The relationship between form and substance in Christian worship has occupied theologians throughout church history. In recent decades, the rise of contemporary worship movements has introduced increasingly sophisticated approaches to worship planning, often drawing from entertainment, psychology, and emotional design principles. “The Ultimate Setlist Building Guide” (download at this link) from Worship Artistry represents a contemporary approach to worship planning that merits careful theological examination. While the guide offers practical insights into musical dynamics and congregational engagement, its underlying assumptions reveal significant departures from biblical models of worship that warrant serious consideration.
The Biblical Foundation of Worship
Before evaluating contemporary worship methodologies, we must establish what Scripture reveals about worship’s nature and purpose. The biblical testimony presents worship not primarily as a human production designed to achieve congregational engagement, but as a response to divine revelation. When Isaiah encountered the holiness of God in the temple, he did not experience a carefully orchestrated emotional journey from level one to level five—he was undone by the immediate presence of the Holy One (Isaiah 6:1-5). The seraphim did not build momentum through dynamic range; they cried out in antiphonal response to the reality of God’s glory filling the temple.
The New Testament reinforces this understanding. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that true worshipers worship the Father “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23-24), emphasizing the internal reality of worship rather than external manipulation of atmosphere. Paul exhorts the Roman church to present their bodies as “living sacrifices” (Romans 12:1), describing this as their “spiritual worship”—a word (λατρεία) that encompasses the whole of life lived in response to God’s mercies, not merely a Sunday morning emotional experience.
Genuine biblical worship emerges from an encounter with God’s character, deeds, and presence. The Psalms—the inspired songbook of both ancient Israel and the early church—demonstrate worship as a response to revelation. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1) prompts praise. God’s deliverance from enemies evokes thanksgiving (Psalm 18). Recognition of human frailty and divine mercy leads to confession and adoration (Psalm 103). Throughout Scripture, worship flows from truth encountered, not from dynamics engineered.
The Problematic Assumptions of Engineered Worship
The Worship Artistry Guide operates from several unstated assumptions that conflict with biblical priorities. Most fundamentally, it treats worship as something worship leaders produce rather than something they facilitate in response to God’s initiative. The guide’s opening premise—“our setlist has a powerful impact” and “the order in which we introduce concepts and dynamics will either draw the listener into engagement or push them away”—places ultimate responsibility for worship’s effectiveness on human technique rather than on the Holy Spirit’s work and the revelation of God’s character.
This represents a subtle but significant theological shift. The guide assumes that people’s primary obstacle to worship is insufficient emotional preparation, which can be overcome through proper dynamic sequencing. However, Scripture suggests that humanity’s fundamental problem is spiritual deadness and willful rebellion against God (Ephesians 2:1-3, Romans 1:18-32). No amount of careful, dynamic building can overcome hearts that remain hardened to God. Only the Spirit’s regenerating work and the revelation of Christ’s beauty can genuinely draw people into worship.
The guide’s statement that “sometimes we can be confronted with the majesty of God and not be in a place to engage it” deserves particular scrutiny. While this may reflect psychological reality, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of divine encounter. When Moses encountered God at the burning bush, he needed no warm-up songs to “reach that place of encounter”—he removed his sandals because he recognized he stood on holy ground (Exodus 3:5). When Peter recognized Christ’s identity after the miraculous catch of fish, he did not require emotional preparation—he immediately fell at Jesus’ feet, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8).
The biblical pattern suggests that a genuine encounter with God’s majesty creates its own readiness, often through conviction, awe, and recognition of one’s unworthiness. To suggest that people need carefully orchestrated emotional preparation before they can engage with God’s majesty risks domesticating the Divine, reducing the Holy One to something manageable through human technique.
The Manipulation of Emotional Dynamics
The guide’s central methodology—organizing songs by “dynamic range” from level one through five—reveals an understanding of worship rooted more in entertainment and emotional manipulation than in biblical models. The carefully sequenced journey from “focus-shifter” through “momentum builder” and “celebrate” to “quiet” and finally “lights up” treats the congregation as an audience whose emotional state must be managed rather than as participants responding to revealed truth.
