Eric Sarwar (PhD ICS ’21) founded the Tehillim School of Church Music & Worship in Karachi, Pakistan, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. He is also the lead pastor of Artesia City Church in Artesia, California, an Indian Pakistani congregation he started in 2015. He is the author of Psalms, Islam, and Shalom: A Common Heritage of Divine Songs for Muslim-Christian Friendship.
Yolanda Miller: Can you tell me about the Tehillim School of Church Music & Worship that you founded?
Eric Sarwar: The Tehillim School of Church Music & Worship is Pakistan’s pioneer school of worship and music studies and is an interdisciplinary learning ministry center. Founded in 2003, the school educates, equips, and engages young leaders through in-person and online training, seminars, consultations, and symposiums, reflecting on areas of church music and worship. Our nationwide events include ecumenical gatherings for music and mission conferences, theological education consultations, leadership retreats, and interfaith engagements
in Pakistan.
Tehillim is a Christian school that connects theology and art. Because the Pakistani context is an aural culture, we use music as a cultural and contextual approach to build bridges. I designed the curriculum and courses almost 15 to 20 years ago; now we are initiating online and in-person courses that expand our ministry to
other areas of Pakistan. We’ll not only serve practicing church musicians, but we’ll also offer classes to theological seminaries.
YM: What is it like to have a school of church worship in a 96 percent Muslim country? Is persecution a factor?
ES: Well, persecution is part of regular life in Pakistan. Persecution and marginalization on a personal and institutional level is a part of the package in that context. However, it helps that Tehillim is a totally local cultural endeavor. When I started it 20 years ago, I started it without any Western influences. There was no Western model, there was no Western funding. It was totally indigenous. I was born and raised in that country, and I had various Muslim friends who were in Muslim bands, in the entertainment industry, and in the education industry.
But persecution persists. When I was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church on the outskirts of Karachi City, our church was attacked a couple times by people in the neighborhood. My wife and my kids were threatened at gunpoint. You see how my finger is crooked? That is the result of a tussle I got into, and I’m just glad I can still play my instruments.
Anyone can bring blasphemy accusations against you. People can accuse you if you are a Christian. But they can also accuse you if you’re well off or they just don’t like you. They can try to force conversions. That kind of fear is a regular part of life. That’s why, generally, parents teach their children not to talk to anyone about religion, because once you do, you will be prone to blasphemy accusations.The interesting thing is, in Pakistan’s private schools, which are mostly Muslim, 70 to 80 percent of the music teachers are Christians.
ym: Wow! How is that the case?
ES: Well, the schools need music teachers. And Christians have an advantage in that they’ve grown up singing and playing in the churches. In Islam and in the mosques, they don’t use musical instruments because there is a myth that music is haram or illegitimate, although I have busted that myth in my book.
YM: I’m beginning to see how music can be a key tool in building bridges between Christians and Muslims.
ES: Yes, but the majority of theological curricula and mission strategies are still under the Western influence. The Presbyterian Church, Anglican Church, Roman Catholic Church—all these churches in Pakistan are the byproducts of Western colonialism. The Western Protestant church under the Enlightenment brought Western models of mission to different cultures. Probably a century ago, that was workable, but in this day and age, it’s not going to work. That’s why Tehillim uses a cultural, contextual approach.
YM: What does the church need to do to change? What would be more effective today?
ES: We must move away from an exclusive theology and aggressive methodology. Western mission from the past 14 centuries tried to put a square peg into a round hole. It was all about literary approaches and cognition. Missionaries were equipped with a Western mindset
with Western approaches, and they applied these to non-Western contexts.
Christianity is not about Western religion but about Jesus. So our primary missional approach at Tehillim is using cultural arts, including music, dance, and theater, to develop a theological praxis, not from something outside our context, but in a way that reflects our culture, theology, and biblical understanding of the Christian message. There is a need to develop creative and dramatic musical and aural resources, which work in an orally literate context like ours rather than only using printed words and rational thinking. My critique of Western mission is that it has misunderstood the Muslim mind—or any aural culture, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. You must know your context, then see how you can engage people where they feel at home—then they won’t see you as a foreign invasion.
