This past weekend saw the release of Steven Curtis Chapman’s latest, a worship album called Worship and Believe.  The two terms in the title hang together awkwardly.  We might think that the reverse is the appropriate order: believe and worship.  We may even think of them as discrete units: worship here and believe there, but not both at the same time.  Early in the album, though, you get the sense that the two go hand-in-hand all of the time.

My favorite track from the album is a great example of this.  “Who You Say We Are” has a simple lyric that expresses a profound truth well.  And that profound truth, that God declares us to be sons and daughters, is something we believe and that informs our worship.   As the song says, the most we can say is “thank you.”  Check out the song in this Essential Music “song session.”

It is this simplicity of lyric that I like the most about the album.  Too often we sing songs of worship that are overly and unnecessarily complicated.  We get lost in trying to get the melody and the meaning down at the same time.  Maybe it is enough, for at least a time, to songs over and reflect on the most basic implications of our faith’s truth claims: that Jesus the Son brings us back to the Father, that we are indeed His sons and daughters, and that the most we can say is “thank you.”

The rest of the album is solid.  You’ve got your crowd-pleasing fast tracks (“Amen” and “We are More than Conquerors”).  You’ve got songs that I would call more “obvious” in terms of worship stuff like “King of Love,” “One True God,” and “God of Forever.”  But for me, for now, it’s the simple moments of “Who You Say We Are” and “Hallelujah (You Are Good”) that give me the most traction (and some wonderfully simple and hummable melodies).  Or maybe I just like the great use of the criminally-underused hallelujah.