Cory Broersma's Blog

I grew up playing the guitar in many types of churches with many types of styles and MANY opinions of what worship music is all about. Now at times I enjoyed playing but mostly I would have preferred playing in my basement , alone without all the opinions of what kind of worship I am playing and how much “anointing” was on the “music” . I am not judging peoples opinions except that I believe that many people in church leadership take it too serious. I have always thought of worship as singing or playing your thanks to God. Nothing more and nothing less. My real “pet peeve” was the fixation on the “New Song”, (which I believe is great and something we should ask God for) but for some reason in one of the churches I grew up they seemed to think it had to be this spontaneous (real bad sounding) composition. Anyone who knows me would say I am probably to pragmatic, but I could not help thinking about any visitors we may have had, and what they thought of all the off tune strange singing. This may be the wrong attitude, but I just hate the idea of a church more concerned on being OUTWORDLY “Spiritual” without taking in to consideration how the non-Christians will react. Hence, that particular church did not grow but stayed the same for years, full of people (including myself) who thought they were very spiritual…..Anyhow, all ranting aside, my topic is free worship. The reason I mentioned the previous observance is because there are so many opinions of worship in general, but when you bring in the labels with their business minds and their lawyers then the freedom of your sound in confined to many worldly boxes. First of all, the most popular doctrines will have to be the ideology of the lyrics in order to appeal to the most lucrative demographic, and second of all, the most radio friendly production styles will have to be implemented in order to make the sound appealing that same market. Honestly, I love the U2 / Cold Play sound as much as the rest of the world, so in one way it doesn’t bother me, but I also think that for the music of the church to really create that “new sound” we should be able to play without any outside factors weighing in on our creativity. I just can’t see real creativity come with money attached to it. I have always found that in the secular music world independent bands comes up with something creative and then as the sound goes mainstream it gets over duplicated and milked for as many dollars as the label can get. In the worship music “world” it is even more extreme simply because it is a smaller group of musicians and a smaller audience. So for me, I pray for a worship revolution, free from labels and CCLI and all these other goofy businesses, so that worship musicians can create the most creative music possible, I dare to hope that they will create musical trends that the secular world will emulate! So as worship musicians who are independent by choice, we have to think and ask God to give us creative ways to finance our worship projects. Anyhow, for me Worship should be free. Of course anyone should feel free to disagree and I would certainly not judge them for it.

Cheers,

Cory Broersma
www.freeworshipsongs.org