As I think about the first 20 years of modern worship and the song that got it all started, I can’t help but wonder when churches last unplugged their instruments to let their people just sing. I can’t help but wonder how many churches actually could. The organic and entirely unprofessional moment that contributed to the beginning of the movement gave way to an obsession with excellence and professionalism. What got lost along the way is that the heart of worship is not a great band, a perfect key change, or a soaring chorus, but human voices lifted together to God. 

I had been lost in a kind of daydream and snapped back to reality with the realization I had been singing “The Heart of Worship.” It surprised me to learn I know the song by memory, and since I was already well into it, I kept on going. You probably remember the chorus: “I’m coming back to the heart of worship, and it’s all about You, Jesus.”
It was 20 years ago that Matt Redman penned this song, which means it was 20 years ago that the modern worship movement emerged from the UK and swept across the world. The groundwork laid through the Jesus movement of the 70s and the million-and-one choruses of the 80s led to the rise of Redman and Tomlin and Delirious? and Sonicflood and so many others in the 90s. There is no objective way to define exactly when the movement began, but I say it was the day Mike Pilavachi, pastor of Soul Survivor church, in Watford, England, pulled the plug on his band.
Here’s the story: Soul Survivor church was doing well, drawing people, enjoying success. They were gathering as a church every week, singing loud songs, and having a good time. But the leaders couldn’t shake the growing conviction that for all the good they were seeing and all the fun they were having, they had completely lost track of what it is to worship. So one week Pilavachi unplugged the sound system and had the band leave the stage. For a time they sat in awkward silence until finally they began to raise their voices unaccompanied by instruments, amplification, and lights.
Redman later reflected on that experience and penned “The Heart of Worship” which immediately became a smash hit and a worldwide worship staple. It is certainly not one of the great songs of history, but it was the song for a moment. It was a song of confession, a song of commitment, and in some ways a song of hope. “When the music fades, all is stripped away, and I simply come / Longing just to bring something that’s of worth that will bless your heart / I’m coming back to the heart of worship, and it’s all about You, Jesus.”
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Like a lot of political solutions, creating a government office to combat loneliness assumes human beings are less like God and more like problems to be solved. If we can just get the technique right, by setting up the right system at scale, we can “reboot” all these lonely humans back to their factory settings so they’ll stop making so much trouble. Of course, because that’s not what humans are, no government program will ever be able to regenerate the fallen human heart. 

Recently Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, proposed The National Strategy for Social Connection Act. The bill has three parts. Part one would create a White House Office of Social Connection Policy to advise the president on the epidemic of loneliness and develop strategies to improve social connection. Part two would mandate the federal government to develop an official, national Anti-Loneliness strategy across all federal agencies. Part three would send more funding to the CDC for the study of the mental and physical effects of loneliness.  
The bill itself exemplifies the clunkiness and inefficiency that characterizes the work of the government: a new office will be formed, then an office will be placed inside that office, and that office will advise and send money to yet another office. 
To be fair to Senator Murphy, America is facing a very dangerous loneliness epidemic that is quickly becoming a public health crisis. Rates of suicide, homicide, depression, self-harm, crime, and social isolation are at all-time highs. These trends are correlated with loneliness, which researchers have found can be twice as detrimental to our physical health as obesity.  
Even if well-intentioned, there are two fundamental problems with Senator Murphy’s legislation. First, no program, government or otherwise, that does not first understand what it means to be human can hope to combat the growing pandemic of loneliness. Second, there are some problems that the government with its clunkiness simply cannot address.  
It is a very modern belief, as Jacques Ellul so clearly described in his writing on the rise of “technocratism,” that all problems can be solved through the proper application of technique and the effective use of technology. This illusion only contributes to the expansion of state power. After all, who else can be trusted to properly apply the technologies that promise to solve our problems? 
Under this illusion, there is less and less room to look to God for help.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, December 16, 2022
The tawdry Achord affair has revealed an ugly side to a certain part of the American Christian world. Real white supremacy really exists and is a real sin. It requires real action and real repentance from those Christians who espouse it. But in reacting to this, we need to be careful not to fall into the sin of ingratitude for other things—such as the country, warts and all, that we call home. 

The recent controversy surrounding Thomas Achord, a classical Christian school headmaster exposed for running a white supremacist Twitter account, has proved instructive on a number of fronts. It demonstrates that real racism and white supremacy do exist, a point that the grade inflation to which these terms have been subjected by the professional anti-racists of the last few years has served only to obscure. We must not allow the trivialization of racism to blind us to the places where it actually is. It is also a reminder that a radical right that cannot effectively operate a pseudonymous Twitter account is unlikely to be seizing control of America by force any time soon. The views Achord and his Twitter cronies expressed were vile; their impotent online posturing unintentionally comedic. And then there was the personal abuse to which Alastair Roberts, the man who exposed the situation, was subjected by professing Christians—a reminder that for some Protestants, all Scripture is inspired and perspicuous, but some parts (e.g., the imprecatory bits) are apparently more inspired and perspicuous than others (e.g., the references to kind words deflecting wrath, turning the other cheek, observing the Ninth Commandment, and those pesky sections on not insulting brothers in the faith).
Beyond the bluster, though, two other issues struck me as noteworthy. First, it is clear that identity politics has a home on the reactionary right just as it does on the progressive left. This is no real surprise: In a world where everything has become politicized, such a scenario was bound to come to pass. The danger for Christians is that the apparent polarizing of society makes the stakes of political debates seem extremely high. In such a situation, extreme positions become attractive, even irresistible. As otherwise ordinary Christians see the country slipping away from them and into the hands of those whose culture war seems to have no moral limits, there is a temptation to repay like with like and to become the mirror image of the other side. This has to be resisted.
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