The question of who writes the songs a congregation sings has moved from niche debate to a live pastoral concern. Writing in Premier Christianity, Kenny Klinglesmith — a worship songwriter who co-wrote songs with the Austin Stone Worship collective — asks how much the character and beliefs of a songwriter should matter when their words become "the prayers of God's people". His conclusion is a careful one: character cannot be ignored, but neither can it be made into a test of moral perfection.
The essay is grounded in a specific event. In 2024, Austin Stone Community Church in Texas fired its worship pastor, Aaron Ivey, after allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct emerged. Ivey had co-written the majority of the songs the church's music collective had produced over the previous decade. When leaders asked him to revoke his rights to those songs and he refused, they pulled the entire catalogue from streaming platforms and stopped singing any song carrying his writing credit — including one Klinglesmith had co-written. Songs that had ministered to many people disappeared overnight.
The more recent prompt was a conference for academics writing on worship, where an industry panel celebrated the growing crossover between Christian and country music, pointing to songwriter Brandon Lake leading a Sunday-morning worship event at the Country Music Association Awards. When Klinglesmith asked what responsibility the Christian music industry bears when a country artist who does not profess Christian faith writes or co-writes a worship song, Ryan Dahl, chief executive of PraiseCharts, answered "None", arguing it is impossible to monitor the thousands of artists the industry represents. Another panellist added that it is hard to tell someone who did not grow up in the Christian world that they are not qualified to talk about Jesus.
Klinglesmith pushes back on what he reads as a commercial answer to a theological problem. If worship songs are, as pastor Tony Merida describes them, "portable theology", then songwriters are creating theologically formative content — art that is, in effect, teaching the church. He points to James 3:1, "Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly", and argues that if worship songs carry that teaching weight, then songwriters deserve at least some of the scrutiny applied to those who teach God's people. He notes there is precedent: in 2020 several Christian publishers removed the songs of composer David Haas following allegations of sexual misconduct, reasoning that continuing to sing them could retraumatise survivors.
Yet he also resists making the test absolute. The answer, he writes, lies somewhere between complete indifference and "Pollyanna perfectionism" — songwriters cannot be morally perfect, and he concedes the Psalms complicate any hard line. David, he notes, was both a murderer and guilty of grievous sexual sin, and his Psalms have never been pulled from the canon, even though his repentance was genuine. Still, Klinglesmith concludes, to claim character is irrelevant lacks pastoral wisdom in this cultural moment, and there is a profound difference between befriending someone on the fringes of faith and inviting them to shape the theological truths the church sings. To reduce songwriting for the church to mere content creation, he warns, is to abandon the sacred weight songwriting carries in forming disciples.
Source: Premier Christianity — premierchristianity.com
