Matt Maher says a little mystery is a good thing, whether it’s in his faith or his music.
Like every other pop singer, Maher has a Facebook page and Twitter account, but he’s a little wary of them.
“It’s created a sense of accessibility, and for artists who do use social media regularly, it creates a sense of connection, and I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a good thing or not,” says Maher, who performs Saturday night with Audrey Assad at Mary Queen of the Holy Rosary School. “One of the things that helped the explosion of popular music was there was an element of mystery. It’s like, ‘Who are The Beatles?’ They were four dots in Shea Stadium, and they play and they leave, and the only time we get to see them is on TV or a movie theater or live in concert.
“It created an aura of mystery about it, and mystery is an important part of the human experience.”
That includes the experience of faith.
Maher is an award-winning, best-selling Christian songwriter and recording artist. But he is a bit of an anomaly in contemporary Christian music as a practicing Catholic in a market dominated by evangelical Protestants.
He has been a big part of contemporary worship, but Maher says he sees people drawn to time-honored traditions and icons.
“Church for so long was like a game show, or it was like a TV show or a talk show — my youth service is like Saturday Night Live,” Maher says. “I think there’s a renewed interest in liturgy. I think that church as rock concert, church as X, church as Y have been tried. Are they inherently bad or not bad? I don’t think so, but the question is, do they really get back to the core of what is the point of the church coming together.”
Maher says he thinks part of the reason for such disparate forms of worship is a growing distrust of “the church,” along with other institutions. That, he says, is a dangerous trend because “Jesus instituted the church. On a theological level, on a spiritual level the church is the bride of Christ. So, it’s like you can critique something on an institutional level, but you have to be careful because you’re tearing down the bride of Christ.”
But these days, Maher sees Christians looking back to some traditions like the structure of services in the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant churches such as Presbyterians and Methodists. The biggest evidence of that may be that at the beginning of the year, the No. 1 contemporary Christian music album and a hit on mainstream charts was the David Crowder Band’s Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys]), an album structured in the form of a Catholic Mass.
“They were drawn to the idea of the Mass as a performance piece by the great music composers of the past,” says Maher, who helped write some songs on that album. “All the world’s great composers, regardless of whether they were Protestant or not, looked to the Mass as a container for art. Bach was a staunch Lutheran, but he believed in liturgy, and his Masses were unbelievable.”
Maher has written songs such as Alive Again and I Love You, Lord that are now sung in contemporary worship churches around the world. He says the key to delineating between church and rock concert is being mindful of where he is.
“I worked at a Catholic church for 11 years where I played three Masses a week,” Maher says. “It was sort of understood this isn’t about us rocking out. It’s about worship. And I think that mind-set translates to other denominations.”
He says that he was mentored to understand the difference between playing for an audience that has paid to hear music and a congregation that has come together for communal worship.
“Yes, I am singing a song right now and I am playing music,” he says of leading worship. “But more importantly … the people of God are singing his praises and God is hearing the praises of his people. I want to be excited about that but reverent towards it.
“I think reverence is something that even non-Christians or non-practicing people of anything miss about church. I think that’s why people still walk into old cathedrals, because there is something mysterious and something reverent about it, and they kind of go, ‘Man, part of this seems really true to me,’ not the whole idea of ‘Jesus is my best friend, and he made the universe.’”
