I attended a men’s gathering last night where a speaker gave a testimony of not only his past sins but also a dreadful list of wrongs that were done to him when he was still a lad. I am fairly certain that even he didn’t wish to regurgitate them in such lurid detail. As a result I felt like bathing when I got home. Let me be absolutely clear, we are all sinners. If we weren’t we would have no need of Christ. But here is why I found last night’s gathering both frustrating and uncomfortable. A blow-by-blow breakdown of a person's entire history of sin is not the biblical model for sharing a testimony, and it often does more harm than good in a church community.
When a testimony turns into an exhaustive, graphic list of past wrongs, it crosses the line from a celebration of grace into something sensational, distracting, and inappropriate for a gathering of the saints.
Where Modern Testimonies Go Wrong:
Glorifying the Wrong Entity: A hyper-detailed timeline accidentally forces the audience to focus on the shock value or complexity of the sin rather than the simplicity of God’s forgiveness. The sin becomes the "hero" of the story because it gets 90% of the airtime.
Violating Biblical Boundaries: As mentioned before, the Apostle Paul explicitly warned that "it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret" (Ephesians 5:12). There is a vast difference between being honest about a struggle and offering an overshared, unedited diary of it.
Stumbling Blocks for Others: Hearing a meticulous list of specific sins can trigger others, plant intrusive thoughts, or create a toxic environment of comparison (where people feel their testimony isn't "dramatic enough" because they didn't commit the same list of wrongs).
The Healthy Alternative: "Appropriate Vulnerability"
Many committed Christians have asked exactly that question. Whether a service feels "shallow" is partly subjective, but there are some identifiable trends that help explain the reaction.
Why do virtually all modern evangelical meetings ignore the structure for gathering that Paul has laid out in his epistle written to the Corinthians?
1. The shift from hymnody to contemporary worship
Most older hymns were written to be sung by congregations without amplification. They typically had:
• Strong, memorable melodies
• Predictable harmonic movement
• Multiple verses that developed an idea
• Rich theological content
Examples like "Holy, Holy, Holy", "A Mighty Fortress", or "And Can It Be" tell a story, make doctrinal arguments, and contain musical tension and resolution.
Many contemporary worship songs are built differently. They often prioritise:
• Simplicity
• Immediate emotional accessibility
• Repetition
• Easy congregational participation
• Compatibility with a modern band format
As a result, the melody is frequently secondary to the vocal style, atmosphere, and rhythm. The song may feel more like a musical backdrop for an experience than a tune that can stand on its own.
2. Modern worship is often written for the guitar, not the piano
Traditional hymn writers commonly composed at a keyboard, where harmonic complexity comes naturally.
Modern worship music is often written by guitarists using a relatively small number of open chords. This tends to produce:
• Repetitive harmonic cycles
• Narrow melodic ranges
• Similar song structures
The famous I-V-VI-IV progression and its relatives appear constantly.
Consequently, many songs sound alike because they are built on nearly identical foundations.
3. The influence of popular music
Much evangelical worship since the 1990s has been influenced by pop, soft rock, ambient music, and later by bands such as Hillsong, Bethel, and Elevation.
In popular music, the "hook" often matters more than the melody's long-term durability. A song can succeed because of production, rhythm, and emotional delivery rather than because people can whistle the tune twenty years later.
Many classic hymns remain recognisable when sung a cappella. Quite a few modern worship songs lose much of their impact once the band, with guitar, bass, drums, and sound system are removed.
4. Experience often displaced participation
A criticism raised by thinking Christian is that worship has increasingly become something people watch rather than something they do.
Historically:
• Congregation centred
• Strong communal singing
• Less performance emphasis
Modern model:
• Stage centred
• Professional musicians
• Concert-style sound reinforcement
• Emotional build-ups
When that happens, the congregation can become an audience. The music may feel emotionally powerful in the room yet leave little musical substance in memory afterwards.
5. Theology has become more individualistic
Many older hymns focused on:
• God's attributes
• Biblical narrative
• Doctrine
• Church history
• Redemption
Many contemporary songs focus more on:
• My feelings
• My experience
• My relationship
• My response
Not all do, of course, but the tendency is noticeable. The result can feel thinner because the songs are expressing emotions about faith rather than teaching or exploring faith itself.
6. Why "there is no tune"
This is an interesting musical observation. In much contemporary worship music, the vocal line often resembles speech rhythms set to chords rather than a fully developed melody. The memorable element may be:
• the groove,
• the atmosphere,
• the production,
• the repeated phrase,
• rather than the melody itself.
Compare the opening of "Amazing Grace" with many modern worship songs. Almost anyone can sing "Amazing Grace" from memory decades after hearing it. The melody carries the song. In much contemporary worship music, the accompaniment carries the song.
A historical irony
Many evangelicals of the nineteenth century complained that the newer gospel songs of their day were shallow compared with the older hymns. Then later generations regarded those same gospel songs as classics.
So, part of the reaction is generational. However, the specific criticism that modern worship music often lacks memorable melodic development, relies on repeated chord loops, and contains less theological density is not merely nostalgia. Professional church musicians, hymn scholars, worship leaders, and theologians have been making those same observations for years.
In short, when people say modern evangelical worship feels hollow, they are often reacting to three things at once: less theological depth, less melodic complexity, and a shift from congregational singing toward creating a particular emotional atmosphere. The feeling that "there is no tune" is usually a response to the fact that many contemporary worship songs are built around a chord progression and mood first, with melody serving a much smaller role than it did in traditional hymn writing.