YM: Can you tell me more about what you call “the Muslim mind”? What is it about the Muslim mind that Western missionaries deeply misunderstand?
es: The first misunderstanding is that all Muslims are the same. They are not. Radical or militant Muslims are only a small fraction of Muslims. They are visible, vocal, and violent, so the world pays attention to them.
Secondly, in my opinion, it is not always helpful to quote directly from the New Testament when you engage with Muslims. The apostle Paul quoted local Greek poets when he was engaging with people in the Greco-Roman context. He built a bridge, connected with the local culture, and then led them to the “unknown God.” You need to develop a connection most of all. So in my approach, I start with Zabur, because the book of Psalms is non-confrontational, and every Muslim, from any sect or context, believes that the Psalms of the Prophet David is a divine revelation. Strangely, the Zabur has been neglected by Christian missions for the past 14 centuries as a path to Muslim engagement.
YM: So the Psalms are almost like a key that unlocks a path to Jesus for you in your work with Muslims?
es: Yes, that’s what I believe. For 14 centuries, we have muted this powerful tool that God has given us—a musical, cultural, and global mandate to engage with the world. Even Jesus used this book with Jews and Gentiles, and the book of Psalms is quoted in the New Testament extensively. So that is my call: to put forth the challenge to not only read the Psalms with a theological or spiritual or even a linguistic or poetic lens. We also need to read Psalms with a missional lens.
YM: Can you give me an example of what that would
look like?
es: One of my tools is the Punjabi Psalter, the Psalms translated into the Punjabi language and musically composed in Indian raga—an Indian classical music style —a century ago. The project was started in the 1890s by Presbyterian missionaries, and when the whole corpus of 150 psalms was finished, the entirety of it was 405 pieces of completely raga, locally embedded and composed music, translated into the local language.
So, generally, wherever Western missions reached, they brought their own Western hymns and songs. But the Western musical invasion failed when they arrived in North India, especially in the Punjab mission. Why? Because we had our own more than 3,000-year-old,
raga-based musical system, and it was part of our DNA. The sitar, tanpura, and our unique melodic structures are why sound is among Pakistan’s and India’s most distinctive identities. Ours is an aural culture, so the church and mission need to explore the sonic culture, our musical culture, to engage us.
The Psalms give us a text. But tune, or melody, is cultural. The song should be wherever you are. Use the maqam modal system if you are in a Middle Eastern culture. If you are in an Indian Pakistani culture, use the raga-based system. For example, Psalm 100 says, “People of the earth, come and praise God with gladness and sing a song to the Lord.” But what kind of musical system are you going to use? You’re not going to use Western classical music in a Pakistani context; you’re going to use Pakistani music. So when it says, “sing a song,” there’s flexibility to use local music culture and your own heart music to praise the Lord with the words in the book of Psalms.
YM: That is beautiful! I hear you saying that Christian mission needs to reimagine the ways we bring the gospel to the world. You’ve demonstrated one way of doing that—through the use of local arts and a common point of intersection for Muslims and Christians in the Psalms. Do you have suggestions for what this looks like for those of us in the West?
es: We need to understand the future of global missions in the 21st century and beyond as diasporic and doxological. By diasporic, I mean this: Western Christianity is weakening. But God is bringing to the Western church Christian immigrants from around the world, who are coming with their cultures, values, and gifts of faith because they have had to be totally dependent upon God’s providence and direct intervention. They have lots of stories; many of them are faith stories. Not only are they bringing gifts, but also, they are a gift. So rather than treating and looking at them as a kind of liability, recognize them and receive them as the gift they are. We need people and scholars and voices that are non-Western voices, voices of people of color, and internal voices from countries outside of the West because that’s the future of the global church.
