Worship music has often been the subject of contention; in some of the more regrettable cases men and women have even paid with their own lives.  In other instances, the carnage that has resulted from such worship wars includes the splitting of churches, pastors being fired and in most cases droves of people leaving the church.  Ever since the Council of Laodicea in the 4th Century to the Reformation, the issue of disagreement had been should the laity sing in church.  Then from the Reformation onwards into the Puritan times, questions have been raised as to whether or not the church could sing songs outside the Book of Psalms.  When we approach the Victorian era where there was a greater conscience on the "self," hymns began to reflect our personal affection for Jesus.  This became an issue of strife: how dare we speak of our transcendent God in the same way we speak of a spouse or a friend?  Isn't this a blatant sign of irreverence?  Fast forward into the 1970s right into the 1990s, many in the church began criticising the hymns as being stilted, archaic and irrelevant.  Thus, choruses with no more than a couple of verses were written.  About half a dozen years ago, the pendulum swings again, many began to find chorus singing repetitive and trite.  As a result, worship songs became more hymn-like again.  Some have even harkened back to the hymns and began writing new verses or chorus or tag lines to them. 

Integrity Music's "Just As I Am: A Legacy of Hymns and Worship" captures in Kodak form where the current state of our worship music is at now.  This collection features 13 worship songs all of which have been garnered from previous Integrity Music releases ranging from material as old as 2001's Robin Mark's "Ancient Words" to material as new as this year's Darlene Zschech's "My Jesus I Love Thee." Here on this 13 song collection we find two forms of worship music represented:  first, we have the re-imagined hymns where the ancient chestnuts of the church have been re-vamped with newly written refrains or verses or tag lines added.  Second, we have worship songs that adopt a hymn-like verse chorus verse structure.  Representing songs from the former grouping is Brenton Brown who has taken the hymn "Just As I Am" and has written a new chorus to go with it.  While the original hymn has a repetitive flow to it, Brown by adding a newly written chorus actually breaks up the monotony.

Darlene Zschech equally excels in her version of "My Jesus I Love Thee."  Teaming up with Michael W. Smith to compose a bridge to this hymn, this avails more expressive moments where we can declare our love for Jesus.  Travis Cottrell, on the other hand, is most ambitious when he takes Darlene Zschech's "Worthy Is the Lamb" and sandwiches it seamlessly within two hymns "In the Cross" and "Crown Him with Many Crowns."   As for the newer worship songs, Israel Houghton's Grammy winning "Jesus At the Center" is one of the most lyrically coherent paean as it develops the theme of the centrality of Jesus across various contexts that is worthy for us to take to heart.  And taken from Don Moen's 2004 "Thank You Lord" album is his classic flute-intro "When It's All Said And Done."  Though the album faults on the fact that there are no newly recorded songs but to have some of the biggest names in current worship music (like the aforementioned Zschech, Rend Collective Experiement, Kari Jobe) and some of the genre's veterans (such as Robin Mark, Moen and Paul Baloche) on one CD is itself a treat.  Frankly, of all the epochs of worship music, we are living in the best of times as we still get to enjoy the hymns but also such well crafted God-centred worship songs.