I have made this point several times, but I think it bears repeating. Evangelicals and cultural transformers spend a lot (inordinate, in my estimation) telling the wider culture how it needs to follow God’s law. Much of this activity happens during the ordinary days of the week. When James Dobson calls for a Justice Sunday or some such, it also happens on the faithful’s lone holiday.
But when many evangelicals and culture transformers gather for worship (or for church business – namely, ordination, instruction of the youth, Bible studies, etc.) they do not do as they say – they don’t follow God’s word but they follow their own rules. An obvious example is contemporary worship led by non-ordained church members. Another example is the Reformed or Presbyterian congregation that follows the praise & worship methods of charismatics and Pentecostals. Such Reformed Christians are awfully serious about husbands and wives respecting their marriage vows. Do they actually worry about the vows their pastors and elders make to uphold Reformed teaching and practice?
I wrote these paragraphs even before reading a juicy example of this very inconsistency at the blog of the Brothers Bayly. Pastors Tim and David are apparently big fans of contemporary Christian music in public worship. I cannot tell what their services are like entirely but I have seen clips of worship bands in their services and have followed links to the Good Shepherd Band’s page at Myspace. (Church of the Good Shepherd, by the way, is the name of Pastor Tim’s congregation in Bloomington, In.) So readers of their blog naturally receive the sense that services in the Baylys’ congregations is up-tempo.
The Baylys left no one to wonder about their worship preferences when this past week they posted a piece in which they divided the world between the effeminate traditionalists/classicalists and the manly singers and performers of contemporary Christian music. In particular, Tim faults Reformed Protestantism for simply being a stop on the ladder of upward mobility:
The Wesleyan or Southern Baptist moves up to Presbyterian. And there in his new Presbyterian church, our convert finds the accoutrements of his new social class wonderfully reassuring. It’s the church’s zip code, the minister’s Genevan gown or collar, the frequent repetition of those peaceful words ‘providence’ and ‘sovereignty,’ the high priority placed on the education of the congregation’s Covenant children, the preacher’s thoughtful message and splendid vocabulary, and of course the high classical style of music.
Musical style is simply an expression of socio-economic status. Could the Marxists teaching down the road at Indiana University have said it any better? This led to remarks, one part anti-intellectual, one part anti-elitist (and therefore egalitarian), that contrasted the snobbery of Reformed upper-middle classness with the poor and uneducated apostles whom Christ turned into fishers of men. “ Our converts don’t take pride in the foolishness of the Cross,” Tim writes, “so much as the wisdom of Calvin and their senior pastor’s earned doctorate from somewhere across the pond.â€
This standard leftist cultural analysis in turn led to a brief on behalf of contemporary Christian music:
Speaking specifically of the music of our worship, Reformed pastors would do well to consider whether it isn’t time to stop despising the musical vernacular of our own day. There may be some congregations where musical archaisms have put down such deep roots that it would split the church to turn the clock forward, embracing the musical vernacular. But I’m betting use of the amplified instruments, tunes, and vocabulary of the common man in worship won’t happen in most of our Reformed churches for the same reason preaching against the heresy of egalitarian feminism doesn’t happen. Elisabeth Elliot put it well some years back when she said the problem with the church today is that “it’s filled with emasculated men who can’t bring themselves to say ‘no’ to a woman.”
Thus, when we set the musical forms and instrumentation of our other six days a week beside the musical forms and instrumentation of our Sunday worship, we find our Sunday worship to be cloyingly feminine, an historic specimen best suited to be trotted out by the curator for occasional museum exhibits.
So important is the fork in the liturgical road prompted by contemporary Christian music that Tim thinks fidelity to the gospel is at stake:
We must stop trying to kill two birds with one stone. Either we seek to make men into disciples of this Jesus Who chose tax collectors and fishermen to be His Apostles, or we make men into disciples of these archaic liturgies and exquisite musical forms that have evolved across centuries of Western culture. Yes, they’re true and good and beautiful. But what is the cost of making them the focus of our churches’ culture?
Somehow, the Baylys think the only alternatives are the praise band or the robed (see, they really are effeminate) four-part choir accompanied by an organ. They don’t seem to know or allow for the cultural idiom between high-brow and mass culture which is folk or common. (Ken Myers is brilliant on this point in his book, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes.) And if Reformed have a folk culture certainly one part of it psalm singing (another is the high-carb, low ruffage, pot luck supper). As Shaker furniture can well teach us, simplicity and order can reveal treasures of great beauty, and clearly the Reformed are on the side of decency and order and should be seeking simplicity.
But what may be most troubling about the Bayly post is how much they imitate the academic left that they believe has led the culture astray. The Baylys reduce culture to socio-economic and gender categories. They are as egalitarian and radical as the lefties they oppose. And just as these sorts of arguments have ruined the study of the liberal arts in universities and colleges, so they are also responsible for ruining our churches and undermining any credibility about the church as pilgrim people set apart from the world. In fact, if you see the embarrassing antics of worship leaders and praise bands you have all reasons you need for Keller’s arguments for using professional musicians in services. Again, the choice isn’t between the dudes and the pro’s; the psalter or hymnal accompanied by one instrument or sung acapella depends neither on the failed rock star or the conservatory student.
Which leads to the following excerpt from a piece written fifteen years ago that still seems as fresh as it was then pungent:
Why is it, then, that when evangelicals retreat from the public square into their houses of worship they manifest the same hostility to tradition, intellectual standards, and good taste they find so deplorable in their opponents in the culture wars? Anyone familiar with the so-called “Praise & Worship” phenomenon (so named, supposedly, to remind participants of what they are doing) would be hard pressed to identify these believers as the party of memory or the defenders of cultural conservatism. P&W has become the dominant mode of expression within evangelical churches, from conservative Presbyterian denominations to low church independent congregations. What characterizes this “style” of worship is the praise song (“four words, three notes and two hours”) with its mantra-like repetition of phrases from Scripture, displayed on an overhead projector or video monitors (for those churches with bigger budgets), and accompanied by the standard pieces in a rock band.