This raises a criticism that has been made by many Christians across different traditions, and it centres not on the music but on the structure of the gathering itself.
The passage I am referring to is 1 Corinthians 14:26:
"When ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying."
Taken at face value, the meeting Paul describes appears highly participatory. Multiple members contribute. The gathering is not centred on a single speaker delivering a prepared sermon while everyone else listens.
That observation has led some movements, particularly the Plymouth Brethren, house church movements, and various "simple church" groups, to argue that the modern church service bears little resemblance to what is described in the New Testament. I thoroughly echo these sentiments which is why my wife and I have been forced to meet alone as any past fellowship with believers failed to follow Paul’s example.
Our argument is as follows:
• The New Testament assembly was participatory.
• Spiritual gifts were expected to function openly.
• Leadership existed, but elders shepherded rather than dominated the meeting.
• No evidence exists of a modern pastor conducting a scheduled service from a platform.
• The congregation itself was the active body of Christ.
From that perspective, the contemporary pattern of:
• one worship leader,
• one sermon giver,
• a rigid order of service,
• passive audience participation,
This format looks more like an institution than a body. The church is the living manifestation of the Body of Christ therefore it is an organism rather than an organization. The real debate is not whether leadership existed. Nobody seriously denies that elders existed.
The debate is whether leadership means:
A. Facilitating a gathering where many members contribute,
or
B. Conducting a gathering where one designated person does most of the speaking.
If you read 1 Corinthians 12-14 straight through, the emphasis does seem heavily weighted toward participation by many members. Paul repeatedly uses the image of the body where every member supplies something. The concern in chapter 14 is not getting more people involved. It is actually the opposite. So many people were contributing that Paul had to impose order:
"Let two or three prophets speak."
"If anything be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the first hold his peace."
"The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets."
Those instructions only make sense if multiple people were expected to contribute regularly.
Historically, many scholars would agree that the earliest Christian gatherings were probably much more interactive and much smaller than the typical evangelical service today. Over the centuries, as churches grew larger, became institutionalised under Orthodoxies and Catholicism, and developed clergy structures, the service gradually became more centred on designated leaders. This has placed an intermediary between God and man other than Christ Himself.
So, my comparison is specifically between Paul's description in 1 Corinthians 14 and a contemporary evangelical service where hundreds of people sit facing a stage, it is understandable why I see a significant disconnect. The key question then becomes whether that disconnect represents a legitimate adaptation to larger congregations or a departure from the New Testament pattern itself. Christians have been debating that question for centuries. I think it is obvious where I stand in this disconnect between what Paul described as “Normal Church life” and the man-made structure of modern evangelicalism and how we are commanded to meet as believers for the organism has been crushed under an organized format that places manmade structure at the centre of meetings rather than the Holy Ghost!
The other thing I find particularly frustrating is that the entire Western zeitgeist is under an attack by the heresies of postmodernism and critical theories. Christian gatherings are failing to equip the Church to stand against these Gnostic heresies.
From a traditional Christian perspective, especially one grounded in Christian doctrine, there is an obvious tension:
• Christianity claims objective truth.
• Christianity claims historical revelation.
• Christianity claims that God has spoken authoritatively.
• Christianity claims that human nature is real and not infinitely malleable.
Christians should therefore see certain postmodern and critical-theory assumptions as Gnosticisms incompatible with core Christian doctrines. My frustration lies in the churches’ refusal to address them directly. Many evangelical churches devote substantial time to:
• worship music,
• personal encouragement,
• practical life application,
• family issues,
• emotional and relational topics,
But without sound doctrine these things fall short of the Glory of God while spending comparatively little time equipping Christ’s Body to engage with:
• philosophy,
• epistemology,
• competing worldviews,
• secular ideologies,
• intellectual history.
As a result, people may leave church knowing how to discuss their feelings but not how to answer fundamental questions such as:
• What is truth?
• How do we know what we know?
• Does objective morality exist?
• What is a human being?
• Why is Christianity different from Gnosticism?
• What assumptions underlie contemporary identity politics?
• What does Scripture say about authority, justice, power, and nature?
Historically, Christians often invested heavily in these questions. The early church confronted:
• Gnosticism,
• Platonism,
• pagan mystery religions,
• various heresies concerning Christ and the Trinity.
The Reformers engaged:
• scholasticism,
• ecclesiastical authority,
• Renaissance humanism.
In the twentieth century, Christian thinkers engaged:
• Marxism,
• nihilism,
• existentialism,
• logical positivism.
One could argue that every generation has had to train believers to recognise the dominant intellectual currents of its age in the light of the Truth of Christ.
The comparison is usually made because some critics see modern ideologies as dividing humanity into categories of enlightenment and false consciousness or treating subjective awareness as more authoritative than objective reality.
My broader concern, however, is one that many pastors, theologians, and lay Christians have expressed: if churches focus almost exclusively on personal inspiration and internal experience, they may produce believers who are not well equipped to analyse and respond to the major philosophical and cultural challenges of their time.
In this sense, I echo a concern found in the New Testament. Paul's letters are not merely devotional. He repeatedly warned believers about "every wind of doctrine", deceptive philosophies, false teachers, and arguments that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. The assumption is that Christians need not only encouragement, but also intellectual and spiritual discernment.
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