Music, Prayer & Holiness

1) I think you're probably right that only about 50% of the congregation is singing those praise songs. However, if a choir is singing, or a soloist is singing, then much less than 50% of the congregation is singing.

2) WHY is participation in congregational singing so low? Some possible answers: Ignorance: singing is not taught in elementary school like it once was; Obstinacy: the young people are refusing to sing the old hymns and the old people are refusing to sing the new praise choruses; Quality: many of the new songs just don't have very catchy tunes or particularly poetic words, and likewise for some of those dear old hymns; Lack of Practice: many churches now only meet once per week instead of the old standard of 3x/week (at a minimum); Unfamiliarity: many people in our churches today did not grow up attending church regularly (unlike the past); Fast-Paced Society: even music ministers have difficulty keeping current when a 2-year-old praise song is considered a "somewhat dated classic"; Long-Lived Society: the span of ages in the congregation has increased by an entire generation (instead of children/parents/grandparents you now have children/parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents); Professionalism Idolatry: amateurs are struggling for life in every field because of societal expectations for professional performances; Degradation of the Gene Pool: sometimes I wonder if people just aren't getting dumber and less talented.

3) I don't think there is any such thing as inherently Christian or worldly musical styles. However, not every popular worldly style is equally good musically. (Call me an elitist, but there it is.) Also, most current pop music is solo music, and some of it relies on technological tricks. For all of these reasons, it is not surprising that attempts to shoehorn pop music into congregational singing often fall flat. I've heard some spine-tingling, awe-inspiring, spirit-lifting, soul-stirring Christian pop solo songs just horribly butchered by congregations. Some things really are best left to professionals. On the other hand, I've also seen Christian pop songs transferred successfully to congregations, and some are as good musically and as rich textually as any hymn in the hymnbook.

4) Not to be rude, Rob, but maybe your pastor killed the choir because it stunk. Perhaps there were not enough choir members. Or perhaps some of the choir members were tone deaf. Sometimes it is easier for pastors to kill a whole program than to be honest and kick out the talentless participants. It may also be that your pastor is old enough to know a bad choir, but too old to know a bad praise band.

Holiness, holiness is what I long for.
Holiness is what I need.
Holiness, holiness is what you want from me.

Take my heart and form it,
Take my mind, transform it,
Take my will, conform it to yours,
To yours, O Lord.

Scott Underwood


In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.

Isaiah

Ach meine leiber! What can I say?

You are a baptist, and gnosticism is so tangled deep in the baptist psyche, there's no getting it out. Suffice to say that no musician of merit down the centuries has ever called himself a baptist. Likewise no baptist has ever mistaken a piece of music for a church service. (Notice I didn't say worship service.) Contrast that with a Mozart or Bach Requiem.

And concerning the choir, imagine firing your pastor for preaching 4 bad sermons in a row. Not replacing him, mind you, just having the service without sermons. And this is the whole point of gnosticism, it separates the mind from substance, the music from the words, the spirit from the body. As if the sacraments could be administered in a Catholic mass without the liturgy.

Finally, if we hadn't had a set of truly awful guitarists strumming through the service, I would almost believe the pastor that the choir was bad. But it wasn't. In fact, we had a reputation in town of being the church with the best music. Imagine that. Even after the choir director left in disgust, and members of the choir had to volunteer to direct. Even after the congregation broke out in spontaneous applause after our anthem, noticing our obviously difficult situation. No, this was the sort of red herring intended to humiliate, alienate, and drive underground whatever spirit was left. This was a "take no prisoners" scorched earth policy of character assassination so beloved of our politicos. To quote Chavez, the smell of brimstone still lingers.

"Suffice to say that no musician of merit down the centuries has ever called himself a baptist."
OUCH!!!
Keep in mind that baptists were persecuted minorities until the 1800s, and after the 1800s how many "musicians of merit" have there been?
;-)

Sorry for suggesting that maybe your choir stunk. It was presented merely as a logical possibility. I'm sorry also for your situation. In our church, even the contemporary service gets a choir performance about once a month, and it is very well-received. We also get traditional solo performances at about the same rate. Anyone who can't hear that a good choir number is a treat is a Philistine.

