On Sunday, Aug. 11, the Church at Clarendon in Arlington, Va., held a service entitled “Church Remixed.” The service was during the regular 11 a.m. worship hour, a typically “blended” style service, with five to eight musicians. On this morning, however, a DJ led music using an Apple laptop, MP3 files and a mixing console.
The idea first occurred 15 months earlier when Stephen Taylor, community minister at the Church at Clarendon, met Hans Daniels at a Memorial Day barbecue in Atlanta. Taylor learned he was a DJ and producer, and also active in Andy Stanley’s Northpoint Community Church. The two engaged in a lengthy and energetic discussion that revolved around two questions: “What is the next step after contemporary rock praise band instrumentation?” And, “Why can’t a DJ provide music in church instead of live musicians?”
James Johnson
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Stephen Taylor (left) and Hans Daniels pose after the remixed worship service at the Church at Clarendon. (Photo courtesy of the Church at Clarendon)
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Hans observed that the high school students he worked with were not especially inspired with Northpoint’s rock music worship, but they did get excited about secular dance music by Skrillex and Bassnectar. The next step was a conversation with Clarendon senior pastor Jim Johnson, who, with Taylor and Daniels, shares enthusiasm for new forms of worship. There was no other option in his or their minds except to try it.
There are several distinct advantages to a DJ-led church service:
• It is a step up from the prerecorded tape or DVD music that many churches depend upon.
• It is a step down in cost, in terms of personnel or in negotiating practice time for hired musicians or volunteers.
• A DJ has access to an immensely broad range of music at the touch of a finger. Where even the most talented music ministry can draw from only so many musical styles, a DJ can reach into every music genre available in recorded music. If you want traditional, you get traditional; if you want cutting-edge contemporary, you can have that too, and everything between.
• A DJ offers the possibility of contemporary, beat-driven styles of music. This musical space includes electronic dance music, ambient, house, techno, big beat, trip hop, dubstep, rap and electronica. The music ministers in our churches may not know this musical vocabulary, but make no mistake, many that we desire to introduce to Christ certainly do.
• It allows for the integration of congregant experiences, those in and those out of the church. It admits the old, but worthy question, “Why should the devil have all the good music?” On the other hand, it does not deny, mute or compromise our testimony of faith. It simply couches the good news in music some ears are ready to hear.
Our enthusiasm for the experiment did not mean that everyone immediately jumped on board. We did serve up to our people significant amounts of preparation for the day (read, “advanced warning” for some). Even our regular musicians took some convincing but proved wonderfully cooperative in the end.
There was no sense of throwing folks into the deep end of the pool. Rocking it out at an extreme would provoke more reaction to worship than participation in worship. So instead of some of the more far-out songs in DJ Hans’s repertoire, we stayed with mostly well-known contemporary praise choruses, such as Blessed Be Your Name and 10,000 Reasons, and the traditional songs Be Thou My Vision and Amazing Grace. On the more cutting edge side, Hans did mix in Praise You by Fatboy Slim and Around the World by Daft Punk with How Deep the Father’s Love, and he included a “Chillstep Instrumental” during the offertory.
Reaction
The outcome of the service was, by all accounts, a success. No one stormed out during the service. Our impression was that people sang louder than usual and clapped more vigorously during and after each song, a not unfamiliar feature in our services, but noticeably enthusiastic. One youth wryly observed, “The young people stayed awake this time.”
Even the most traditional members of the congregation seemed at ease, even pleased, with the service. And the toughest criticism to date was from an 81-year-old member active in the church for more than a half-century who said, “I like the music more than I did last year.” We’ll take that.
There were spin-off benefits. The Washington Post attended the service and provided print, pictorial and video coverage of the service. Bloggers were immediately engaging in conversations about the worship wars, Christ and culture, stage performance versus inspiring authentic worship.
On Monday morning DJ Hans, monitoring Twitter responses to the event, noted a comment from someone in Berlin, Germany: “We hold worship in a dance club, but we play rock music during the service.” Hans remarked, “Even in Berlin, the place that invented this kind of music, they aren’t doing this yet.”
Will we do this again? Certainly. Will it be the new brand for our church? No. We are a diverse place and people where it would be just as relevant for us to have a barbershop quartet one Sunday, gospel the next and something else the third.
But here’s the point. No one wants to fall into an uninspired rut in worship. Consider the possibility of DJ’ed music as an alternative to live music or popping in a DVD for a church version of karaoke. With discernment, take risks. Lift Christ high, remembering the revolutionary who ate with tax collectors and sinners, who attended weddings and, undoubtedly, sang popular folk songs, one whose ministry was on the road and in the marketplace.
In other words, the answer to the WWJD question might be a DJ.
Stephen Taylor (stephen@1bc.org) community minister and James Johnson II (jim@1bc.org) is senior pastor at the Church at Clarendon in Arlington, Va. Hans Daniels may be contacted at hans@nicedj.me.