Gone are the hymnals which keep the faithful in touch with previous generations of saints. They have been abandoned, in many cases, because they are filled with music and texts considered too boring, too doctrinal, and too restrained. What boomers and busters need instead, according to the liturgy of P&W, are a steady diet of religious ballads most of which date from the 1970s, the decade of disco, leisure suits, and long hair. Gone too are the traditional elements of Protestant worship, the invocation,confession of sins, the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the doxology, and the Gloria Patri. Again, these elements are not sufficiently celebrative or “dynamic,” the favorite word used to describe the new worship. And while P&W has retained the talking head in the sermon, probably the most boring element of Protestant worship, the substance of much preaching turns out to be more therapeutic than theological.
Of course, evangelicals are not the only ones guilty of abandoning the treasures of historic Protestant worship. Various churches in the ELCA and Missouri Synod have begun to experiment with contemporary worship. The traditionalists in Reformed circles, if the periodical Reformed Worship, is any indication, have also begun to incorporate P&W in their services. And Roman Catholics, one of the genuine conservative constituencies throughout American history, have contributed to the mix with the now infamous guitar and polka mass. Yet, judging on the basis of worship practices, evangelicals look the most hypocritical. For six days a week they trumpet traditional values and the heritage of the West, but on Sunday they turn out to be the most novel. Indeed, the patterns of worship that prevail in most evangelical congregations suggest that these Protestants are no more interested in tradition than their arch-enemies in the academy.
A variety of factors, many of which stem from developments in post-1960s American popular culture, unite evangelicalism and the cultural left. In both movements, we see a form of anti-elitism that questions any distinction between good and bad (or even not so good), or between what is appropriate and inappropriate. Professors of literature have long been saying that the traditional literary canon was the product, or better, the social construction of a particular period in intellectual life which preserved the hegemony of white men, but which had no intrinsic merit. In other words, because aesthetic and intellectual standards turn out to be means of sustaining power, there is no legitimate criteria for including some works and excluding others.
The same sort of logic can be found across the country at week-night worship planning committee meetings. It is virtually impossible to make the case — without having your hearers go glassy-eyed — that “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” is a better text and tune than “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and, therefore, that the former is fitting for corporate worship while the latter should remain confined to Christian radio. In the case of evangelicals, the inability to make distinctions between good and bad poetry and music does not stem so much from political ideology (though it ends up abetting the cause) as from the deeply ingrained instinct that worship is simply a matter of evangelism. Thus, in order to reach the unchurched the churched have to use the former’s idiom and style. What is wrong with this picture?
The traditionalists are of no help here. Rather than trying to hold the line on what is appropriate and good in worship, most of those who are devoted full-time to thinking about liturgy and worship, the doorkeepers of the sanctuary as it were, have generally adopted a “united-colors-of-Benetton” approach to the challenge of contemporary worship. For instance, a recent editorial in a Reformed publication says that the old ways — the patterns which used Buxtehude rather than Bill Gaither, “Immortal, Invisible” rather than “Do Lord,” a Genevan gown instead of a polo shirt — have turned out to be too restrictive. Churches need to expand their worship “repertoire.” The older predilection was “white, European, adult, classical, with a strong resonance from the traditional concert hall.” But this was merely a preference and reflection of a specific “education, socio-economic status, ethnic background, and personality.” Heaven forbid that anyone should appear to be so elitist. For the traditional “worship idiom” can become “too refined, cultured, and bloodless. . . too arrogant.” Instead, we need to encourage the rainbow coalition — “of old and young, men and women, red and yellow, black and white, classical and contemporary.” And the reason for this need of diversity? It is simply because worship is the reflection of socio-economic status and culture. Gone is any conviction that one liturgy is better than another because it conforms to revealed truth and the order of creation, or that one order of worship is more appropriate than another for the theology which a congregation or denomination confesses. Worship, like food or clothes, is merely a matter of taste. Thus the logic of multi-culturalism has infected even those concerned to preserve traditional liturgy.
The Baylys would have us believe that 2k and the spirituality of the church are responsible for moving the church in radical and liberal directions. As Tom McGinnis would say, “Are you kidding me!?â€
Old Life 
As usual you’ve hit the nail on the head. Irrational and inconsistent arguments are the best the advocates of so-called Contemporary worship have ever been able to put forward. If they want the musical vernacular of most of the United States, which is radically different from the vast majority of pop culture production, they should be using shape-note hymnals on the Eastern seaboard and other folk media in the west, etc. If they want to be consistent with Reformed practice as enjoined by the Reformers themselves (Calvin sent for Claude Goudimel when he wanted new Psalm settings for Geneva) they’d do well to hire the most prominent musical talents of our time; perhaps James MacMillan, Arvo Pärt, John Tavener or even Steve Reich would be willing to write some new hymns and Psalm settings in a genuinely contemporary idiom for congregational use. It’s absurd so suggest that the vast majority of “contemporary” music is either 1) genuinely contemporary or 2) somehow in sync with what the Reformers had in mind when they transformed liturgy into the vernacular. Not all church music has to be Bach but it certainly ought to be more than here-today-gone-tomorrow, lowest-common-denominator trash.
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Great article, Darryl. You’re so right. The evangelical aversion to culture is self-defeating.
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I’ve felt the way you do for a long time, but your post resonated with me all the more because I’ve been delving lately into Philip Rieff. It is arrogant to elevate an ideology over our cultural traditions. The church’s imitation of the academy in this regard is a sell-out.
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Well, yeah, if perhaps they had ever sung Psalm 50, they might have had a chance, but then they probably wouldn’t have thought it could have applied to church today.
But to the wicked man Says God How do you dare
To take My covenant in your mouth, My statutes to declare
And since you even hate The warnings you have heard
And you have have thrown behind your back the teachings of My word.
But the bottom line is that they think they are following God’s rules about worship, just like you think you are with your 10 reasons why you love your church. Worship is all about spirit and truth, and well, who are you to judge what is spiritual and true to the Baylys? You play games with the RPW, and the Baylys’s play games with the RPW, well, so what if they go for big production rock ‘n roll and you prefer chamber music, big deal. You come off like Jehu, while reforming worship, you haven’t departed from the sin of Jereboam son of Nabat that made Israel to sin.