The future of the global church and mission is also doxological. Why? Because that’s the purpose of the church. Doxology is praising God—that’s doxo. If you read the Luke-Acts narrative, where does the Luke narrative start? With Zechariah worshiping in the temple. So Luke begins with a worship encounter, a doxological encounter. Then he continues this theme—that’s why the first three chapters are full of canticles: Mary’s Magnificat, the angels’ Gloria, and Simeon’s song.
Jesus’ first announcement is in the synagogue, and eventually, Jesus’ departure and ascension see him giving an Aaronic blessing, raising his hands like a high priest. In Acts, the early church was continuously worshiping, praying, and then feasting on the day of Pentecost. Everything is centered around doxology, the worship encounter. We read Luke-Acts with a missional, historical, or theological perspective, but they are doxological books.
Then there’s ethnodoxology. If you read Psalm 67, Psalm 98, Psalm 100, or Psalm 145, all of these Psalms portray a global expression of God’s kingdom—all ethnicities, peoples, and nations giving praise to God. Whatever these immigrant churches bring is a gift; they’re bringing the language, music, art, hymns, and everything, and it’s all for the church, not just their church. This is why we need to revisit our theology of mission from a diasporic and doxological perspective.
YM: In what ways can we welcome the gift of the
diasporic church?
es: That’s very easy. First of all, don’t patronize them. Sometimes, we see them as poor Christians—economically insufficient, educationally deficient—and a by-product of Western missions. But this current generation of Christians is not a by-product. They’re raised and born in a Christian church. Many are fourth- and fifth-generation believers, raised and born in that cultural context.
Next, churches can make it their own personal responsibility to engage. Every church can connect with the Global South through missionaries and seminaries. And now God is bringing many immigrants and refugees seeking asylum from persecution right to their front door. Open your doors and give them spaces to worship in. This is a way even shrinking churches with empty rooms can support and help them grow. But provide them with the notion that they are not second-class or inferior citizens. Sometimes the host church thinks they are a liability to us if they’re using our space.
But Revelation 5:9 gives us a vision of a global, multicultural church. In Acts, after chapter 11, there is no Jewish church story. The Jewish church disappears, and there is only a global church story. Why? Here’s a lesson for the 21st-century church: if you are an isolated church—only white, only Black, yellow, brown, whatever—you will not be around for a long time. Because that’s how God’s kingdom works. It is constantly expanding, it’s always vital and vibrant, and a mix of ethnicities.
YM: I’ve heard a critique of the movement to try to move towards multiethnic churches in the US: that they’re multiethnic, but they’re not multicultural. You might have people of different ethnicities, but they predominantly identify with the dominant culture. Or the church leadership and models are all defined by the dominant culture. So, like in Acts, how do we integrate the old with the new?
es: It’s a new phenomenon. And first of all, we need to drop our superiority complex. I would say start with small steps because people get scared sometimes. I’m not saying change everything or integrate right away. There are cultural and language barriers and they would get lost if you did that. But the host culture needs to see immigrants as guests.
I propose inviting them and allowing them their space to grow. Just begin with getting to know them and engaging with them. Invite them to share their culture, food, music, and themselves at social gatherings or outreaches. Find opportunities tied to the Christian calendar, where they are invited to participate; have them bring songs from their culture to add to your worship service; or plug them into Scripture readings, prayers, and sharing their testimonies. Host a festival where you have some cultural engagement out in the community. Provide various avenues where you can find places for the congregations to overlap.
These are small ways you give them a place, an equal place, at the table. Because when you receive a gift, you don’t hide it away, right? If you really see them as a gift, you’ll cherish them, you know?
Yolanda “Yo” Miller leads spiritual formation groups for Fuller, teh De Pree Center, and Soul Care in Boulder, CO. Learn more about her and her work as a soul coach at yo-miller.com.
