Date

5-2021

Department

Rawlings School of Divinity

Degree

Doctor of Ministry (DMin)

Chair

Seth Bible

Keywords

Generational, Worship, Music, Style, Church, Discipleship

Disciplines

Christianity | Liturgy and Worship | Religion

Abstract

Westside Baptist Church is a multigenerational Southern Baptist Church with an established culture of dynamic musical worship. Throughout the last four decades, this congregation has flourished in its weekly engagement of musical worship. Westside's musical worship styles are generally comprised of traditional hymns, southern gospel, and praise and worship music. While the church has maintained a reputation of first-rate worship music, the last decade has revealed a growing division among the congregation's generational worship style preferences. One generation of the church longs to worship with the songs that they grew up with, while another generation prefers to grow up with a worship style of their own. The purpose of this thesis project is to recognize how generational worship style divisions are created and then to resolve the church's generational worship divide by persuading every generation of the value and necessity of both older and newer worship styles. This purpose will be accomplished by evaluating Westside Baptist Church's ministry context, developing a biblical and generational philosophy of worship, observing historical lessons from the worship divisions throughout church history, and researching modern texts about the current worship war. Finally, this thesis project will develop a discipleship strategy for biblical worship that will produce generational unity among Westside Baptist Church worshipers.

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