A holistic worship pastor is one who pastors worship

* of and to the whole God

* in and by the whole congregation

* with our whole heart

* through our whole lives

[Read More] for the backstory.

We had brunch last weekend with a friend of mine who is a worship pastor, and I raised the question of “what is the purpose of a worship pastor.” The answer I got was more about ‘why we hire someone to lead worship’, but I was after something different. As usual, I feel we need to understand the purpose of something in order to make intelligent decisions about it, so we know which parts to critique, reform, strengthen, or abandon.

In a similar vein, today I ran into Steve Camp’s “107 Theses” about Contemporary Christian Music:

http://a1m.org/page.php?page=template10.php&pageid=fcf54d19dd342ec4d0b163b23018f777

Like his mentor John MacArthur, I think Steve does an excellent and much needed job of “knowing” the fundamental issue — the lack of a wholehearted focus on the person of Jesus Christ — but a poor job of “understanding” it. His theses (which I’ve admittedly only skimmed) read like, well, a thesis: didactic, rather than pastoral. He may well have identified the right problem, but the solution he demonstrates (as opposed to the one he preaches) feels like the God of “try harder” and “think correctly.”

Radical centrist that I am, I believe that we need to understand the lies other people perceive we believe in order to help win them free of the lies we know they believe. To me, that is one of the primary objectives of transformational worship: to help uncover the emotional and intellectual lies we are in bondage to, that we might be liberated by God’s truth. But we can only help others to the extent we allow God (and others) to expose our own hidden sins.

May God have mercy on me, and us all.