Eric Sarwar (PhD ICS ’21) founded the Tehillim School of Church Music & Worship in Karachi, Pakistan, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. He is also the lead pastor of Artesia City Church in Artesia, California, an Indian Pakistani congregation he started in 2015. He is the author of Psalms, Islam, and Shalom: A Common Heritage of Divine Songs for Muslim-Christian Friendship.
Yolanda Miller: Can you tell me about the Tehillim School of Church Music & Worship that you founded?
Eric Sarwar: The Tehillim School of Church Music & Worship is Pakistan’s pioneer school of worship and music studies and is an interdisciplinary learning ministry center. Founded in 2003, the school educates, equips, and engages young leaders through in-person and online training, seminars, consultations, and symposiums, reflecting on areas of church music and worship. Our nationwide events include ecumenical gatherings for music and mission conferences, theological education consultations, leadership retreats, and interfaith engagements
in Pakistan.
Tehillim is a Christian school that connects theology and art. Because the Pakistani context is an aural culture, we use music as a cultural and contextual approach to build bridges. I designed the curriculum and courses almost 15 to 20 years ago; now we are initiating online and in-person courses that expand our ministry to
other areas of Pakistan. We’ll not only serve practicing church musicians, but we’ll also offer classes to theological seminaries.
YM: What is it like to have a school of church worship in a 96 percent Muslim country? Is persecution a factor?
ES: Well, persecution is part of regular life in Pakistan. Persecution and marginalization on a personal and institutional level is a part of the package in that context. However, it helps that Tehillim is a totally local cultural endeavor. When I started it 20 years ago, I started it without any Western influences. There was no Western model, there was no Western funding. It was totally indigenous. I was born and raised in that country, and I had various Muslim friends who were in Muslim bands, in the entertainment industry, and in the education industry.
But persecution persists. When I was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church on the outskirts of Karachi City, our church was attacked a couple times by people in the neighborhood. My wife and my kids were threatened at gunpoint. You see how my finger is crooked? That is the result of a tussle I got into, and I’m just glad I can still play my instruments.
Anyone can bring blasphemy accusations against you. People can accuse you if you are a Christian. But they can also accuse you if you’re well off or they just don’t like you. They can try to force conversions. That kind of fear is a regular part of life. That’s why, generally, parents teach their children not to talk to anyone about religion, because once you do, you will be prone to blasphemy accusations.The interesting thing is, in Pakistan’s private schools, which are mostly Muslim, 70 to 80 percent of the music teachers are Christians.
ym: Wow! How is that the case?
ES: Well, the schools need music teachers. And Christians have an advantage in that they’ve grown up singing and playing in the churches. In Islam and in the mosques, they don’t use musical instruments because there is a myth that music is haram or illegitimate, although I have busted that myth in my book.
YM: I’m beginning to see how music can be a key tool in building bridges between Christians and Muslims.
ES: Yes, but the majority of theological curricula and mission strategies are still under the Western influence. The Presbyterian Church, Anglican Church, Roman Catholic Church—all these churches in Pakistan are the byproducts of Western colonialism. The Western Protestant church under the Enlightenment brought Western models of mission to different cultures. Probably a century ago, that was workable, but in this day and age, it’s not going to work. That’s why Tehillim uses a cultural, contextual approach.
YM: What does the church need to do to change? What would be more effective today?
ES: We must move away from an exclusive theology and aggressive methodology. Western mission from the past 14 centuries tried to put a square peg into a round hole. It was all about literary approaches and cognition. Missionaries were equipped with a Western mindset
with Western approaches, and they applied these to non-Western contexts.
Christianity is not about Western religion but about Jesus. So our primary missional approach at Tehillim is using cultural arts, including music, dance, and theater, to develop a theological praxis, not from something outside our context, but in a way that reflects our culture, theology, and biblical understanding of the Christian message. There is a need to develop creative and dramatic musical and aural resources, which work in an orally literate context like ours rather than only using printed words and rational thinking. My critique of Western mission is that it has misunderstood the Muslim mind—or any aural culture, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. You must know your context, then see how you can engage people where they feel at home—then they won’t see you as a foreign invasion.
