This is a small article I wrote for Apex’s website and I thought I’d share it here on my personal blog as well.
To be honest, we (I) kinda have a love/hate relationship with a lot of Christmas songs. When people think about Christmas, one of the first things that comes to mind is music. There are a ton of songs about Christmas! Songs about winter, reindeer, jolly fat men, drummer-boys, teeth, mangers, relationships, and even a hippopotamus. Those are all fine and dandy, but it seems that not many of them really give a high honor to Jesus. Not many of them are “worshipful” songs. Many of them are just familiar tunes with an emotional tie to those of us who grew up singing them. But, to sing songs about Christmas should be some of the most worshipful songs we ever sing! Considering that it’s Jesus’ birthday that we’re celebrating here…ya know…the one who changed the world forever, beat sin and death, passed that victory on to us, etc…. it would seem that our songs for this season should reflect that a little more.
Because of that, we, the band at Apex, prayed and asked God what He wanted us to do. We believe His response was to give us a challenge to write songs for our congregation that were truthful, Christ-glorifying, and singable. So, we did. We’re not saying they’re the best songs ever, they’re just the songs that God gave us for our church family. We’re just excited that He’s choosing to use them! Our hope is that God will continue to poor out new songs in us, for the Christmas season and any season that our Apex family goes through.
Hear me on this, we have NOT written off all traditional Christmas songs. We have found some of the traditional Christmas tunes to be GREAT songs of worship that seem to be quite timeless. We hold on to those kinds of songs tightly!
Our hope is to always respect and learn from where we’ve been, and influence the future. That applies to church music as much as it does to overall church history.