I decided to not live blog from Catalyst. The reason was very practical.. I was exhausted. Every time I had a chance to think, I would start dozing off. It’s been a long week. So, I spent a lot of my drive home from Catalyst 2010 thinking about what I would blog about first when I got home. I made a huge list of what I would talk about.

However, nothing spoke to me quite like the music of the band Gungor (Official Website). Let me give you a little personal context to this.

I spent 4 years in an indie/rock band whose main purpose was to reach people for Christ where they were. We would play in bars, coffee shops, churches, and music venues. We would engage people in real dialogue about their faith without preaching at them. However, as we played more and more I couldn’t help but notice that there was beautiful art being made all around us… except for in the churches.

I’ve always tried to say that while I don’t like praise & worship music, I can usually connect to it in the proper worship context or setting (when the Holy Spirit moves in a worship service, it doesn’t matter what kind of music the band is playing… you start worshipping). Contemporary music has a very important place in the life of the church. With that said, most of it is a reproduction of itself. Its filled with cliches, trends, and self-fulfilling stereotypes. It lacks creativity.

This has been a serious source of inner turmoil for me. I struggled with the question: What does creative worship music sound like?

At the time I would say “it sounds like Anathallo or mewithoutYou or Sufjan Stevens”.

But the problem is that, while I could worship while listening to those bands (the last time worship brought me to weeping was at an Anathallo concert in a bar) not everyone could. Not everyone can handle the difficult melodies, counter-intuitive rhythms, long instrumental bridges, or dense lyrical content. Not everyone wants to be forced to actually focus and actively participate in musical worship (which is a shame).

So I beat my head against the wall for years. It was a major source of tension.

I had all but given up.

I had decided that I was going to accept the constraints I was given. I was going to pick and choose contemporary worship bands that I didn’t hate and run with those.

Then, earlier today, Gungor took the stage and broke through the walls of my hardened heart. Within 20 minutes everything that I had told myself about worship music changed.

God spoke to me through them in a way that I had not been spoken to in a really long time. After these years of wrestling with the creative potential of worship, I stood in an arena filled to the brim with tens of thousands of people worshipping with a band that was doing everything that I had always wanted to do. The brilliance and creativity of their music immediately connected with me. Their lyrics were challenging and complex. Their rhythms were atypical. And, most importantly, their melodies were not particularly easy to sing along with. Within 30 seconds of hearing their first song I knew that I was buying their CD. By the time they had finished their 3rd song, I had experienced the most intimate musical worship that I had been a part of since I stood in that bar in Jacksonville, FL and listened to Anathallo.

…and I wept like a little girl because of the work that God is doing.