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It seems the Bayly brothers have managed to wed my grandfather’s post-war boom view of gender and home life to his boomer sons’ “my experience and desires trump all other considerations” aesthetic.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. No wonder they are out of their minds.
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You play games with the RPW, and the Baylys’s play games with the RPW, well, so what if they go for big production rock ‘n roll and you prefer chamber music, big deal.
Andrew,
I’m not sure you’ve understood the point here. The categorical distinction isn’t between “contemporary” and “traditional” but between “Reformed according to Scripture” and “will worship.” For a good example of the latter, see Stan Mast’s unabashed article on employing the Willow Creek model for meeting the felt needs of the raised pinky class who like lots of wood and stained glass in their religion (and chamber music):
http://www.thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=578
One advantage of Mastism is that it retains a sense of reverence and awe in worship, but unfortunately it slips into worshipping reverence in awe instead of using it to worship. There is at once here a fine line and wide distinction that seems to escape many.
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It’s more macho to worship with CCM? FWIW, my observations would lead me to a different conclusion. There’s a scenario that tends to repeat in reformed churches with traditional hymns and psalms. That is, a couple visits the church; they sang giddyup music in their last church. Typically the husband is able to make a theological commitment to both the church and, somewhat thereafter, the hymnal. However, it tends to take the wife much longer to make the transition to the hymnal; sometimes she never does. If the wife has a stronger will than the husband, they eventually leave.
Now, it’s easy to overgeneralize, but it’s dumb to ignore patterns. Here’s another pattern: those who tend to be frontmen for worship or praise bands tend to exhibit characteristics that are classically feminine: the dewy eye, the smile that lasts far beyond any apparent stimulus to smile, etc. You wouldn’t mistake them for construction workers, certainly.
My teenage daughter and I will sometimes let the radio scan while in the car and make comments on the five-second segments we hear. Along the way we have some up with categories. One category is “men singing chick songs.” They are characterized by a somewhat high pitch, emotionalism, and sentimental lyrics. As it turns out, nearly every CCM song that pops up qualifies as “men singing chick songs.”
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As usual, Tim Bayly produced a rambling, largely incoherent blog post whose meaning I still don’t quite understand. His analysis of masculine/feminine worship coupled with white collar/blue collar worship is so simultaneously simplistic, condescending, and utterly subjective it relegates his post to laughable absurdity. The same post promoted contextualization, worship based on man’s preference, and worship aimed to attract men, specifically men who “bale hay” and “serve in the military” as what we should aspire to in the Reformed community.
Sometimes I wonder why I still read the Bayly’s blog since I’ve been banned, but what good entertainment they are…
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The issues of worship raised simply don’t go away, especially as the followers of CCM now have an entrenched position in supposedly Reformed churches. One fact is that the writers of the hymns and choruses have upped their game and through this have got acceptance and apparent credibility in churches where they would have not been welcomed, even recently. Let’s look at a specific case study of those in the van guard of today’s P and W, and not generalise.
Keith and Kristyn Getty are perhaps the the most well known of these producers of modern worship. Keith talks with gravitas in his Irish accent about the songs he and his wife write; they are not charismatic ditties often cited by the critics of P and W. They call their songs hymns, and write them in the style of the evangelical hymn writers. This couple show sincerity and earnestness. But when the environment and culture of the ‘ministry’ of this winsome couple is examined, there are fault lines which show perhaps that the purveyors of such P and W have not fundamentally changed – they have basically refined and developed their style.
The latest product/album of the Getty’s is an elaborate affair with orchestra, guest singers from Christian bands (Iona), and is recorded in Abbey Road Studios, England, famous for it’s links with the Beatles.. This recording must have cost some serious money, and the free promotion DVD shows clips filmed in Ireland, England and California. I cannot help thinking that this album is typical of the personality based culture endemic in evangelical circles, and BTW this couple (who funnily enough brought Donny and Marie Osmond to my mind) are part of the worship leaders at T4G’s 2011 Conference.
The overall substance then of those in the P and W scene, if the Getty’s are typical, has not changed. I listened last week to an mp3 by Robert Godfrey speaking with insight and excellence on Psalm singing and Contemporary Worship. He summed up many of the issues surrounding the CCW scene, and the vast and often ignored subject that we have a book given by God for worship – the Psalms. But the Psalms go so deeply in the opposite direction to todays’ worship singers, writers and leaders like the Gettys and their peers like the British Stuart Townsend. The Psalms do call us to praise God, but they also sing of of loss, death, fear, the ravaging of enemies and God’s anger. None of these essential themes get even a mention in today’s CCW and P and W.
There is much more I could write and would like to discuss. But finally the book by Philip Rieff which has been referred to in this thread looks like one which touches deeply on today’s therapeutic culture which is copied so much in evangelical worship and reinforced by Pentecostal and charismatic circles. I shall have to get it, and this blog is worth it’s weight in gold for bringing such books to our attention. Let the debate continue!
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I’ll say this much for the Baylys they are one of the few bloggers out there who could lead me to sympathize with Daryl Hart.
I don’t have a problem with contemporary worship in reformed services(although the labeling of traditional as effeminate & contemporary as masculine is downright strange). But even though I might agree with them on certain subjects I’ve found that if you critique them slightly or question their methods that it dosen’t take long before you are banned from their blog.
They also seem to have a fixation on a particular pastor that also seems a bit overboard.
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It has been my experience that a biblical liturgical worship service is an acquired taste. It seems boring and rote if you do not have the proper theological understanding of the flow and reasons why the worship service is set up like it is. I love the liturgy of the Lutheran Divine Service now because I understand the theology behind it and reasons for it. The flow and centering of the Worship Service which culminates in the taking of Holy Communion is something that I look forward to with great anticipation and great need each week now. It is my life and power source and what I depend on to make me persevere in the faith. This was not the case when I went to Non-denominational and charismatic Churches for so many years. It was a burden for me to go to those contemporary worship services where you were expected to worship God until he “broke through” to the congregation in response to our worship. The whole mentality of that gives one a portrait of God as this ego-centric Being who needs our praise in order for Him to act. The whole point of the Divine service, I think, is to turn to God in the Worship service and allow Him to build you up in the faith with the opening confession of sin, the preparation of turning our hearts towards worship, the hearing of the Law and Gospel, singing of the hymns, offering of our money from the previous weeks work, the taking of the Lord’s Supper and then the final praise, thanksgiving and benediction to go now into the world as salt and light. I have found I am incapable of doing this (being salt and light) without God ministering to me first in the Worship Service. It is a complete opposite mentality of the contemporary praise and worship services which flows from a faulty and shallow theological foundation.
