Calling Worship Songs up for a Cup of Coffee
Major League Baseball has just completed another season. Spring Training will begin again in February in both Arizona and Florida. And with the beginning of that new season, thousands of minor league players will compete for a chance to prove their abilities at the major league level.
Since its inception over 150 years ago, Major League Baseball has had over 20,000 players who’ve spent time in an MLB dugout and played on a major league field. Approximately 1,000 of those players have been called up from the minor leagues for just a single game.
In baseball jargon, those players called up for a short time are referred to as “cup of coffee” players. The etymology of the idiom is that a player was only in the major leagues long enough to drink a cup of coffee before being sent back down to the minors. So, most of the other roster players didn’t even get a chance to know their names.
Churches have literally hundreds of thousands of songs and hymns from which to choose for singing in their worship services. And new songs are being written and added to the list every week. Maybe one of the reasons our churches struggle with song unity is because we are trying to teach too many new songs without giving worshipers enough time to learn them before we move onto the next new one. They don’t know our songs because we often don’t call those songs up for more than a cup of coffee.
Several church research organizations have indicated both statistically and anecdotally that regular church attendance used to be three times a week, but has now dropped to one or two Sundays a month. So, if we are introducing one or more new songs every week, there is a chance that even those so-called regular attenders might not recognize many or maybe even any of our songs.
In The Worship Ministry Guidebook, my friend, Kenny Lamm writes, “Too high a rate of new song inclusion in worship can kill the participation rate and turn the congregation into spectators. People worship best with songs they know.”[1]
The argument is not whether we should sing new songs since that is a biblical mandate. So, it’s not a squabble over older songs vs. newer songs. The argument is before placing those new songs on the shelf to move onto the next new one, let’s give them enough time to become a part of our shared worship language. Let’s call them up for more than a cup of coffee so that corporately we can easily remember, revisit, and reaffirm their worship value in future services. Then maybe those new songs, even for those of us who are once-a-monthers, can live in our hearts and not just in our ears.
[1] Kenny Lamm, The Worship Ministry Guidebook: Engaging Your Congregation in Transformational Worship (Sanford, NC: WorshipLink Publishing, 2023), 219.
This article is adapted from David W. Manner, Better Sundays Begin on Monday: 52 Exercises for Evaluating Weekly Worship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2020).