Dan Lucarini is a former "rock music" composer and performer, who was converted to Christianity. This book is about his personal odyssey of attempting to use his gifts to serve the Lord in the church as a church musician and "worship leader." The conclusion he came to is that it is not possible to serve God in his house of worship by the use of rock music. The book is written in a rather non-theological, and a very non-judgmental way. Although he has a few appropriate Scriptures interspersed throughout, there is no attempt made to exegete and expound these texts. Rather the book is premised on the author’s subjective experiences as a "worship leader" in several evangelical churches.The strength of the book is that it represents the consistent attempt of a sincere Christian to use his gifts to serve the Lord in the sphere of contemporary Christian music and his utter failure to accomplish that. If anyone could succeed in doing this in a Biblical fashion one would think that Dan Lucarini would be such a person. His profession of faith, his gifts, and his sincere desire to serve God are all manifest in the book. If he cannot succeed in implementing the dreams of the advocates of contemporary Christian music then no one can, and we can conclude that it is practically impossible. That it is also Biblically and theologically impossible would be the subject of another book.Lucarini stresses the worldliness of this music, and that its use by the churches has not succeeded in bringing the ungodly into Christianity as much as it has succeeded in bringing the world, and its worldliness, into the church. A worship service becomes transmogrified from a service to glorify God and minister to his saints to a service designed to appeal to the musical tastes of the unconverted. The cult of personality with its attendant egos, immodesty in dress, a theologically fuzzy message designed to mute the offense of the gospel, and a slippery slope of constantly more "edgier" musical styles, are some of the practical problems that Lucarini sets forth as the inevitable fruit of appealing to the world in one worship styles.Lucarini also devotes significant attention to deconstructing all the shibboleths of the movement and the arguments by which the movement defends itself, such as that there are historic precedents for using worldly music in the churches (Ed. Note: The Huguenot Louis Bourgeois wrote all the musical tunes for the Genevan Psalter whose influence was paramount in the Reformation. The tunes were not taken from the taverns of Geneva!), that it is the only way to reach unsaved youth, etc.The weakness of the book is that it lacks a Biblical theology of worship. So all the author can do is point the way back to tradition, That leaves one with Charles Wesley and Fanny Crosby, et. al. A true reformation of worship requires a Biblical doctrine of worship and would lead the churches back to the divinely inspired Psalter and music designed to stress the awe, reverence, and humility that necessarily accompanies the true worship of the living God.
