Date
12-16-2025
Department
School of Music
Degree
Master of Arts in Music and Worship (MA)
Chair
Hanna J. Byrd
Keywords
contextualization, liturgy, rubric, songwriting, worship
Disciplines
Liturgy and Worship | Music
Recommended Citation
Blanco, Adriane M., "Gospel-Centric Liturgy for Contemporary Worship: A Biblical Basis for Locally Crafted Worship Songs" (2025). Masters Theses. 1417.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/1417
Abstract
Despite a cultural shift toward creating original worship music in churches today, there remains a need for new songs that reinforce biblical theology and foster spiritual formation through an intentional gospel-centric liturgy contextualized for the local congregation. Such a gospel liturgy consists of a cycle of songs that, with each weekly gathering of the church body, reiterates the revelation of God's presence, humanity’s sinful nature, Christ’s work of salvation, and the believer’s response in worship. At the same time, it is essential to emphasize spiritual songs that express the heartfelt emotions of the worshiper, maintaining a balance in properly worshiping God in both Spirit and truth. The purpose of this ministry project is to develop a rubric for evaluating worship songs based on the emotional, theological, and thematic lyrical content of a gospel-centric liturgy, which will then serve as a standard for composing new worship songs to be incorporated into the local church's worship repertoire to promote worship and spiritual formation in congregational worship services. It is anticipated that developing such a rich canon of songs for the church community will provide the congregation with more profound spiritual formation, as the liturgy aligns with the local teaching ministry of the church, thereby strengthening the unity of worship and teaching. It is also expected that songwriters may face challenges in discovering inspiration for creating new songs, establishing criteria for evaluating song quality, and navigating the dynamics of collaborating as a cohesive team. Although this study focuses on establishing the rubrics to develop songs for congregational worship liturgy, these principles would be of interest to other church ministries where songwriting could be beneficial, such as children’s ministry, drama ministry, recovery ministry, or promoting songwriting in the context of spiritual disciplines, evangelism, or community outreach.