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Do you suppose there is an inverse relationship between CCM churches and Sabbatarian churches, and this inverse relationship is due to a denial of specialness?
Bear with me while I explain. I have some uptempo music in my iPod for workouts, some traveling music on CD’s in the car, and a different kind of music on my computer. I never think “I wish I could put some religious words in my music and sing it at church.†I don’t want worship to remind me of my workouts, my driving, or my word processing. I want it to be a special time on a special day.
I am a little out of the loop on today’s CCM. Is it still mediocre rehashing of styles that were
popular twenty years ago? I guess I don’t want church to remind me of early 90’s light rock, either. Rather, I think its quite fitting that on the Lord’s Day there is a special genre that consists of psalms and hymns. It just seems like CCM makes the day blend in with the other days of the week, hence the question “is CCM part of a larger pattern of making worship and Sundays more like the rest of the week?â€
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But here is the dilemma I see. If we choose any style of music, we are choosing some culture that this music came out of. Classical music is simply the music of a certain past culture; it was once the ‘popular music’ of it’s day. So to choose any style of music for worship is to embed some level of this world’s culture into your church service. I don’t see how you escape it by simply using the music of a past culture. And I do not see anything particularly more spiritual in so doing.
I think the best attempt we get to on this would be some form of psalm singing that has no antecedents in music cultures of our history. But even pure, acapella (sp?) psalm singing is probably tied to some musical tradition. And even if that tradition is purely a church tradition, where does it say in scripture that this is the best, most spiritual way to sing? It is simply the most culturally…. odd. Scripture tells us to use all kinds of instruments in our singing. Scripture tells us, in the New Testament, to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. So to only sing psalms is to violate and disobey scripture.
So while I sympathize with the desire to have worship that is biblical, I do not think it is as clear as you all seem to see it. The Bayly rant aside, if the Reformers wanted the Bible in the vernacular so that we could understand it, and they created worship in the vernacular (not Latin) so that we could understand it, I fail to see why the Reformed tradition is so afraid of music in it’s contemporary forms, since that music is most accessible and understandable to this present culture.If the urban myth is correct, Luther borrowed a melody from some song that was current in his culture to put music to a hymn he wrote.
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A great rejoinder to the nonsense that is P & W. One of the less-reflected-upon matters regarding P & W music is which genre of popular music should be used? The dominant genre of CCM that I’ve heard on radio or TV seems to be some kind of 90s alternative mixed with the ‘epic’ histrionics of U2 or Coldplay. Which means that CCM mirrors the cultural matrix of a white, middle-class, suburban child who grew up in the late 80s or early 90s (which is probably the average demographic of almost every worship minister in evangelical churches today). So P & W essentially comes down to one rather bland form of popular music that is reified by what is popular on the CCM charts.
“In order to reach the unchurched the churched have to use the former’s idiom and style. What is wrong with this picture?”
What’s wrong can be imagined without much difficulty: how does a congregation decide which of the myriad musical genres available to the ipod generation is evangel-worthy? Why not emo/r & b/hip-hop/bluegrass/free jazz/techno/krautrock/grunge/metal/thrash/prog rock/afro-celt/progressive bluegrass/cool jazz/dub/house/brit rock/shoegaze/new wave/noise rock/folk/ambient/delta blues/chicago blues/soul/jangle rock/etc.? If the lyrics are vaguely Christianly, what’s stopping the motivated worship minister from appropriating all of these (and tomorrow’s!) genres for Christ? Is it because only one form of bland, tasteless, AOR rock has become the default sound for a narrow, parochial view of worship that is bound to be “cloyingly feminine, an historic specimen best suited to be trotted out by the curator for occasional museum exhibits”?
The flaw in the logic of P & W will be exposed thus: a) most of these ‘relevant’ churches will cease to be relevant once their base ages and their taste in popular music becomes unhip and uncool (kind of like the liberal boomers who currently lead the mainstream denominations) b) there will be a growth in this kind of worship but it will increasingly look like the ghettofication of popular music: there will be a church worship service for every genre and therefore the American god of choice will reign supreme.
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Dan MacDonald you bring up an interesting point. I think, however, that your premise is flawed when you assume using a particular “style” of music is to adopt the culture (positive and negative I assume) from which the music came. I placed the word style in quotes because what is commonly considered to be one unified style used by advocates of traditional worship is, in fact, a conglomeration of many disparate styles dating from many periods and geographical locations. Any good hymnal (the Trinity and the Episcopal Hymnal of 1940 being, in my opinion, the best) will have in it plainchant from the 800-1200s, Renaissance melodies from Germany and France, Classical Italian and English examples from the 18th century, and various 19th and 20th century pieces from all over the place. So it’s not really a unified “classical” aesthetic but a large variety of compatible aesthetics from all over the western world (some from the east- Leoni being one tune that comes to mind) and dating from every century. Now the question that I’m drawn to ask from all this data is, what made these disparate musical traditions effective carriers of the Gospel message and what made them conducive to reverent worship? I’d venture to say that what made the musical expressions of varying cultures effective is the degree to which they were influenced by the Gospel and, more importantly, how much they were modified to fit the appropriate sacred context. This idea of modification is important- composers of hymns didn’t just appropriate secular melodies wholesale and write new words for them; they altered them to make them different, to transform them. Even when a melody was used in full, other voice parts were added which transformed the sound of the piece and moved it from the realm of the secular to the sacred realm, or, if you prefer, the churchly realm. There wasn’t a drive to make church music sound like its secular counterpart, in fact the opposite was true. There was a concerted effort to make the music different from its secular counterpart even where there were superficial similarities.