However, at the risk of being accused of closet gnosticism, I have to say that I think you are trying to have it both ways. You think the church service should have music that is at the level of Mozart. (Hey, personally, I would love that!) But you also want more than 50% of the congregation to sing along. Well, which is it? Or do you only want to go to church with Juilliard graduates?

During my college years, I had a church friend who came from a rough part of Philly. One day we were driving in his car and he excitedly put in a tape someone had just given him. "I think you'll like this," he said. "It's called classical music. No words -- just music."

This is what we're up against in our society. I think you have no idea how well educated you are compared to the average person.

For what it's worth, with the additional info you've just given me, I think your pastor is making a big mistake. I don't think a church should pander to the lowest common denominator. We do have to try to meet people where they are, but we also should be trying to edify people. Gnosticism isn't just a bad idea or a sinful idea. It's plain wrong. So if he thinks that he's going to give the congregation a good mix of spiritual milk and meat in his sermons, but he's going to serve this well-balanced "main course" in the context of a service that is all pablum, then he's sadly mistaken. It won't work.

On the other hand, you almost seem to be saying that one absolutely can't have a proper church service without a healthy helping of Western classical music or centuries-old liturgy. Obviously, as a baptist, I'm going to disagree with you there. However, I'm also not one of those who feels that tradition and heritage have no importance. Certainly, it is foolish to discard 2000 years of experience.

Well, yes, I do want it both ways. That's my whole complaint about Gnosticism, that there are only two mutually exclusive positions. What we used to call in seminary "a false dichotomy". Do you go out or at night? Do you walk to school or carry your lunch? And we have gotten so used to these false dichotomies, that we blithely accept the separation of mind and body, of spirit and substance, without once asking how our body can live without blood, and why the Eucharist comes in two parts.

But about church music. I'm all for uneducated, unwashed public singing their heart out. We just had a Sunday evening "hymn sing", which was a sop to the disbanded choir. 30 people out of a congregation of 700-1000 were present. For an hour we sang hymns from the unused hymnbooks in the pews. Some people liked Handel (Austrian Hymn) or Ralph Vaughn Williams (Sine Nomine), others preferred Phillip Bliss or Karen Lafferty. There wasn't a lot of chronological snobbery evident. But there is a reason why these songs made it into our hymnbook, and not the ones printed in the bulletin on Sunday. At the very least, let's call them empirically tested. The more testing, the better. In fact, what elevates Empiricism from a philosophical pragmatism a la Hume, to the level of Deductive certainty, is the presence of the Spirit. Thus church-tested hymns that come down through the centuries are like golden heirlooms. Which is not to say that the Coptic Church or the Syriac Church might have some gems we know nothing about, but stuff that was produced for the CCM mass market 2 years ago? Worthless costume jewelry, nearly all of it. And the rationale for forcing it on a reluctant congregation? Brimstone.

If you look at a new hymn book, you'll see that it has some songs in it that were "CCM" (before that term was even used) in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s. It also has a lot of "mass market" hymns from the Wesleys. Clearly, some mass market CCM can make the cut. Genuine gems can be created by each new generation of Christians. But, how was this determined? Clearly, somebody did some sort of empirical testing. Presumably it was churches. It is probably safe to say that these same churches also tried some songs that sparkled all nice and shiny but turned out to be paste upon close inspection.

I think what you are complaining about is that your church is deciding to toss out all the old proven "gems" and use ONLY faddish new "jewelry," most of which will not stand the test of time. If that is the case, then we are in fairly solid agreement. Moreover, I would add that someone with a good ear for gems, developed through careful study of previously certified gems, should be able to sift through the hot new CCM and pick out the new gems. (I know I can do it pretty reliably, and I'm no great expert.) So if your congregation isn't singing mostly gems, then your music director simply doesn't know what he's doing. He is a spiritual gourmand, which is all well and good except that he's being paid to be the church's gourmet. The church should be feasting on Julia Child's filet mignon, but instead he is serving you pot luck meat loaf. That's a cryin' shame. (I hope I'm wrong about him.) The worst part is, if you raise children on McDonalds, as adults they'll turn their noses up at real food.