Consider the guide’s description of Song 1, “The Opener”: “Most people are still finishing up their conversations or dropping their kids off at childcare. It’s a mistake to expect anyone to really engage here. The first song is simply a ‘we’re starting now’ message.” This purely pragmatic approach ignores the rich biblical and historical understanding of worship as a sacred assembly called by God. When Israel gathered before Mount Sinai, no one needed a “focus-shifter” song—the mountain quaked, thunder rolled, and lightning flashed because the Lord had descended upon it (Exodus 19:16-18). The call to worship was not a musical technique but a divine summons.
The historical church understood this through the practice of the call to worship—typically a Scripture reading that announced God’s presence and invitation to His people. “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him” (Habakkuk 2:20) or “O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker” (Psalm 95:6). These biblical calls to worship acknowledged that gathering for worship was not primarily about shifting human focus but about responding to divine presence and invitation.
The guide’s instruction for Song 3 further illustrates this manipulative approach: “You’ve built momentum and should have an engaged congregation, which is important when moving into a resting moment. Give it your all on this one! It will signal celebration and that this leg of the journey is over. A quiet moment (song 4) won’t go as well if you haven’t spent your energy first.” This explicitly treats worship as emotional engineering—the loud song exists not primarily to express truth about God but to prepare people emotionally for the quiet song that follows. The congregation becomes not participants in worship but subjects of psychological manipulation.
The Reduction of Worship to Emotional Experience
Perhaps most troubling is the guide’s implicit equation of worship with emotional intensity. The five-point dynamic scale culminates at the “celebrate” song, which “should max out the set at a dynamic level of 5.” The assumption is that authentic worship correlates with heightened emotional and musical intensity. Yet Scripture presents a far more complex picture of worship that includes silence, lament, confession, meditation, and other modes that resist reduction to a five-point intensity scale.
The Psalms contain not only songs of celebration but also laments that sit in pain without resolution (Psalm 88), prayers for deliverance that acknowledge prolonged suffering (Psalm 13), and meditations on God’s law that call for quiet contemplation (Psalm 119). Jesus himself worshiped through anguished prayer in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36-44), hardly fitting the guide’s “level 5” celebratory model. Paul and Silas worshiped through hymns at midnight while imprisoned and beaten (Acts 16:25), demonstrating that worship springs from conviction about God’s character regardless of circumstances or emotional state.
By organizing worship around dynamic intensity, the guide risks teaching congregations that worship equals emotional experience. This can create several problems. First, it may lead believers to doubt the authenticity of their worship when they lack strong emotions. Second, it can foster dependence on musical manipulation rather than on direct engagement with God through His Word and Spirit. Third, it may produce shallow spirituality that craves emotional highs rather than deep transformation through sustained meditation on divine truth.
The “Together Moment” and Manufactured Memory
The guide concludes with a “together moment”—an a cappella chorus or Scripture reading designed to “be the most memorable part of a gathering.” While creating memorable worship experiences is not inherently wrong, the guide’s approach reveals a concerning priority: memorability as a design goal rather than as a natural byproduct of genuine encounter with God.
Biblical worship certainly creates memories, but these memories emerge from the content of revelation, not from emotional engineering. When Moses descended from Mount Sinai with his face shining from being in God’s presence, the Israelites remembered not because Moses had designed a memorable moment but because they had witnessed the effects of divine encounter (Exodus 34:29-35). When Peter, James, and John witnessed the Transfiguration, they remembered not because Jesus had orchestrated a climactic “together moment” but because they had seen Christ’s glory revealed (Matthew 17:1-8).
The difference is crucial: In biblical models, memory serves revelation. In the engineered approach, memory becomes the goal, with a technique employed to manufacture the memorable. This inverts the proper relationship between form and content, potentially creating powerful emotional memories that are disconnected from any genuine encounter with God or deeper understanding of His character.
