by Zac Hicks
Dietary Spirituality
You are what you eat, so they say. What goes into you has a shaping effect on your physical body. Literally. The shape of your muscles change with a diet of protein and a whole lot of working out. The shape of your belly changes with a diet of sugar and a whole lot of doing nothing. So it is with your soul.
Your soul is what you spiritually eat. You are shaped by your spiritual intake. Spiritual junk food will leave your soul malnourished, flabby, and weak. Spiritual superfoods…well, you get the picture. The question of the hour then for worship planners and leaders who oversee the weekly meal known as the worship service is, what are our people eating? What they’re eating we could call their “theological diet.” But don’t let that fool you. When we’re talking about theology, the best theologians will tell you that we’re not referring to the intellectual accumulation of abstract facts about God, or ivory tower style conversations based on big books with even bigger words that have no relevance to our lives. When we say “theology” we mean knowing God, and then, out of that relationship flows our understanding of ourselves, our world, our reality. It is out of this relational context of knowing and being known by God, that we can properly speak of our people’s theological diet.
So we’re back to the question: In the worship services we plan and lead, what are our people eating? What are they taking in regarding God, themselves, and the world? And because our diet really does have a shaping effect on us, I hope you can see just how significant, just how weighty, these questions are. The worship services we plan and lead shape our people into certain kinds of Christians, and this kind of responsibility is in fact pastoral work. You may not have “pastor” in your title. You may not have signed up for pastoral work. You may not want the responsibility of being a pastor. But make no mistake, your work of planning and leading worship services is indeed the work of a pastor. So let’s just go ahead and embrace the metaphor. Worship leader, you are a Theological Dietician.
This metaphor has a lot of mileage for worship leaders who are looking for a deeper dive into the serious business of song-selection. And I’d like to focus on four simple ideas that flow from the mindset of a Theological Dietician: Striving for a balanced diet, developing criteria for food-selection, introducing new foods, and aiming for long-term health.
Striving for a Balanced Diet
Every dietician knows that “man shall not live by protein alone, carbs alone, or grains alone.” Our bodies are complex, and we need the varied nutrients that those food groups provide for our physical health. So it is with our spiritual health. The diet for a healthy spirituality is varied and diverse. In fact, it’s as complicated as life is, with all its ups and downs, highs and lows. It’s not a coincidence or mere symbolism that one of the Bible’s most often used metaphors for itself is food. Psalm 119:103 (ESV) emotes, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Or how about Jesus’ strong words to the devil when he broke that liar’s mouth in the wilderness, quoting Deuteronomy 8: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4 ESV)
So, if the Word of God is food for our people, and if our songs are supposed to be means of conveying that nutrition to our flocks, then the content of our songs needs to mirror the nutritional breadth of that Word. How do we wrap our minds around that? The Bible is big. And it’s not necessarily a manual for song-selection. Therefore, you should first pray for the Holy Spirit to give you a hunger and thirst for God’s Word. The more you study it, the more you meditate on it, the more you soak in it, the more it simply becomes your mode of thinking when you choose songs.
But to get a bit more practical, we can take some advice from reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. They were both big proponents of the Psalms. Luther called the Psalms “the little Bible.” What he meant was, that if you took all the Bible and you prayed it back to God, you’d have the Psalms. Calvin similarly called the Psalms “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” If you steep yourself in the Psalms, you are consuming all the varied nutrients of the Bible in worship-song-form. It’s why my favorite reformer, Thomas Cranmer, advocated praying through all the Psalms once a month in his Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer knew that if the people of God are regularly praying the Psalms (like Jesus did, actually), they’re spiritually eating from a full diet.
And here’s the payout for song selection: the more you consume the Psalms, the more you will start to notice the holes and the gaps in the nutrition of the worship songs you’re listening to and feeding your people. You might notice your diet lacking confession. You might see a shortage of lament and prayers of suffering. You might pick up on the lack of warfare and battle-prayers in your diet. When you regularly “eat” the Psalms yourself, all of a sudden, you’re choosing songs with eyes wide open. It might be a great idea for you and your worship team to take a retreat, divide up some of the Psalms, then compare those findings to the top thirty or forty songs in rotation at your church. An exercise like that would reveal a lot about your congregation’s diet.
Developing Criteria for Food Selection
This next step is where thought, prayer, and discipline really come in. Every dietician knows that if you don’t create for yourself a clear plan—clear rules of what you will and will not put in your diet, you’ll be enslaved to unhealthy cravings of your base appetites. Similarly, we Theological Dieticians need criteria. We need to be able to list reasons for why we will select certain songs and why we’ll avoid others. Developing these criteria, if you haven’t done it already, would be a great thing to do with your worship teams or with your other pastors or church leaders. I wish we had time to go into the details of this, but here I’m simply going to give you what I’ve developed over time. Feel free to fill in the gaps, disagree, or pick this apart. Hopefully it gives you a starting place.
I generally operate with five criteria. First, is it singable? Is the song in its rhythm and range easy for your congregation to sing? By the way, I think this question is local and contextual. It depends on your cultural background. What’s singable in one context may not be in another.
Second, does the music complement the lyrics? I’ve sometimes come across songs that are great musically, and fabulous textually, but the two don’t fit. Sometimes it’s a song about joy that’s incredibly slow and musically lifeless. We need to think of music as a frame for the text, like how a good frame surrounds a piece of art. We don’t want it to distract or overwhelm the text. Rather, we want it to amplify the truth of the words we’re singing.
