice” always bring me to worship. On “&Seranading,” Simpson proclaims, “When I was a boy I saw things that no one else could see.” Yet, he immediately follows that proclamation with a question, “So why am I so blind at twenty-two, to the hope that is all around me, filling up this room?” In these two lines, Simpson sums up the ways that as children we easily worship, engaging with the divine in awe and wonder, but that ease leaves us as we grow. We must never forget those moments, and we must slow down, taking the time to experience them.

Simpson has stated that many of the lyrics on End Serenading deal with spiritual anxiety, and as a kid who grew up in evangelical circles scared to death of the end times and everything else, Mineral’s songs spoke to me in a way that allowed me to express my own spiritual anxieties. The final song of End Serenading, “The Last Word is Rejoice,” encapsulates all of this through its musical movement and also through Simpson’s sparse lyrics. The song consists of three questions where Simpson asks, “How will I drink from that stream? How will my hear sing your praise? How will I lay down in green grass fields when my soul is so afraid to rejoice?” Simpson’s lyrics embody spiritual anxiety as he questions his “worthiness” at receiving God’s grace. Mineral’s music provided me, as a twenty-year-old, with the confidence to question during worship, to engage not just in unfettered praise but to actually converse with God in a manner that has led me to a deeper faith and relationship with the divine.

Another band that always brings me to worship is mewithoutYou, a ground I have written about before when exploring politics in “Christian” music. Their song “The Dryness and the Rain” details how we hear the voice of God, but the entirety of their oeuvre brings me into contact with God. Notably, “Allah, Allah, Allah,” the song that Christian bookstores made them change in packaging to “Untitled,” brings me to worship everytime I hear it. This song really does mirror a hymn or contemporary worship song in its structure. Like “The Last Word is Rejoice,” the song begins with three lines repeated like the verses of a hymn and each line calling upon us to see Allah “everywhere we look,” “in everyone we meet,” and “in every blade of grass.” It ends with Allah’s grace, the undeserved grace that Simpson addresses in his own lyrics. Aaron Weiss sings, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done” just place your head down in the hand of the “love that never changes.”

I could write about other songs like “Every Though a Thought of You” or “The King Beetle on a Cocnut Escape,” a song I may write about some day. However, i will leave it here for now. Next post I will write about some songs that directly challenge Christian fascism in all its forms, specifically punk songs from the 1980s and 1990s. Until then, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.