YM: Can you tell me more about what you call “the Muslim mind”? What is it about the Muslim mind that Western missionaries deeply misunderstand?
es: The first misunderstanding is that all Muslims are the same. They are not. Radical or militant Muslims are only a small fraction of Muslims. They are visible, vocal, and violent, so the world pays attention to them.
Secondly, in my opinion, it is not always helpful to quote directly from the New Testament when you engage with Muslims. The apostle Paul quoted local Greek poets when he was engaging with people in the Greco-Roman context. He built a bridge, connected with the local culture, and then led them to the “unknown God.” You need to develop a connection most of all. So in my approach, I start with Zabur, because the book of Psalms is non-confrontational, and every Muslim, from any sect or context, believes that the Psalms of the Prophet David is a divine revelation. Strangely, the Zabur has been neglected by Christian missions for the past 14 centuries as a path to Muslim engagement.
YM: So the Psalms are almost like a key that unlocks a path to Jesus for you in your work with Muslims?
es: Yes, that’s what I believe. For 14 centuries, we have muted this powerful tool that God has given us—a musical, cultural, and global mandate to engage with the world. Even Jesus used this book with Jews and Gentiles, and the book of Psalms is quoted in the New Testament extensively. So that is my call: to put forth the challenge to not only read the Psalms with a theological or spiritual or even a linguistic or poetic lens. We also need to read Psalms with a missional lens.
YM: Can you give me an example of what that would
look like?
es: One of my tools is the Punjabi Psalter, the Psalms translated into the Punjabi language and musically composed in Indian raga—an Indian classical music style —a century ago. The project was started in the 1890s by Presbyterian missionaries, and when the whole corpus of 150 psalms was finished, the entirety of it was 405 pieces of completely raga, locally embedded and composed music, translated into the local language.
So, generally, wherever Western missions reached, they brought their own Western hymns and songs. But the Western musical invasion failed when they arrived in North India, especially in the Punjab mission. Why? Because we had our own more than 3,000-year-old,
raga-based musical system, and it was part of our DNA. The sitar, tanpura, and our unique melodic structures are why sound is among Pakistan’s and India’s most distinctive identities. Ours is an aural culture, so the church and mission need to explore the sonic culture, our musical culture, to engage us.
The Psalms give us a text. But tune, or melody, is cultural. The song should be wherever you are. Use the maqam modal system if you are in a Middle Eastern culture. If you are in an Indian Pakistani culture, use the raga-based system. For example, Psalm 100 says, “People of the earth, come and praise God with gladness and sing a song to the Lord.” But what kind of musical system are you going to use? You’re not going to use Western classical music in a Pakistani context; you’re going to use Pakistani music. So when it says, “sing a song,” there’s flexibility to use local music culture and your own heart music to praise the Lord with the words in the book of Psalms.
YM: That is beautiful! I hear you saying that Christian mission needs to reimagine the ways we bring the gospel to the world. You’ve demonstrated one way of doing that—through the use of local arts and a common point of intersection for Muslims and Christians in the Psalms. Do you have suggestions for what this looks like for those of us in the West?
es: We need to understand the future of global missions in the 21st century and beyond as diasporic and doxological. By diasporic, I mean this: Western Christianity is weakening. But God is bringing to the Western church Christian immigrants from around the world, who are coming with their cultures, values, and gifts of faith because they have had to be totally dependent upon God’s providence and direct intervention. They have lots of stories; many of them are faith stories. Not only are they bringing gifts, but also, they are a gift. So rather than treating and looking at them as a kind of liability, recognize them and receive them as the gift they are. We need people and scholars and voices that are non-Western voices, voices of people of color, and internal voices from countries outside of the West because that’s the future of the global church.