When we start to talk about contemporaneity the discussion becomes more complicated. As one who studies music as a hobby, I find that perceptions about what “contemporary” means differ widely depending on how much individuals are aware of trends that go beyond the realm of popular culture. If you read my earlier post, you’ll see that I recommend a number of living composers whose styles could be used for writing new church music. They’re genuinely contemporary in that they represent a line of compositional technique that continues to grow and develop today despite reaching all the way back through history to those plainchant hymns that started it all in the western tradition. What most people think of as contemporary is, in reality, a distinctly period-limited phenomenon that didn’t appear until the 1950s with the advent of rock and roll. It does beg the question of who is being more of a temporal snob (read: traditionalist), the advocate of the so-called “classical” tradition which started in the first centuries of the Church and continues today, or the advocate of so-called “contemporary” worship which dates from the middle of the 20th century and hasn’t changed fundamentally since its inception.
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So while I sympathize with the desire to have worship that is biblical, I do not think it is as clear as you all seem to see it. The Bayly rant aside, if the Reformers wanted the Bible in the vernacular so that we could understand it, and they created worship in the vernacular (not Latin) so that we could understand it, I fail to see why the Reformed tradition is so afraid of music in it’s contemporary forms, since that music is most accessible and understandable to this present culture.
Dan,
That sounds like Frame’s doctrine of intelligibility, which leads to juggling and dancing by the way. But don’t you think there is a significant difference between worship in one’s native tongue and worship according to one’s cultural felt needs?
In point of fact, to the extent that “contemporary†so often is unintelligible (as in juggling and dancing), I tend to think that the Reformers’ labors for the vernacular is actually the argument against it, though it might be helpful in getting the King James-y dialects helpfully revised. And consider that Latin was dazzling to the felt needs of religious elites of the Reformers’ times. Could it be that they had their Latin and we have our CCM (and King James, and juggling and dancing).
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Intelligibility versus cultural felt needs seems to be one of those irregular verbs, but just because a single principle can be taken to un-helpful extremes doesn’t necesarily make it useless.
It also appears that musical style and worship form are being conflated in ways that aren’t particularly helpful.
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In my experience musical style and worship form go together more often than not. Hence the conflation; you can’t really address one without addressing the other these days.
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“In my experience musical style and worship form go together more often than not. Hence the conflation; you can’t really address one without addressing the other these days.”
Addressing things this way inevitably leads to subjective rather than objective (and scriptural) arguments. Besides the answer isn’t a change in musical style but a change in worship form – or you end up with the sort of thing cited in the Stan Mast article.
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But, Chris E., when was the last time the doctrine of intelligibility led to the psalter? The only way to get there is by the doctrine of Reformed according to Scripture, or by meeting the felt needs of an older class who grew up with the psalter (but that’s just more intelligibility). How do you get to juggling and dancing by way of the RPW?
Maybe you could helpfully distinguish between musical style and worship form?
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I agree in one sense yet I can’t help but think that our view of God informs style. Asking what He is like means we have to ask the question what does He then deserve. You see the problem.
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I don’t think singing the Psalter is infallible proof against grandstanding musicians (or personality driven worship).
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I don’t think singing the Psalter is infallible proof against grandstanding musicians (or personality driven worship).
Nor I. But your first comment seemed to suggest that the doctrine of intelligibility (as distinguished from vernacular) has some merit. One way to test this is to ask how it gets us to the psalter and protects us from grandstanding. I don’t see how it does. Maybe you don’t like that test, so perhaps you could explain what merit the doctrine of intelligibility has.
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Well, if you want to extend your use of vernacular to also cover musical venacular then I’d happily drop ‘intelligibility’. It’s perfectly possible to change tunes without changing the medium or the message, a contemporary tune doesn’t necessarily mean a contempory band and dewey eyed worship leader, just as ‘revising King James-y language’ doesn’t necessarily imply The Message.
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Deal, Chris E. And for it’s worth, my problem isn’t simply with contemporaryism but also traditionalism (Mast piece), insofar as both fall into the category of intelligibility (which I take to mean meeting particular felt needs, which necessarily confounds those not in the loop). I still don’t understand the explanation the musical elites at my traditional church gave me for the complicated ways of singing hymns. There’s a vernacular for methodology as well, it seems to me.
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Evan,
Thanks for the musical history sketch; it was helpful to me. I am not sure it really answers my questions, however. You argue that some forms of what I would, as an ‘amateur,’ call classical music are more contemporary than what we normally call CM. I can see that point. My question, however, is this: do we have a scriptural mandate that requires us to use a certain kind of musical style- and avoid others? Where is that? If our worship is to be reformed according to the scriptures, I would want some scriptural evidence for it.
Zrim,thanks for your response. I think I agree with some of what you said, since I am not a fan of CCM or CCM P and W. However, I do and do not see the difference between worshipping in a native tongue and worshipping according to a culture’s felt needs. One of my felt needs as part of the culture I inhabit IS to worship intelligibly, in my native tongue – I couldn’t worship properly in any other tongue, in my opinion – I don’t know any other languages well enough. So native tongue-worship is part of my cultural felt need. And part of my church culture’s felt need. I don’t see the clear distinction between acceptably accessible linguistic forms and acceptably accessible musical forms. They both are part of my need for worship. Example: if all the music at my church was chanted in a melody range above my abilities, I would have a tough time worshipping. Even psalter -singing churches take this into account: why? So that worship is not only intelligible to their congregants, but accessible, sing-able, even – may I say it- enjoyable for their flock. So given those principles, why not use modern instruments and melody lines? Why not write new hymns?
What I do not see in the scriptures is any place in the Old or New Testament that would require me, or even motivate me, to simply restrict worship to a psalter. Since we are reformed, which means we believe in sola scriptura as our final authority, and not the practice of the magisterial reformers or any other reformed group in history as our authority, I would like to know where the idea of restricting worship to a psalter comes from in Holy Writ.
