Grandpa’s Music?

A friend once told me one of the reasons she didn’t attend her Evangelical church any more was because it no longer sang many of the “great old hymns of the faith”—it was now dominated by what is called Praise and Worship music. I asked her for examples of the hymns she had in mind, and she named a few. Resisting the temptation to give her both barrels, to lecture her on why these hymns were rarely great and certainly not old, I contented myself with observing that all the ones she had mentioned were written when her great-grandmother was a girl—that given the age of the Church, they were, relatively speaking, hardly much older than the “new” music to which she objected.

Age, either of the music or the hearer, has nothing to do with the problem that I have been addressing in these short writings on the music of worship. We are not speaking here of an intergenerational dispute, but of a liturgical culture that has lost its bearings--of old folk’s hymnals that would not pass theological examination, if they were to undergo it, even in the churches that use them, of liturgy-as-entertainment-for-evangelical-purposes which they and their immediate forebears introduced into their churches, and of the younger people’s picking up the cues and carrying on in the same vein. Had you “P & W” people who have been trying in your comments to quarantine me as an old guy disputing the tastes of the young been paying attention to what I wrote, this would have been plain to you. You and your parents and grandparents all have the same problem.  (And I thought the same when I was a young guy.)

There is “praise and worship” music that would pass the tests I propose with no difficulties. Much of it, however, would not. The same is true of the music in the hymnals. The problem is that it is not submitted to tests, or sufficiently rigorous tests, of theological integrity and appropriateness for corporate worship, because such a trial would cause the removal of a large number of very popular pieces—pieces that warm the heart and so tend to lodge in the mind as Spirit-inspired, and then as “great old hymns of the faith,” if they survive two or three generations.

Now, of course, the whole controversial string began with my revolt against not simply against bad lyrics, but their presentation, which is an inseparable part of the liturgical whole. No church that concerns itself with the theology of the verses is going to ignore the way they are presented, including their musical vehicle, for the presentation is a vital part of the witness to their truth. And yes, I have developed some strong opinions about what is good and what is bad practice in this regard, believing that churches rest upon a continuum, a few doing it almost completely right, others making an utter hash of it, with yet others somewhere between.

The practice of any given church must be left up to its presbyters, who are to provide fatherly guidance, which means rules and judgments, resting firmly on Christian teaching, about how things are and are not to be done. It is a dereliction of duty for those holding pastoral authority to turn the service over to virtually unsupervised “worship leaders,” particularly if these people put themselves forward as experts upon whose territory the teaching authority is not to tread.

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Let me also add here as a postscript that what I said in “Lying in Church” about Christ’s redemption making us the gods we were meant to be was a direct and intentional reference to what Eastern Orthodoxy calls theosis. It is not a cultic or New Age idea.