War & Peace Quote by Michael W. Smith

Smith is making a pointed case for worship as strategy, not soundtrack. By invoking the Old Testament image of musicians leading an army, he’s borrowing an ancient visual to defend a very contemporary instinct in Christian culture: when things feel like a fight, you don’t start with force or arguments, you start by setting the spiritual temperature. It’s an attention-grabber because it flips the expected order of operations. In any modern crisis narrative, the “real” action comes first and the arts follow as morale. Smith insists the arts are the opening move.

The subtext is equally practical and ideological. Practical: music organizes a crowd fast. It synchronizes breath, emotion, and language; it turns scattered individuals into a single body. Ideological: it reframes conflict. If the battle is ultimately spiritual, then leading with musicians signals trust that victory isn’t manufactured by superior tactics but granted through alignment with God. It’s also a gentle rebuke to a certain kind of muscular faith that prefers domination to devotion.

Context matters: Smith, a major figure in contemporary Christian music, has spent a career arguing (implicitly and explicitly) that worship music isn’t “extra,” it’s essential. The line functions as a credentialing move for CCM itself: not just permissible, but biblically precedent. There’s a cultural tension under it too - between religious communities that treat art as decoration and those that treat it as formation. Smith is planting his flag with the latter, using scripture as both shield and megaphone.