Ask a younger worship leader how they decide whether a new song belongs in a Sunday service, and the honest answer is often that they are not sure. That is the gap a Houston worship leader has spent the past year trying to close — with artificial intelligence.
Tyler Anson Newberry has led worship for more than 30 years, in Southern Baptist and nondenominational churches, and he has come to rely on what he calls an internal song theology. “I have this algorithm in my mind built on personal experience. I can look at the first verse, chorus, bridge, and make the judgment,” he told Christianity Today. But he noticed that younger leaders have no equivalent, and he traced part of the gap to the absence of help from denominations. Without denominational guides or standardised theological training, he says, many worship leaders end up choosing songs on musical preference rather than theological content. “A lot of young worship leaders don’t know that they need Bible training,” he said. “They have been sold a faulty bill of goods from Instagram and YouTube that tells them that all they have to be is talented.”
Just over a year ago Newberry and his wife, Leslianne, left full-time church ministry to found Asaph’s Table, a nonprofit that trains and supports worship leaders in the Houston area. Out of those conversations came SongTheology, a tool that scores a song’s lyrics out of 35 points across seven categories: scriptural grounding, doctrinal clarity, God-centredness, gospel presence, clarity versus ambiguity, congregational usefulness and pastoral durability. Newberry wrote the criteria himself; the analysis is carried out by Claude. The popular worship song “Gratitude” by Brandon Lake, for example, scores 20 out of 35, flagged for a lack of gospel clarity and for “emotion without theological grounding” — the evaluation notes that the song “speaks of gratitude and worship of a king but never names Christ, mentions the cross, grace, forgiveness, or any redemptive work that would ground Christian worship.”
A second tool, Asaph, approaches the task from the other direction. Founded by Alex Moyse, a worship leader in Sydney whose father was an early member of Hillsong Church, Asaph is an “AI worship planning assistant” that proposes setlists and tracks the theological and emotional balance of a congregation’s worship over time, analysing “underused themes, gaps in theology or overused emotions.” Moyse first tried offering training material for worship teams, and found it did not take. A fellow leader’s reply, he recalled, was: “I don’t have time to onboard my team and do the whole training thing.” Both men insist that discernment stays human. “AI is not trained to think about this stuff,” Moyse said. “It’s doing a lot of the grunt work, and there is still a human in the loop.”
Not everyone is convinced the trade is worth making. Mark Porter, a British researcher who studies congregational music at the University of Erfurt in Germany, tested Asaph and found it could “put together a coherent musical set” — but he cautions that the people who build such tools bring their own point of view to the instructions they give the technology, and that a song is more than its words. “Some elements of music are easily captured by a computer model,” he said. “But songs have histories of being interpreted in different ways in different historical contexts. Over time, they acquire meanings and uses that aren’t captured in the text.” His test for any worship leader weighing such a tool is simple: “Ask, ‘Does this tool help me to think more deeply? Or does it just reduce this all to a mechanical task?’”
The detail most likely to interest free churches is where the gap these tools fill came from. Historic denominations — the United Methodist Church and the Christian Reformed Church among them — have published optional guides to help local congregations weigh contemporary worship music, and Southern Baptists have unofficial filters in Lifeway Worship and SBC Worship. But those do not offer explicit theological evaluation, and worship leaders serving in nondenominational or loosely networked churches, the article notes, “have to find their own song-evaluation resources.” Moyse hopes a tool like his can eventually run the other way, letting a local congregation write a song, enter it, and have a nearby church discover it: “I am hoping that this tool can help invert the system that brings worship music from the industry down to the local church.” Newberry is more modest about his own. “To those who don’t want to bring AI into this process, I get it,” he said. “This is just my attempt to help guide people into a new way of thinking. It’s a tool to help you begin to not need this tool.”
Source: Christianity Today — christianitytoday.com