Third, is it theologically precise? And here I don’t necessarily mean theologically dense. A song can be simple yet not simplistic, theologically faithful yet not theologically tedious. We’re simply asking, does this song give me the ability to think thoughts about God that are true, right, and good, or does it leave room for me to believe God is something he is not, or to believe that I am something I am not?
Fourth, is it aimed God-ward? Over the years I’ve become less worried about worship conversations that express concern about the pronouns of the song. Many of the Psalms are filled with “me” and “I” language. I’m way more interested in the song’s orientation. When I sing about “me,” does it stay with me, or does it orient me toward God? I always want the aim to be God-ward. Psalm 42 is a great example of what we’re talking about. It’s a worship song intensely focused on “me,” “my soul,” and the personal experience of pain and the feelings of God’s absence. But it takes those personal experiences and directs them back up to God. It turns those cries of the self into cries to God, and hope in God.
Fifth, is it in line with the gospel? There was something significant about that moment recorded in Galatians when Paul got into it with Peter and “opposed him to his face…when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:11, 14 ESV). What Paul meant was that for the gospel to be clear in any circumstance (or any worship song), it needs to display a grace that knows no bounds—a reliance upon Christ and his work that carries with it no conditions, no ifs, ands, or buts, no hint that it’s Jesus plus something else. Songs in line with the gospel don’t spend a lot of time focusing on what “I” am doing for God. They sing from the place of what Christ has done for me.
So here are the kinds of questions we can ask: Does this song pump me up, throw me back on myself? Or does this song push me to rely less on myself and more upon Jesus and his finished work—grace alone, faith alone, through Christ alone.
Introducing New Foods
Think with me about the psychology of being a dietician. If I’m trying to get someone who is unhealthy, overweight, and used to eating poorly to change the patterns of their diet, I’m going to have to introduce new, foreign, and healthy foods to them in a slow and patient manner. Someone used to cheeseburgers, soda, and shrimp alfredo, isn’t going to just immediately trade all that for kale, beets, and sparkling water. That’s not sustainable. Nor would their system tolerate those new substances readily. So what does a dietician do? She tapers the diet over time.
So, say you read Psalm 51 and become convicted that your local congregation needs to do more confession of sin. If you just start out next Sunday by shoving the Book of Common Prayer confession of sin down their throats, your congregation will spit it back out and you’ll probably be looking for new employment on Monday. You may need to coat that kale with a little chocolate, if you know what I mean. Perhaps for a few months, you simply up the frequency of familiar worship songs that have a little bit of “confession-y” language, or perhaps you extemporaneously lead prayers that pray some simple apologies to God in the middle of your song sets. And then maybe over time, you fill out the rich, confessional language by placing a Psalm of confession on their tongues, or you introduce songs that do a better job with the full breadth of confession. Again, when you’re thinking like a dietician, you’re aware of the deficits in the diet of your congregation. But you’re thinking strategically and patiently about how to introduce, or increase the consumption of, lesser utilized food groups.
Aiming for Long-Term Health
This is actually where the first three points come together: balanced diet, criteria for food-selection, introducing new foods. When we think about those three things, we can get overwhelmed, similar to how a dietician might be overwhelmed by how much work needs to be accomplished in the life of her unhealthy client. One of the things that eases this pressure is that moving toward health isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. No quick fixes. We’re looking for slow growth and transformation over time. And this means that we can be absolved of the pressure of thinking that all the nutrients of the Psalms need to be present in every worship service. It’s not that every meal needs all five food groups. Rather, it’s that over the weeks and months, we need a balance of it all over time.
This is why we need to be disciplined as worship planners and leaders in fighting the tyranny of the urgent. It’s a good practice to plan worship services in chunks and sets, with a wider scope over weeks and even months. It’s helpful to take an annual inventory of the diet you’ve been feeding your flock. But if we’re so stressed and pressured that we’re only able to think about a week at a time, we may be setting ourselves and our congregations up for poor health.
For me, in addition to the weekly grind of plugging in songs to Planning Center Online, I have a Google doc that simply has the date and some song ideas. That view allows me to more easily see the forest for the trees and to see the arc of my congregation’s diet over time. Some people take day-retreats two or three times a year, and map out a whole set of months of worship songs. However you administrate it, though, the important point is to create the space and time to do the long-range evaluating and planning. This space gives you the room to think like a dietician and plan like a pastor.
The Resulting Shape
What’s the end result of good and faithful theological dietary work? What picture does the Bible paint of the mature believer? What is our point of reference for the “well-shaped” disciple? That’s pretty simple, actually. It’s Jesus. Romans 8:29 (ESV) says, “Those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” And what is Jesus shaped like? The Bible actually uses another food metaphor to answer that question: the shape of Jesus is the fruit of the Spirit. This means that as we are faithful to minister the gospel to our flocks, and faithful to serve up the Word that declares that soul-shaping gospel, our people will look more like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This is the picture of spiritual fitness and health. This is what we’re praying for. This is what we hope that God, by his grace, will produce in us and our people, until the day when he will “unite all things in him, things in heaven and things in earth” (Eph 1:10 ESV).
Biography of Author
Zac Hicks has been pastoring and leading worship for over twenty years. He is an Adjunct Professor of Music and Worship at Samford University and author of The Worship Pastor (Zondervan, 2016) and Worship By Faith Alone (IVP, forthcoming).