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Dan MacDonald-
I’ll try not to be so lengthy in my response this time and, if you’ll allow, I’ll try to answer one of the questions you ask Zrim.
When we start to think about the form our worship of God takes we have to ask two foundational questions. First, we ask what God has revealed about Himself in His word and, second, we ask how that knowledge of Him contributes to our form. So we know that God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, all beautiful, all loving, etc. He is complex and yet comprehensible in His own revelation of Himself- the Word and the Word Incarnate. He requires us to reverence Him, to be joyful in His presence, and not to think of Him as anything less than He is. I would suggest that this information implies a hymnody that is content-rich with a corresponding form that is also complex. Now, complexity need not mean that a piece of music be difficult to sing but it does, I believe, mean that it should reflect the complexity of God (seen in four-part harmony even in hymns with a simple melody line) and it should reflect His beauty which is best understood by us in an appeal to the created order. Inasmuch as music references the order found in God’s creation and allows for an understanding of His eternally varied attributes, it contributes to us intuitively learning how to think of God. Some musical styles are less conducive getting a feel for the nature of God in that they make an immediate appeal to the baser senses and emotions through, for example, excessive rhythm or dramatically obvious key-changes calculated to produce an emotional result rather than flowing from the nature of the text.
The hard thing about form is that it’s not prescribed; elements are prescribed, but form, wisely, is left to reason to determine. Here’s where your question to Zrim about modern instruments and melody lines comes in. It may be that some staunch traditionalists are willing to ban anything that remotely seems contemporary. I’m a little less trigger-happy in that I’m primarily concerned with the nature of the text being set and the relation of the text to the music. If the text presents a fullness of content reflective of the fullness of Scripture (which, interestingly, is neither popular nor easy to understand) and the music conveys the text in a manner that accentuates it’s content and appropriate emotion, it’s usable. I’m a big fan of variety in instrumentation- guitars are no problem, neither are assorted woodwinds, etc. I do draw the line at drums though because of the solo-like dominance they tend to assert over the other instruments. Nobody likes a one-man show during what is intended to be a congregational act. Same goes for “worship leaders” whose voices drown out everyone else. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s nothing wrong with new music as long as it’s of the same quality (largely an objective, measurable phenomenon) as the old music. If not, why bother?
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And so much for a non-lengthy response.
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Andrew,
Who said anything about oldlifers preferring classical music. The hymnals are hardly classical. But if all you listen to is pop music, the psalms and hymns sure sound weird.
Evan,
The major point of consideration for musical form is whether or not a congregation can sing the song. Most contemporary worship music is unsingable to anyone who has not been listening to this stuff for large amounts of time. The music to use as a substitute is hardly a classical or formal idiom of music designed for performance at court or in the concert hall. Folk culture, with music that is singable across generations and even across cultures is the best form of music for congregational signing.
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Dan,
I would say that our need to worship in our native tongue (i.e. the vernacular) is a human need, not a cultural need. Eating might be a good analogy: we have a human need for edible food, but we have different cultural needs for what we eat. (I can’t stomach raw fish and seaweed, and my Japanese exchange students were leery of…I can’t recall now, but they recoiled at something we offered.) So blocking what is human seems altogether different from frustrating what is cultural. Consider how the Jews complained in the wilderness about the food provided, longing instead for the cultural cravings that lingered from Egypt. The Word is often compared to food. Could it be that our demand for, as you say, “enjoyable modern instruments and melody lines” is a version of that stiff-necked complaining? Is singing the unadorned Word simply not good enough for us in our present wilderness the same way the desert food wasn’t for the Jews?
BTW, I’m not suggesting exclusive psalmody, all Scripture is singable.
Evan, what you’re saying doesn’t seem terribly different from what my high-brow traditionalists say about low-brow contemporaryists (and the snobbery is usually returned up the nose). But like I said before, the distinction isn’t between “traditional” and “contemporary” but between “Reformed according to Scripture” and “will worship.” Besides, how are drums more susceptible to “solo-like dominance” than geetars? Both are staples of rock and roll. This feels like those who want to distinguish between revival and revivalism, when it’s revival versus Reformation.
He is complex and yet comprehensible in His own revelation of Himself- the Word and the Word Incarnate. He requires us to reverence Him, to be joyful in His presence, and not to think of Him as anything less than He is. I would suggest that this information implies a hymnody that is content-rich with a corresponding form that is also complex. Now, complexity need not mean that a piece of music be difficult to sing but it does, I believe, mean that it should reflect the complexity of God…
Actually, the implication of the Creator-creature distinction is that God is simple yet incomprehensible and we that are complex yet comprehensible. Simplicity is a Reformed virtue because God is simple, thus his worship should reflect the simplicity of God. It seems to me that if we suggest complexity in worship we are suggesting it be more human-centered than God-centered.
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Tim and Dave Bayly are clueless. Do they really think that CCM is masculine?
The audience for Christian Adult Contemporary radio is 63% female. Women nearly outnumber men two to one. As for all other radio formats, women make up only 52% of the audience. See Why Men Hate Going to Church page 68.
If they were truly committed to having the musical forms of Sunday worship mirror the musical forms of the other six days of the week, they could encourage attendees to simply pre-load their iPods with three of four songs. At the appropriate time they could just have everyone press play.
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dgh, I don’t disagree one bit. Folk music has informed the development of music in the concert hall so they are cousins though different. I suppose it’s the difference between singing ‘There is a Fountain Filled with Blood’ and ‘Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee.’ The former seems natural while the latter feels contrived. Although I’d suggest what most of us consider folk music has been mucked about with by professional musicians more than we’d like to think.
Zrim, Interesting thoughts on the creator-creature distinction. I’d always thought of God as being infinitely beyond us in every way so if we’re complex, He is infinitely more complex (though, in His own understanding of Himself, simple). That’s the nature of Reformed belief, I think, to allow for apparent paradox ultimately reconcilable in the mind of God. And I don’t disagree one bit that worship should be simple- it’s limited to a handful of prescribed elements, how complicated can it be?- but suggesting that forms can’t reflect the kaleidoscopic variety of God’s attributes and our comprehension of Him as He has revealed Himself in Scripture doesn’t seem to recognize how amazing He really is. But I might not be following your thoughts very well so please correct me if I’m off base.