A More Biblical Approach to Worship Planning
This analysis should not be interpreted as opposition to thoughtful worship planning or musical excellence. Scripture itself presents evidence of careful planning in worship—the elaborate instructions for tabernacle and temple worship, the organization of Levitical musicians into divisions (1 Chronicles 25), and the evident structure in many Psalms all demonstrate that God values ordered, thoughtful worship.
However, biblical worship planning begins with different priorities. Rather than organizing songs by dynamic range to manage congregational emotional states, worship leaders should:
Ground worship in Scripture and proclamation. Each element of worship should connect to the revealed truth about God’s character and works. Songs should be chosen for theological content and scriptural faithfulness, not merely for where they fall on a dynamic scale.
Trust the Holy Spirit rather than technique. While good musicianship and planning matter, worship leaders must remember that only the Spirit can open blind eyes and soften hard hearts. Our role is faithfulness in presenting truth, not mastery of emotional manipulation.
Embrace the full range of worship expressions. Rather than reducing worship to a predictable emotional arc, incorporate confession, lament, intercession, thanksgiving, and praise as appropriate to the congregation’s circumstances and the biblical text being proclaimed.
Integrate worship with the Word. Historic Christian worship kept preaching and song in close relationship, with hymns often expounding biblical texts. Contemporary worship frequently isolates the “worship set” from preaching, treating them as separate experiences rather than integrated responses to God’s revelation.
Foster congregational participation rather than performance. The guide’s emphasis on building energy and creating moments risks positioning the worship team as performers who produce an experience for a passive audience. Biblical worship calls for full congregational participation in song, prayer, confession, and response.
Conclusion
“The Ultimate Setlist Building Guide” offers practical insights into musical dynamics and crowd engagement that may have appropriate applications in entertainment contexts. However, when these techniques become primary organizing principles for Christian worship, they risk displacing biblical priorities with methodologies borrowed from fields designed to manipulate emotions and manufacture experiences.
The biblical testimony presents worship as fundamentally responsive to divine revelation, presence, and initiative. While human planning and musical excellence have their place, they must serve the higher goal of helping people encounter God through His revealed truth and respond in spirit and truth. When technique overshadows content, when emotional manipulation replaces Spirit-led response, and when memorability becomes more important than truth, we have departed from biblical worship regardless of how engaged our congregations appear.
Worship leaders would be better served by studying the Psalms than by mastering dynamic ranges, by deepening their theological understanding than by perfecting their emotional engineering, and by trusting the Spirit’s power to draw people to God than by relying on carefully sequenced musical intensity. The goal is not to produce an optimal worship experience but to facilitate genuine encounter between the covenant people and their covenant God—an encounter that neither requires nor benefits from manipulative technique, but thrives on faithfulness to revealed truth and dependence on the Spirit’s work.
A Word of Gratitude
In closing, I would like to express my deep appreciation for the ministry of East Valley International Church in Gilbert, Arizona, whose leadership has remained committed to a biblical model of worship. In a community where numerous churches have embraced the engineered, performance-driven approach exemplified in guides like this one, E.V.I.C. has chosen the more excellent way—facilitating worship that honors God’s call to worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). Their commitment to Scripture-grounded, Christ-centered worship that trusts the Holy Spirit rather than human technique stands as a refreshing testimony to the sufficiency of biblical patterns. In an era of manufactured moments and emotional manipulation, E.V.I.C.’s commitment to authentic worship reminds us that God’s ways require no improvement through contemporary marketing strategies. May their example encourage other churches to return to worship that truly honors the One we gather to adore, rather than techniques designed merely to engage an audience. To the pastoral leadership and worship team at East Valley International Church: thank you for your faithful stewardship of corporate worship that prioritizes God’s glory over human experience, truth over technique, and the Spirit’s work over emotional engineering.