So, to summarize: Don't blame CCM. There are some wonderful, wonderful gems in it. And the "costume jewelry" is nice for everyday wear. But to have ONLY CCM, and (especially) ONLY the latest top-40 CCM every Sunday for your corporate worship? No, no, no. Someone is incompetent and needs to be fired. Don't you have any adults in charge?

Adults I can handle. And you come to the one place that I am a true Gnostic: either it's incompetence or malice. The more we get to know this enemy of our souls, the more we realize how incompetence is the fall guy, in Stalin's words "the useful idiot" fronting the malice. And what is discouraging is seeing just how widespread is this trend across America. It is like invading southern Lebanon and finding machine guns welded into windowframes, or discovering an Al Quaida cell operating in your neighborhood. The church has not seen such concerted attack since Hitler took over Germany, or Lenin over Russia. And this reveals just how important was that gem we just threw away.

I wonder if most of the problem isn't simply due to not enough time being spent on corporate worship. When I was a kid, every Sunday morning we had Sunday School, where we sang a little (usually praise choruses, not hymns). Then we had morning church, where we sang a lot (usually 4 hymns). We also had a choir number, which was often a hymn arrangement, but could have been an anthem which might have ranged from Bach to Bill Gaither. Then there was at least one special music, which was usually a solo or small group, and which often had CCM tendencies. At the end, there was an invitational hymn, and we'd sing all the verses, often two or even three times. In the evening, we'd have Training Hour, where we'd sing a little. Then we'd have evening church, where we'd sing a lot, much like morning church, except there was no choir, the hymns tended to be the more upbeat ones, and the special music tended to be more modern. After evening church, the teens often had Afterglow at someone's house, where we'd sing a little, almost exclusively praise choruses.

And that was just Sunday! We also had Wednesday night prayer meeting every week. And we had youth retreats, family retreats, week-long revivals, week-long missionary conferences, week-long Bible studies, Vacation Bible School, and summer camp. On top of that, I was attending our church's Christian school, and we had chapel 2 to 5 times per week. (It kept changing every year.) Plus I was in the school choir.

At every event, we sang, and often had special music. There was no difficulty in giving good coverage to every form of church music, simply because we spent so much time on it. And we could afford to spend so much time on music because we were spending a LOT of time worshiping together.

What you are describing, seems to be normative Christian experience. That is, monasteries do a lot of singing too, and they've perfected this form of community for 1000's of years. Music is a whole lot more than the emotive stuff that plays in the background of every Hollywood box-office hit. In fact, when Wagner invented "movie music", it was considered quite radical, because it departed from the "music as an art form" sort of thing to "music as a subliminal communication medium". Muzak and movie-music, like MP3 and i-Pods are all just expressions of music as emotion, as thought, as a reality filter. Otherwise, why would you ever listen to music while doing something else? Imagine going to a classical music concert and reading a book, or checking e-mail. Everyone would glare at you. But those same people would think nothing of going home, putting a CD on and reading a book.

But I digress. If music is more than emotive Muzak for the soul, what exactly is it? The opening line of my post has that quote "He who sings prays twice." You don't put prayers on the CD and read a book. Praying is only meaningful when you are engaging your mind in the prayer. And the best way to avoid daydreaming during the pastoral prayer is to have to pray outloud yourself. Congregational singing does that. That's why it is even better than praying (since Paul seemed to discourage the Corinthians from all praying simultaneously.) Therefore every innovation that reduces congregational participation, be it new tunes to old words, hackneyed words to old tunes, or general tuneless repetition of the same 7 words, destroys what should be an important congregational participation.

Why congregational or group interaction is important is perhaps worth a separate post, but notice how often it has been a part of our past experience, as well as the "community life" of the church throughout the ages. That is what is being thrown away, that is what is being lost. Not that it makes a church richer, happier or more populated, quite the opposite. Which raises the question, whence this race to self-destruction?