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I’d always thought of God as being infinitely beyond us in every way so if we’re complex, He is infinitely more complex (though, in His own understanding of Himself, simple). That’s the nature of Reformed belief, I think, to allow for apparent paradox ultimately reconcilable in the mind of God.
Of course, his thoughts and ways aren’t ours. The “incomprehensible†part of “simple yet incomprehensible†covers God’s utter otherness and distinction from us. And it seems to me that how “simple yet incomprehensible†co-exist is a matter of paradox (and “complex yet comprehensible: for that matter). Arguably, the effort to reverse these things (as in saying God is “complex†when we mean “incomprehensibleâ€) may be a way to unravel paradoxes not meant to be understood.
And I don’t disagree one bit that worship should be simple- it’s limited to a handful of prescribed elements, how complicated can it be?- but suggesting that forms can’t reflect the kaleidoscopic variety of God’s attributes and our comprehension of Him as He has revealed Himself in Scripture doesn’t seem to recognize how amazing He really is.
It seems like you take away with one hand what you previously give with the other here: God’s worship should be simple but also complex. But while Reformed worship should be simple it should also be mysterious, even alien to the natural senses, which is what I think you’re after when you say “complex†(as I suggested above) We are a peculiar people, belonging to a peculiar God. The most exquisite Reformed liturgies I have ever known are at once remarkably simple and remarkably mysterious in nature.
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Yeah, Zrim, I think we’re getting at the same thing by different roads. I say simple yet complex because the liturgy itself, the elements, are limited- prayer, preaching, singing, almsgiving, Sacraments and, on occasion, vows. So there’s nothing particularly complicated there. The complexity comes in with things like how the sermon is given (classical Reformed exposition is anything but simplistic) and how the music sounds (even the folk music tradition is complex when compared with most of what passes for music these days in popular culture- take Sacred Harp for example). It’d be neat to sit down one day and actually talk about it in person though I don’t imagine I’m going to get out of Philadelphia any time soon… Who knows though?!
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Evan, sorry, I’m still a bit confused. Why shouldn’t simplicity attend every aspect, from form to content? I don’t understand the need to make anything complex. You say, for example, that expository preaching is anything but simplistic, but this seems to assume that being simple and being simplistic are the same thing. They aren’t, God is simple but not simplistic. Granted, I quite understand the desire to avoid the adolescent silliness that pervades something like evangelicalism, but I don’t see how the answer to indiscernible uncouthness is indiscernible couthness.
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Zrim, you seem to be under the impression that I’m talking about adding complexity, I’m not. I’m talking about the complexity inherent in Reformed worship and theology, a completely natural complexity that flows from an attempt to properly understand the Scriptures. Reformed preaching is orderly, it expounds a text, it shows how God has worked and is working in His people for His glory. For those of us that have grown up in a Reformed context, perhaps this seems simple; for those who have never heard anything like it, it seems complex no matter how orderly, concise, and clear the preacher is. The same is apparent in hymnody. No matter the clarity of content, its Scriptural logic, its ease when sung, it’s not something that is easy for the untutored mind or affections to grasp; it takes effort and training. Complexity is not an affectation, an add-on, it just exists where proper doctrine is taught and preached and prayed and sung. You reference the difference between simple and simplistic. Perhaps we’re missing each other because when I say ‘complex’ you hear ‘complicated?’
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Evan, I may be under the impression that you’re talking about “adding complexity” or mean “complicated” because you keep using the word “complex” to describe how Reformed worship should be. But it’s a misleading word to use when what I think you mean is “profound, mysterious, peculiar, alien.” In that case, I quite agree of course. It is common and right to describe the gospel itself as simple yet profound (not simple yet complex), so why not do the same when it comes to Reformed worship?
But the yet unexplored theme of the post-proper is how those sympathetic about meeting the felt cultural needs (of one type or another) in worship tend also to be the ones sympathetic to cultural transformation (of one kind or another). For all the popular talk amongst both about being counter-cultural, obsession with culture seems to be the ironic common thread. It reminds me of how purity-ringers want to counter a fleshy culture by being equally creepy in their obsession with sex.
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Haha, nice last sentence. I feel acutely the difficulties inherent in discussing this issue and I’m pretty convinced that we simply can’t separate our arguments from culture since we are a part of one and live in a particular geographical/temporal framework. In the end, whatever side we fall on, we could all use a good lesson in history and a solid dose of charity.
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Mr Bayly said:
“Thus, when we set the musical forms and instrumentation of our other six days a week beside the musical forms and instrumentation of our Sunday worship, we find our Sunday worship to be cloyingly feminine, an historic specimen best suited to be trotted out by the curator for occasional museum exhibits.”
I think Mr Bayly is correct in what he condemns and wrong in what he commends. He, rightly, commends the archaic, camp, feminine worship of some Reformed churches while commending an antidote that, in my experience, has been equally feminized and while being mildly archaic. The result is cheesy worship; not reverential, but pure molten cheddar.
On the feminizing front, much CCM stems from either a desire to ape the emotional sonnets of pop culture or a mistaken reading of the Song of Songs. There’s something wrong with grown men singing love songs to another man, even if He is divine and glorious.
On the mildly archaic front, so many of the CCM artists are not aping cutting edge rock, rap or whatever. In some places the praise band sounds like early to mid 90s rock (ugh) and in others sounds like a bland orchestral arrangement. All in all you end up with music that is very much aping the shibboleths of various ethnic and socio-economic groupings. “The band” in too many churches, defines what type of person will attend. If you have a grunge or gangsta praise band, forget about any old people coming! Likewise, if you play the honky tonk piano and sing the Gaither’s, you can forget about reaching anyone without a retarded musical palette.
No matter what one may think of the RPW’s antithetical nature to CCM, one must concede that unaccompanied singing of inspired texts has dated back to the earliest church fathers and is, in a sense, trans-cultural. The Reformed Liturgy appeals to no niche demographic; capitulation to evangelical CCM places an unnecessary restriction on what type of person will attend one’s assembly.
