Every once in a great while, you experience a worship song. It’s hard to explain the moment, but it’s as though the atmosphere itself shifts as the lyrics wrap around you. Such moments become core memories of a sort, where you can still remember the first time you heard the song. That was how it felt for me the first time I heard How He Loves and Reckless Love, which are both songs some people like to hate on—How He Loves for it’s line about a “sloppy wet kiss” and Reckless Love for calling God’s love “reckless” (a line which no one has memed harder than the author himself).
To some extent, what people want removed from these songs is the poetry, which is exactly what makes them the experiential songs they are. These songs force you into the lyrics. You can hardly sing the words on the screen until you’ve thought through them first. They are lyrics that are meant to provoke your imagination and challenge you, which is exactly what good poetry does. (This is why you can’t get through a Propaganda album without your mind being blown several times.)
But most worship songs don’t provoke. They’re made with cookie-cutter lyrics that share 80% vocabulary with all other popular worship songs our churches sing. They do not challenge us to think or make the Bible or God stand out in a new way. We don’t have core memories attached to them because we do not experience them in the same way.
Of course, most of these normal songs are not bad songs, and they do have their moments. And sure, it would be exhausting to have worship songs do nothing but provoke you. But in the same way that we need pastoral messages that provoke and prod and force us into them, so we need songs that do the same—especially on the theme of God’s love.
God, after all, is the poet of poets. God speaks poetically in the Bible because his voice is beautiful. And when he uses imagery in his writing, we cannot save our imagination from being forced into his lyrics.
For some new lyrics that force you into the story, check out the new albums my friends just wrote.
Jamin Bradley 
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