The future of the global church and mission is also doxological. Why? Because that’s the purpose of the church. Doxology is praising God—that’s doxo. If you read the Luke-Acts narrative, where does the Luke narrative start? With Zechariah worshiping in the temple. So Luke begins with a worship encounter, a doxological encounter. Then he continues this theme—that’s why the first three chapters are full of canticles: Mary’s Magnificat, the angels’ Gloria, and Simeon’s song.
Jesus’ first announcement is in the synagogue, and eventually, Jesus’ departure and ascension see him giving an Aaronic blessing, raising his hands like a high priest. In Acts, the early church was continuously worshiping, praying, and then feasting on the day of Pentecost. Everything is centered around doxology, the worship encounter. We read Luke-Acts with a missional, historical, or theological perspective, but they are doxological books.
Then there’s ethnodoxology. If you read Psalm 67, Psalm 98, Psalm 100, or Psalm 145, all of these Psalms portray a global expression of God’s kingdom—all ethnicities, peoples, and nations giving praise to God. Whatever these immigrant churches bring is a gift; they’re bringing the language, music, art, hymns, and everything, and it’s all for the church, not just their church. This is why we need to revisit our theology of mission from a diasporic and doxological perspective.
YM: In what ways can we welcome the gift of the
diasporic church?
es: That’s very easy. First of all, don’t patronize them. Sometimes, we see them as poor Christians—economically insufficient, educationally deficient—and a by-product of Western missions. But this current generation of Christians is not a by-product. They’re raised and born in a Christian church. Many are fourth- and fifth-generation believers, raised and born in that cultural context.
Next, churches can make it their own personal responsibility to engage. Every church can connect with the Global South through missionaries and seminaries. And now God is bringing many immigrants and refugees seeking asylum from persecution right to their front door. Open your doors and give them spaces to worship in. This is a way even shrinking churches with empty rooms can support and help them grow. But provide them with the notion that they are not second-class or inferior citizens. Sometimes the host church thinks they are a liability to us if they’re using our space.
But Revelation 5:9 gives us a vision of a global, multicultural church. In Acts, after chapter 11, there is no Jewish church story. The Jewish church disappears, and there is only a global church story. Why? Here’s a lesson for the 21st-century church: if you are an isolated church—only white, only Black, yellow, brown, whatever—you will not be around for a long time. Because that’s how God’s kingdom works. It is constantly expanding, it’s always vital and vibrant, and a mix of ethnicities.
YM: I’ve heard a critique of the movement to try to move towards multiethnic churches in the US: that they’re multiethnic, but they’re not multicultural. You might have people of different ethnicities, but they predominantly identify with the dominant culture. Or the church leadership and models are all defined by the dominant culture. So, like in Acts, how do we integrate the old with the new?
es: It’s a new phenomenon. And first of all, we need to drop our superiority complex. I would say start with small steps because people get scared sometimes. I’m not saying change everything or integrate right away. There are cultural and language barriers and they would get lost if you did that. But the host culture needs to see immigrants as guests.
I propose inviting them and allowing them their space to grow. Just begin with getting to know them and engaging with them. Invite them to share their culture, food, music, and themselves at social gatherings or outreaches. Find opportunities tied to the Christian calendar, where they are invited to participate; have them bring songs from their culture to add to your worship service; or plug them into Scripture readings, prayers, and sharing their testimonies. Host a festival where you have some cultural engagement out in the community. Provide various avenues where you can find places for the congregations to overlap.
These are small ways you give them a place, an equal place, at the table. Because when you receive a gift, you don’t hide it away, right? If you really see them as a gift, you’ll cherish them, you know?
Yolanda “Yo” Miller leads spiritual formation groups for Fuller, teh De Pree Center, and Soul Care in Boulder, CO. Learn more about her and her work as a soul coach at yo-miller.com.
Sam George, director of Wheaton College’s Global Diaspora Institute, encourages the church to reimagine global missions in our postcolonial and globalized world.