In an earlier post I talked about addicts being cross-wired. This is a situation where the cross-wiring is even more apparent. The very thing that this CCM is supposed to help--less congregational participation--is what it generates. Once again, whence this cross-wiring?

I'm not going to jump in on the merits of this discussion and the 'new' versus the 'old' music in worship. What I will jump in on is your basic philosophical mistake. You have entered into this philosophically with an emotional attachment to the subject at had, which will produce results philosophically as you wished them to be rather than what logic and evidence dictate.

The title of your blog is "the procrustean", which I assume is not referring to Greek mythology, but rather to disregarding of individual circumstances or preferences. This point of 'music' in worship appears to be, in what has evolved into a debate, to be more over individual preferences and circumstances. One must admit that church music has change significantly over the course of a couple thousand years and thus what we define as 'old' would be considered quite 'new' a majority of Christians in history. Even the advent of 'old' hymns was quite radical at the time.

Your first paragraph asserts something like "emotions run counter to logic and evidence". Is that true?

I assert that it is some sort of Star Trek "Vulcan" virtue to wish for no emotions, it is a male utopian vision that man is better without emotions. Nowhere does the Bible support this. Read Job. Did he have emotions? Were they bad? How about Jesus, was he a cool cucumber weeping over Jerusalem, weeping over Lazarus, turning over tables in the Temple? What did John 15 promise--freedom from emotions, or emotions of contentment?

I would argue that on the contrary, it is entirely Gnostic to separate logic and emotions. If an argument is only logically true, and not emotionally and spiritually and aesthetically true, then there is something very very wrong with the logic.

Paragraph 2 suggests that "procrustean" is something "vulcan" rather than Greek. Read the 3rd post at the very bottom of this blog, entitled "Welcome".

Paragraph 2 also suggests that the debate is between "new" and "old" music. Nothing could be further from the point. Are "new" math theorems better or worse than "old" math theorems? What a silly question! Do we invent or create theorems or discover them? Either its a valid theorem or it isn't. And no amount of time will sanctify a bad theorem. Math has an eternal existence, it has a Platonic Ideal, it is general to any culture, to any time, to any place.

Now can anything of what we said about Math apply to Music? The Gnostic would say no. The Bible would say yes. What is that song in Revelation that is sung by the 144000? Only they know. And how long will they be singing it? For eternity. Do we create songs, or discover them? Plato and St John would say, we are given them.

YES! The death of music is the canary in the coal mine to me. I do music therapy with Alzheimers patients. The way I do this is to gently sing one of the sing-along songs of their youth to them until they find one of the millions of neural connections to that song that remain intact. And BAM, suddenly, there they are, looking out of their eyes at me. For one glorious moment they are back on solid ground. Their joy is indescribable. The nursing staff is astonished to see someone who is no longer capable of speech sing the song through, every word in place, sweet and true. The best moment I will ever remember is, as a nursing home activities director, meeting a newly transferred patient, a handsome, ravaged man in his seventies, totally unresponsive, lying motionless in his gurney, as an orderly and his wife wheeled him into his new room. She looked at him with such devotion, and such pain. I asked her what his interests were. She told me he had loved to sing. So I bent close to him, and took his hand, looked straight into his eyes, and started singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart". By the end of the verse, he was looking back at me. I started the song again. He opened his mouth, and, weakly, began to sing along. Then a puzzled look came into his eyes, and he broke his gaze from my eyes, and sought the eyes of his wife. When he found them, he smiled, and he sang the song to her. We sang the song two more times, then he tired, and closed his eyes and slept. His wife turned to me with tears streaming, and told me it was the first time in over a year that he had made a sound. Of course he hadn't spoken. He was lost. He just needed a path to a familiar place. "He is still there," she said. "Yes," I said, "And he still loves you with all his heart." He died a couple of weeks later. I think he had finally done what he needed to do, what he had been waiting to accomplish. His generation had songs for every moment of the day, for every experience of their lives. In the evenings, on Sunday afternoons, at gatherings and picnics and long walks or rides home, people sang together. Every song had hundreds and thousands of memories attached. They meant something. When jazz appeared on the scene, people worried. They worried about Rock and Roll. Was it because of the minor keys, and the disturbing beats? To some extent. But more, the wrongness about them was that they were the domain of the individual, not the group. They were for independent voices, and virtuoso musicians. They were for listening, not participation. They did not belong to the listener. Today we have rap, angry noise. And we have American Idol. The Big Three sneer at the "old fashioned" singers. They do not want melody. They want vocal acrobatics. They want style, not heart. They tell the rest of us we are not good enough - to stop singing. To shut up. And we have. Someday our children will be in a nursing home. What song will bring them home?

