Thomas Mack in the style of the old masters

Check out this song by Thomas Mack.

This season (2009) of America Idol had several finalists who were Christian worship leaders.  We stopped by Calvary Chapel Old Bridge, where Thomas Mack is a worship leader, to talk to about this phenomenon and a few other things.  In this installment Thomas will talk about incorporating contemporary music styles into Christian worship.  This is part 3 of a 4 part interview.  Part 1 can be found here.

How did you get to Calvary Chapel in New Jersey?

My sophomore year was my last year in college.  At the end of my sophomore year I was burnt. I still wanted to do music but I was tired of learning about music.  I wanted to go do music. I learned a lot that sophomore year.   I aced music theory.  Ear training was a little harder for me.  But, I just wanted to move on and start doing things.

My dad was friends with Lloyd, the pastor at Calvary Chapel, from college and he said why you don’t go spend three weeks with Lloyd.  I had seen Lloyd when I was growing up.  We had gone to Israel with Lloyd and the church.  So I came out initially for three weeks and long story short, this July will be four years that I have been here.

When I got here, what I wanted to do was score some kind of recording contract with someone paying me to make music.  Which in a different way happened I guess,   being at the church and being able to be on staff making music?

Coming out of school, the church was the last place I wanted to be.  I thought in the church, I would be restricted in a lot of ways and I wanted the freedom to do whatever.  But the Lord really…..It been interesting coming here.  I see that God has a plan in my life.  If I had planned it out I would have moved to Nashville with some friends who were down there or something and worked at Starbucks for a while to get my feet under me.   But the Lord had a totally different plan.

The Lord has really changed my perspective on things that I had seen as restrictions in the church.   Pop music is wide open; if you can make it sound cool you can do it.  But in the church, there are certain things you can’t do, there not appropriate.     But at the same time I am starting to see those as challenges more so than restrictions.  This past year we did the horn section in the Christimas recording.  Before, I had a smaller view of music in the church.

I’ve been studying people like J. S Bach, who was the greatest Christian musician probably ever, who faced the same things 300 years ago that we face now.  He would go out and he would hear these different people play and he would want to incorporate it into the church and the next Sunday he would be called before the elders of the Church who would say, “What are you doing?  It’s really distracting people and stuff”.   So it became apparent to me that it is more of a challenge.  Because if you do something really well and tastefully you can do a horn section in church.  You can incorporate elements of hip hop.  I don’t know that we are going to do that.  But I think  you have to be patient with the church and gradually move people and push their boundaries.   If normally you do hymns in church and then you come out one Sunday and you have a guest musician who is a rapper  you are just going to blow their minds and that is unkind to them and they think what the heck was that.

Well, how would you do rap in Church?

If we were to do it, the easy thing to do would be incorporate it into something where people are not expected to sing along.  The syllables come so fast.  If it were an interlude in a song we could do that.  It would be a little harder if you were trying to fit it into congregational worship.  The mechanics of the music are hard for someone to mimic and sing along.  So it has to be in a special thing or some portion of the service where it can still be used to edify people and point them towards the Lord but where they are not expected to sing along with the rapper.

This is part 3 of a 4 part interview.  In part 2, Thomas talks about studying nursing in college and dropping out to pursue music. Part 2 can be found here.