Home Worship Planning Music Resources The Kairos and Chronos of Church Music

The Kairos and Chronos of Church Music

We United Methodists join most of the rest of the faith in paying great attention to keeping time. We order our days by the clock and our weeks and months by the calendar. We mark the natural order of passing time ordained by God's creation in the seasons, even though we now know that these are caused by the tilt of the earth on its axis and the distance from the sun. We usually get up, eat, go to work or school, come home to relax or pursue other endeavors, and do a host of things, all according to the clock and calendar. Farmers plant and harvest, manufacturers make things, merchants sell merchandise, educators teach . . . even preachers preach and church musicians perform music according to clock and calendar time.

The Greeks called this sense of time chronos. It refers to chronological or sequential time. It is always with us, determining the order and duration of our activities. As church musicians, it controls the day and starting and ending time of our rehearsals. Chronos may also control even the sequence of what we do in rehearsal. It is an important factor in ordering our worship services. As we plan for the choir selections, the organ preludes, the solos, the hymns and psalms, the sequence of praise songs and choruses for the praise team and people, we are planning worship under the influence of chronos.

Chronos and our understanding and creative use of it are good things. I am in favor of musicians and pastors always being aware of chronos as we plan and lead worship. It makes for good order, good flow and sequence, and leads to good congregational participation. That's one reason I am in favor of pastors and musicians paying attention to the liturgical calendar and using the lectionary to plan worship and music.

But there is another sense of time identified by the Greeks as kairos, a "time in between." It might be a moment or a longer period, but it is a time when something unique, important, or special happens. Kairos is certainly unexpected and unplanned. It just happens. With chronos, there is the sense of quantity; but with kairos, there is the sense of quality. With kairos, there is also the sense of God's time, or as the Bible says, "the fullness of time."

Jesus' birth in Bethlehem was certainly a kairos event. We may mark the birth of Jesus as a day on our calendar and a season in our liturgical year (chronos), but understanding it as the coming of God into the lives of humans, of establishing a new order, and all that that means for each of us is what the Greeks meant by kairos. It is this sense of time that is not governed or bound by clock and calendar time.

We can become so comfortable with, even bound by, chronos that it is difficult for us to recognize those kairos moments and events when God is breaking through to us. To live only by chronos is to live a life of impoverished spirit, rigid, predetermined, not expecting and unaware of the serendipities of God that come with kairos.

As church musicians, we should expect kairos moments to break through. We don't anticipate them or try to make them happen, we just expect and welcome them. And when they come, we should see them as moments for growth, discipleship, and transformation. It may be something that happened that day at school to one of our young choir members; perhaps an unexpected death in a church member's family, or even an expected death of an aged parent. Have you ever had the congregation sing a hymn or song and they didn't seem to want to stop -- they wanted to sing it again or add a few more choruses? If instead you quit after the last stanza and went on to the next item in the bulletin, then you are likely a slave to chronos thinking, but if you yielded to it as the breaking in of the Holy Spirit into the worship of God's people, then you understand the meaning of kairos.

I am privileged to often hear great preaching in my travels. All too often following a challenging or moving sermon, the worship leader will immediately stand up and announce the closing hymn. But sometimes the worship leader recognizes that perhaps God is indeed speaking to these people through this messenger (surprise, surprise!), and that people need a moment -- a kairos moment -- to sit in silent and personal contemplation, devotion, repentance, commitment, or whatever is the appropriate response to the message.

If we allow the chronos of time to fully influence our planning and leading of worship, with its minutes, hours, days, months, seasons, and years, then we have chronologized God's Spirit out of our worship and out of our lives. But if we understand the meaning and importance of kairos, expect it to break through, and are then sensitive enough to lead our people into experiencing that aspect of God-time, then we are truly ministers of music.

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