Rob wrote: "Do we create songs, or discover them? Plato and St John would say, we are given them."

This reminds me of a musician joke, where the artist intros a song with "This is a song that the Lord gave me last week. I'm so thankful to God for giving me this song. But if you sing it without my permission, I'll sue your pants off!"

This is funny (to me, anyway) because it sums up the quandary of everyone who lives "by his wits." It takes a lot of effort and training to get to the place where God can give you a good idea, or at least get to the place where you can actually do something with a good idea. So a musician (artist, scientist, engineer, etc.) naturally wants (and often needs) a return on his investment. He's worked hard, for many years, and now, to be blunt, he wants money. But on the other hand, he also knows that he could not have done what he did without inborn talent, without the self-sacrifice of parents and teachers, and without being "visited by the muse." So this makes him feel like asking for money is unseemly.

Maybe people with strong bodies feel similarly about their sports achievements. (But I wouldn't know about that!)

Rob wrote: "...why would you ever listen to music while doing something else?"

I think you're going overboard here. Of course it would be weird and rude to check email at a concert, because the whole point of going to a concert is to listen to the music. But music doesn't have to be an exclusive activity EVERY TIME. It isn't gnostic to listen to music while driving, or to sing spirituals while picking cotton, or to dance to music, or to have background music at a dinner party.

Rob wrote: "...every innovation that reduces congregational participation, be it new tunes to old words, hackneyed words to old tunes, or general tuneless repetition of the same 7 words, destroys what should be an important congregational participation."

I sympathize, but again I think you are going too far. You are condemning all church music innovations based upon your experience with a music director who seems to have either poor training or poor taste. And I think you are blaming modern music for lack of participation, when in fact the main cause of lack of participation is simply lack of participation. What I mean is, people are just not attending church services enough. Therefore (and not surprisingly) they fail to acquire the skills necessary to participate effectively in those services. I blame parents, who are both too lazy to attend themselves, and also too weak-willed to force their children to attend. And I blame church leaders, who fail to hold people's feet to the fire. Even my church (which is generally a good church) has substituted home Bible studies during the week for Sunday evening worship. [begin rant] Huh?? Why would I prefer to meet on Monday night rather than Sunday night? I'm OFF on Sunday! [end rant, get back to point] Needless to say, there's not much congregational singing at those home Bible studies. And there's no regular Wednesday night prayer meeting either, so again, no opportunity for congregational singing.

One last comment, relating to Glee's point about "the death of music." I wonder if a big part of the blame isn't portable music players. For millenia, if you wanted music, you had to make it yourself or else go somewhere to hear someone else make it. Then phonographs and radios came along, but they were confined to houses. Later you could get a radio in your car. Later still you could get a carry-along radio, but the batteries didn't last long. In any case, you were still confined to whatever the disc jockeys chose to play. If you wanted a particular piece, you still had to play or sing it yourself. Then came the Walkman and its descendants, down to the IPod, and also satellite radio. So now you can almost always hear a professional play/sing whatever you want, whenever you want. Is it so surprising that music (as a participatory action) is dying? We are finding many things like that in our society: music, sports, acting, reading, writing, teaching, cooking, inventing, home improvement, growing food, seeing nature, raising children, etc. All have been consigned to the "experts." Meanwhile people mourn the death of our culture.