On Bethel, Hillsong, and what actually happens when a church opens its mouth on a Sunday morning
I was standing in a room full of Christians last summer, singing a song I knew came from a church whose theology I don’t trust, and nobody around me was batting an eyelid. Neither, if I’m honest, was I — not until the second verse, when I caught myself and thought: do I even know who wrote this, or what they believe? I didn’t check the screen. I just sang.
That’s the real question underneath this whole debate, and it isn’t really about Bethel or Hillsong. It’s this: when a church sings something on a Sunday, treat it as a licensing formality, and we’ve already answered the question wrong. We treat song selection like a Spotify playlist — does it sound good, does the congregation know it, does it fit the slot before the sermon — and we hand the actual content of what a thousand people are about to say to God, and to each other, almost no thought at all.
Scripture doesn’t let us get away with that.
The word doing the singing
Paul tells the Colossians to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly, and the very next clause is about singing — teaching and admonishing one another, with gratitude in their hearts to God (Colossians 3:16). To the Ephesians, singing is what a Spirit-filled church sounds like: addressing “one another” in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:18–19). In both cases, the songs aren’t decoration around the real ministry. They are ministry. Someone is teaching your congregation theology, right now, in three-part harmony, whether or not that someone has ever set foot in your building.
And teaching never stays neutral. It doesn’t just deposit information; it builds trust in whoever’s voice carries it. Ask a teenager which podcasts they follow and you’ll find allegiance forming the same way sound doctrine is meant to form — repeated exposure to a voice that sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. Singing works faster than either, because it bypasses the analytical brain and lodges in memory before we’ve decided whether to agree.
Which is why this has happened before, badly. In the third century a gifted theologian named Arius set his denial of Christ’s full deity to popular tunes, and the melodies spread the heresy across the empire faster than his sermons ever could. Nobody remembers Arius for his arguments. They remember that people were still humming his theology in the marketplace long after the councils condemned it. A song doesn’t need bad information to do bad work — it just needs to make people trust the wrong source.
When the source becomes the question
Twelve years ago, Ian Carmichael wrote a piece for The Briefing warning churches away from Hillsong’s music on similar grounds. Since then the UK church has largely sung straight past the warning — Bethel and Hillsong songs still sit near the top of the CCLI Top 100 most seasons, and I’ve stood in conference halls where those songs got sung an hour before someone in a break-out room quietly distanced the programme from Bethel’s “school of supernatural ministry” in the same breath.
History gives some of this cover, but only so much. Robert Robinson wrote Come Thou Fount and later renounced his faith. Horatio Spafford wrote It Is Well and held strange views on judgement and the Holy Spirit. Martin Luther gave us A Mighty Fortress and also wrote tracts dripping with hostility toward Jews that the church rightly disowns. We’ve kept singing all three without mistaking it for an endorsement of the author’s worst chapter — and the reason we can is recency, not just quality. Robinson has been dead two hundred years; nothing we do this Sunday grows his following or funds his next chapter, because he doesn’t have one. A song from a ministry that is alive, growing, and actively using its music as its primary tool of outreach is a different transaction entirely: singing it doesn’t just risk associating with a flawed history, it participates in a live campaign. Rejecting a true song purely because of who wrote it is the genetic fallacy — but recognising that a true song can still fund and grow something you have real concerns about isn’t that fallacy at all. It’s a different, live question. A flawed hymn-writer, safely dead, whose words are sound, is not Arius setting live error to music. Discernment about the lyrics genuinely survives contact with an imperfect writer who can no longer benefit from our singing him.
That distinction stops being theoretical once you look at a ministry’s wider output. Bethel’s Bill Johnson has praised the Passion Translation as one of the great achievements in Bible translation in his lifetime; Andrew Shead, who teaches Old Testament and Hebrew at Moore Theological College and sits on the NIV translation committee, reviewed it for the journal Themelios and concluded it “no longer counts as Scripture”. That’s a specific, checkable claim about a specific product the same ministry promotes alongside its music, and it’s worth reading before deciding it doesn’t matter.
It’s also worth being fair about the present tense. A 2017 study of Hillsong’s output across nearly a decade found their lyrics shifting toward clearer, more didactic teaching about Christ over that period — churches and songwriters can and do course-correct, and “they’ve changed” isn’t automatically the excuse it can sound like. But that’s a research question for your elders to actually run down, not a line to accept because it’s convenient. John’s second letter warns against giving any welcome to false teaching that functions as validation (2 John 9–11) — and welcome is precisely the word for what a congregation does, unprompted, when it keeps singing someone’s songs for years without ever asking whether that welcome is still warranted.
What discernment about lyrics doesn’t survive is what happened in my own experience. Several people told me, unprompted, that they’d found their favourite podcast because they recognised the artist from songs they had sung Sunday morning — not from an album, not from a friend’s recommendation, but from four lines they had sang. That’s the Arius dynamic in miniature: sound lyrics functioning as an introduction to a living source, and the source doing the rest. It happens quietly, through the back door, exactly while we’re congratulating ourselves on having taught discernment from the front.
