Heart Music
Just returned from the annual pilgrimage to the Christian Resources Exhibition, with the usual bunch of catalogues and flyers!
One thing I did get was a CD Rom from WEC International. My family have been big WEC supporters for years and I grew up with missionaries staying over etc.
Through this CD I have learn a new word: Ethnodoxology!
I studied some ethnomusicology at uni, and ethnodoxolgy is related to it - its about cross cultural praise - worship across the world.
The emphasis is on heart music:
"Just as we all have a mother tongue language that we call our heart language, we all have styles of music that move us. We feel comfortable with it. This heart music enables us to reach out more easily to the living God and through it we can more clearly hear Him speaking to us. "
(John Oswald from the WEC CD Many Voices, One song).
Wow! I like that - that is so relevant to church in the West, before you leave these shores!

"However, time and time again, when a group of believers develop music from within their own culture to worship the true and living God, their expression of praise and adoration rises to a whole new level... Non-believers start to hear the message because they now understand the form of the music. The underlying feeling is that 'this message is for me' and from this groups of new believers come into being."(Oswald, as above).

Developing local/cultural ways of expressing praise is a key task in church planting.
How can we allow young people to do that? How can emerging church be genuinely of the culture without becoming another marketed form that is bought "off the shelf" (see Pete Ward's excellent Selling Worship).
And how do we then relate to the wider body?

If you want more on this stuff - and I think once again there is a lot to be learned from world missions thinking - there's always http://www.worldofworship.org/
or http://www.wec-int.org.uk/uk/involved/ethmus.htm

For this alone my trip to the CRE was worth it!(never mind my furstrations at Christian consumerism!).