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dgh,
You said this in response to Evan:
“The major point of consideration for musical form is whether or not a congregation can sing the song. Most contemporary worship music is unsingable to anyone who has not been listening to this stuff for large amounts of time.”
I tend to agree with your premise here, but in doing so (our church uses, amongst other styles predominantly folk, some ‘classical’) I think we must be willing to say that if singability is the issue, then musical forms should adapt to the crowd singing. A downtown Seattle crowd can sing certain musical styles better than a rural Texas congregation. A 21st century culture of young professionals under 30 probably can sing some of this contemporary stuff as well as, or better than, songs done with folk arrangements and instrumentation.
While I tend to share your personal preferences for folk, I think that if the primary criterion is singability, then that pragmatic and prudent criterion should allow more room for differing styles and preferences than simply folk. Surely there is no compellingly ‘Reformed’ argument against other forms of musical worship, just as there is no compellingly ‘biblical’ case against those other forms.
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Dan,
It’s not about preference here. Folk music is generally easier to sing than contemporary. The melodies and rhythms are simply easier. Would 30-somethings have to learn a tune? Sure. But they have to learn the tunes of contemporary music. Some of that learning happens, I guess, by radio or other outlets for such music. But plenty of contemporary tunes leave congregations dumb because they’ve never heard it before. And the advantage of a hymnal is that you can actually see what’s going on with the music.
Contemporary music is supposed to be more accessible to more people. It simply is not. So much for democratic worship.
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I wouldn’t generalize like that, Dan. I’m what you’d consider a young professional under 30 (one Masters and working on a 2nd, age 24) and I have an incredibly hard time singing most contemporary music even though I grew up singing it in school chapels. Visiting a church where there are just words on a screen and everybody else seems to know the songs can be really frustrating. At least with a hymnal you can see if the notes are going up or down and sort of figure it out from there. Good accompaniment also helps because you can listen to the melody; guitars only provide chords which isn’t all that helpful. You’ve got to figure out where the words go with the music, how fast to sing, when to slow down (because it’s sometimes unexpected)- time signatures change, the key changes, not everyone’s singing it the same way… Yeah, I have a really hard time.
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Evan: Don’t generalize? Did you read dgh’s bald assertion that folk music is better because – and I quote – ‘it’s GENERALLY easier to sing than contemporary.’ THAT is generalizing. Generalizing is the main course around here, my friend.
dgh; I agree that hymnals let people – who can read music- see what’s going on; but the vast majority of this culture cannot read the music so the hymnal helps them not at all. What helps most often, in my experience, is simply hearing the tune enough to be able to repeat it and sing it. And in that case, pop musical styles are as accessible as folk to most of the twenty something I know.
BTW I am still waiting for a biblical , and therefore Reformed, case against contemporary musical forms. I notice you have not responded to that part of my comments in this thread.
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Dan, I listen to a lot of contemporary and indie music. I am a musical guy. My parents were musical. I still find contemporary songs that I have never heard before hard to sing. Most contemporary songs were written for performance, not for group singing. That means that a performer is going to need the music the first time she sings a contemporary song. Your argument fails. How’s that for particularity.
As for a biblical argument, try Titus 2. What are forms of music fitting sound doctrine. The sorts of virtues that Paul says fit sound doctrine are sobriety, seriousness, and sensible. Last time I checked, rock n’ roll (or even its less filling versions) was not created to cultivate those virtues. That is why it went with sex and drugs.
I know that’s probably not the proof text you were hoping for in you quest for the particular. But have the Christian music folk ever considered the origins of rock? And if Christians try to turn it into easy listening rock, they are doubly wrong. Who wants to listen to the Carpenters when they can have Jimmie Hendrix?
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Right. And who wants to sing psalms a cappella when they can sing them with a great musical team leading the worship? And who wants to sing to the accompaniment of an organ that they have never heard in any music in their life except in a church?
I too listen to a lot of music and am glad you are musical. I find hymns I have never sung hard to sing, as you find contemporary songs you have never heard before hard to sing. So, is that a tie? Sounds like it; ‘you say tomaytoe, I say tomahtoe…’ So my argument does not fail any more than yours does, and it certainly does not fail simply ’cause you say so, unless you have suddenly achieved some kind of canonical/deified status. Your mix of the ingredients of presumption and bald assertions, without biblical and confessional backing, do not a compelling stew make, my friend.
As for your supposed biblical argument, Titus 2 is not directed toward the worship of God but the teaching of sound doctrine, as you even admit. How you get from sound teaching to the inherent ungodliness of ‘rock music’ is a logical leap that would make Superman proud. Organ music, stringed music, classical music can be just as flippant or trivial as anything ever played on Les Paul, and you well know it.
I am not looking for a proof text but for ‘Emperor DGH’ to admit that his argument against contemporary musical forms is not biblical or even theological but really an aesthetic one. If he would simply admit that there are no theological or biblical clothes to cover his distaste of this style of music; that on aesthetic grounds he has a case against this form of musical worship, then I would be happy. To say Rock music is not, for a host of sociological and aesthetic reasons, a prudent form for gospel worship is at least a defensible position. To infer, as you seem to have done several times, that according to Reformed hermeneutical, theological and exegetical principles we can show that ‘Rock Music is not biblical, reformed, and ipso facto violates the RPW’ is what I find over-reaching.
Having said that, I want you to know that I have read and learned much from several of your books on worship, presbyterianism and the church. Blessings. Say hello to Sr. Muether for me
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Dan, if you are musical, and if you have music in front of you, and if the accompaniest plays the song through once before the congregation sings, I find it hard to believe that you have trouble singing most of the melodies in your average hymnal. Plus, it is not a tie since the idiom of rock is designed for performance not group singing.
I agree the Bible does not say, thou shalt use British folk melodies for the best hymns. What the Bible does say is to live lives fitting sound doctrine. Since worship relies upon sound doctrine, and since worshipers are alive and worship is part of what they do with their lives, using music that has generally encouraged sex and drugs does not seem to be fitting sound doctrine.
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Vou recomendar aos colegas com certeza
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