(5 min read)
The space is mostly dark and the crowd is still, but there seems to be an energy coursing through the room anyways. On a stage, with everyone’s attention, someone shares their story of overcoming a difficult season in their life. The people clap and cheer at this testimony, and the band begins to play. To my left, a young woman gives a knowing smile – she recognizes this song. She closes her eyes, folds both her hands over her chest, and begins to sing along.
My head is spinning. I’m at an indie rock concert. So why does it feel so much like a church worship service?
Being there live…
Here’s something about me – I love live music. And I’m not alone.
According to Oxford Economics, concerts are a $132 billion dollar industry in the United States. Interestingly, charitable giving to churches is $30 billion dollars less.
Some people may be surprised that rock venues and concert halls are a bigger financial force than churches, but I think that the massive interest in live music says something deep about what it means to be human, and even something about our innate desire to worship.
Simply put, there is something special and beautiful about being united, vulnerable, and singing together. And both concerts and worship services scratch our human longing for those spaces.
Everyone reading this article is likely reading it alone. After all, who gathers for the public reading of online blog posts? And the same goes for music. Since headphones (and especially wireless earbuds) became popular, listening to music has become a private activity.
Gone are the days of putting on a vinyl for the group to listen to – now I curate my personal playlists, getting particular about which songs I like and the ones I don’t.
Coming together
Despite our individual pursuits in music, something special happens when a group of 50, 500, or 5,000 people are in the same room, listening to the same song.
Our attention is directed towards the same sounds, the same stage, the same set list. No matter how unique each person in the room is, we walk out with a shared experience.
Finally, we’ve found something in common with the person standing next to us. We belong to a group of people, even just for a moment. Unlike sharing a subway train with a group of strangers, with each person honed in on their phones, books, and to-do lists, the concert makes us feel like we did something together. And we like that.
Getting emotional…
Music has always been an emotional experience. From a foundational level of music theory, people learn music by mapping it onto emotions. A major chord feels “happy.” A minor chord feels “sad.” A half-step (like the Jaws theme) feels sinister. A perfect fifth (like the opening notes of the Star Wars Overture) feels powerful and confident. Add beautifully crafted vocals and thoughtful words, and it’s not a leap to suggest that music makes us feel things.
We might associate some songs with anger, as we are reminded of the ex who dumped us. Some songs make us feel melancholic, thinking of a loss or a nostalgic past. (If you still don’t believe me, just go listen to “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2 and try your best not to get even slightly choked up.)
Modern day musical artists make the most of our emotional attachments to music, using it as a tool to delicately wield. Skillful musicians guide an audience through an emotional experience, including highs and lows in their set, with strategic interruptions to share some of their story, or dedicate a song to “anyone who’s been betrayed before” or “anyone going through a hard time right now – it’ll get better.”
We crave these experiences of being vulnerable because we want to experience emotion, and we want to feel safe while doing so. We’ve given musical artists trust – that they’re not going to take advantage of us or bring us down. We allow their words to penetrate our hearts and we fully engage in the sounds and feelings that they’re crafting.
It is rare that we get to tenderly and gently interact with difficult experiences or bittersweet memories, but concerts allow us to let our guards down for an hour or so and engage with our most fragile emotions.
From consumers to participants
I once read that the human voice is the instrument that God gave to everyone. Barring disability, if you have a voice, then you can sing! And intuitively, even from a young age, humans love singing.
In fact, most people who don’t like to sing had to learn not singing through being bullied or criticized into their shyness.
At concerts, singing along is something that no one needs to be encouraged to do. From time to time, artists will step away from the mic, and the crowd will only get louder.
It’s quite possible that a fan could have listened to a song 50+ times before hearing it live, but in this room, in this context, it might be their first time screaming the lyrics out loud with abandon.
In the concert space, fans move from being consumers of media to being participants. A relationship gets formed between the audience and the band – the band relies on the energy and participation of the crowd singing for confidence and for the immediate feedback that they’re doing a good job, and the crowd relies on the band to lead the way and prepare the environment that allows them to sing at the top of their lungs.
For each person singing along, they know their voice, their participation, matters. And finally, after politely and quietly listening to the artist’s music, they finally get to let go and sing along like they’ve maybe always wanted to.
Gather. Be Vulnerable. Worship.
Concerts draw massive crowds of eager participants. The live music experience helps us feel human in a way that we don’t get in our workplaces, schools, restaurants, and homes.
Concerts speak to an innate longing that we have: like we were made for this. And the Christian faith tells us that we were.
Church worship services similarly provide a space for a group of people – once strangers, but now united – to dive into the weakest and most difficult parts of their life in order to experience joy and transformation, and to respond to that transformation by singing praises together.
And as weird as that description is, it feels profoundly human to gather for worship. It's one of the reasons that I love the church, as flawed as she is.
Our Grace Chapel community got together for a concert-like worship experience in May 2024, coming together under one roof to be united and sing together in a venue that, in many ways, felt like a concert. Check out our One Church Sunday service on YouTube for what the worship that day felt like.
So, keep an eye out for this the next time that you go to a concert. What about that experience is so good that you shell out money for a ticket, get parking in the city, and stay up late? And what about that experience points to a deep human longing to gather, be vulnerable, and worship?
Photo by Nathan Fertig on Unsplash
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