Who gets the royalty cheque
And introductions have a second, less visible cost. Every time a church sings a song on a Sunday, CCLI logs it, and money moves — pennies for a small church, thousands of pounds for a national conference — back to the church that wrote it, which, by their own account, funds their ongoing ministry.
Follow the chain all the way through. Singing shapes allegiance; allegiance runs toward a source; and if that source is a movement Albert Mohler has called “a prosperity movement for the millennials”, then singing their songs doesn’t only risk pointing our people toward them. It funds what they’ll find when they get there. We would never write a cheque to a ministry we believed was distorting the gospel. Corporate singing does exactly that, at scale, without most of the congregation ever realising a transaction has taken place at all.
That’s not the old Donatist worry that a flawed minister invalidates the ministry — the Church of England settled that one in the sixteenth century, when Article 26 insisted a sacrament is effectual because of Christ’s institution and promise, even when ministered by unworthy men, not because of the minister’s own righteousness. Nobody’s claiming the songs stop being true because of who wrote them. It’s Acts 20:28, where Paul tells the Ephesian elders that Christ bought this church with his own blood and charges them to guard her — a charge Hebrews 13:17 says shepherds will one day give account for. Guarding the flock plainly includes the money trail now, not only the lyric sheet, and CCLI reporting means that trail is fully visible to anyone willing to look at it.
Think of the newest person in the room
There’s a third cost the royalty statement doesn’t show, and it isn’t really about you at all. You might have the discernment to enjoy a song on Sunday and leave its writers’ theology exactly where you found it. But picture someone three months into faith, who liked what they sang, opens Spotify that evening to find it again — and the algorithm, which has no idea what a gospel is, quietly queues up the next four tracks from the same ministry. Nobody handed them a reading list. The platform did it for them, on autopilot, because that’s what recommendation engines are for.
Paul’s language for this is the weaker brother — someone whose conscience or judgement isn’t yet equipped to do what yours can (1 Corinthians 8:9–13; Romans 14:13–15). He doesn’t ask the strong to stop enjoying their freedom for its own sake. He asks them to notice when their freedom becomes someone else’s stumbling block, and to care about that person more than about being right. A song you can hold safely at arm’s length might, for someone newer in the room, be the on-ramp to a teaching ministry they have no framework yet to evaluate.
What elders are actually being asked to weigh
None of this is necessarily a case for blanket bans. Galatians 1:6–9 — Paul’s harshest test, reserved for a different gospel, not a flawed messenger — should stop us treating every theologically wobbly songwriter as anathema. It’s also worth a moment’s honesty about how entangled we already are: your TV licence part-funds programming you’d never endorse, and plenty of church giving schemes route money through structures with theology you wouldn’t sign off on line by line. There’s a case, in fact, that a church which sings one carefully weighed Bethel song teaches its people something a blanket ban can’t: how to hold a good line and a discerning mind at the same time, in public, as a model rather than a rule handed down. Avoidance is the easier skill; weighing well is the more useful one, because nobody will be vetting the rest of that person’s listening for them. Churches that land in different places, having genuinely weighed it, owe each other charity rather than suspicion.
The better churches I know do this weighing well: a team will sit with a word like “reckless” in a chorus about God’s love and actually ask whether that’s the right word for a Father who has never once lost control of his affection, rather than waving it through because the room already loves the tune. That’s guarding the flock from wolves with snappy melodies — Acts 20:28’s job description, carried out as ordinarily and unglamorously as a Tuesday staff meeting.
That’s the whole shift this piece is asking for: not “never sing Bethel,” not “interrogate every chorus into exhaustion,” but refusing to let the question stay invisible. Check the lyrics — most churches already do that much. Then ask where the royalty money is travelling, ask who else that song will introduce your newest members to once they go looking, and ask whether your congregation could tell you who wrote what they sang last Sunday, or whether it was just wallpaper with a good drumbeat behind it.
The word we’re actually lending
I keep coming back to Colossians 3:16, because it reframes the whole question away from where I first put it. This was never really about Bethel or Hillsong, or which names are safe to have on a lyric sheet. It’s about the fact that when your church opens its mouth on a Sunday, it is letting some word dwell richly among God’s people — teaching them, admonishing them, shaping what they think is true about him — and that word doesn’t stop being formative just because the tune was catchy and nobody checked the credits.
Christ bought this church. The words we let dwell in her belong to him. That’s not a reason to panic over every setlist — it’s a reason to notice, finally, that we’re choosing.
For a fuller framework, the four diagnostic questions at The Gospel Coalition are a helpful next step for elders. Bob Kauflin offers a calmer, more granular take at Worship Matters, worth reading alongside this piece rather than instead of it. Ben Slee’s team at Christ Church Mayfair have also put together the Dwell Richly Course — a free training for music leaders, named, fittingly, after the same verse this whole question keeps circling back to.
