.

Choirs are being ousted from the modern church and the argument goes like this: People just don't relate to choirs anymore: they are too churchy.  Moderns want to come to church today but hopefully find no church there.  However, is the major premise of this syllogism true? Is the choir passé and outdated in today's culture? If so, then the word hasn't reached the outside world of music yet. 

 

Are the choral arts obsolete and useless outside the church walls? Answer: the opposite is true: choirs rule everywhere. It's only the too-too-hip church that thinks it has a finger on the pulse of what's "in" and what's "out." Choirs are burgeoning on planet earth and the only disappearing act is inside the church. The "seeker" church and humankind are marching in opposite directions with regard to choral music and choirs: the world loves them and the new church leadership is ignorant of the power and usefulness of choirs, and no one in the outside world of musical arts cares that the church has de-choired itself; the world simply bypasses the church for its choral music.  

 

Outside the reduced music environment of the church, the real world abounds in vocal ensembles: civic chorales, Bach Society choirs, barbershop harmony societies, glee clubs, community choirs, symphonic choruses, Messiah sing-ins, Sweet Adelines, boy choirs, girl choirs, mixed choirs, gospel choirs, college and university chorales, signing choirs, and oratorio societies.  

 

As the love of choirs seeps out of every pore of society, the confused church, not seeing the arts horizon clearly, is fastidiously removing its choirs like warts. As the rest of the world goes ever choir-crazy, the church just goes crazy and shoots its choir like it was a lame horse or an unwanted intruder.      

 

The arguers against choirs make the astonishing charge that, well, perhaps older fuddy-duddies still want to listen to robed-up psalm-singin' church ladies (with that one guy who everybody knows can't sing a note), but the hallowed youth don't want choirs, and let's face it, youth is everything, and no one else counts. Even this tenet in the no-choir credo is proved false out there in the real world.  

 

Every junior and senior high school has its choirs and show glees. Every college and university music school and conservatory is stuffed to the acoustic ceiling with madrigals, men's choruses, women's chorales, chamber choirs, concert choirs, collegiums, and jazz vocal groups, and all the while the modern church keeps telling us nobody likes choirs any more, especially young people, and the youth are the future of the nation, etc.

 

Even as new types of choirs are constantly developed in society, the church is  constantly trying to distance itself from the choral arts. Where the primal instrument, the human voice, is concerned, the church and modern civilization are on different pages: choirs are more popular than ever in society, and churches are driving their choir programs away as if they are carriers of disease.

 

And here is the issue in a nutshell: church leadership is not divesting itself of choirs to suit the preferences of seekers of Christ; rather church leadership is sating its own tastes and preferences, which are counter to those outside whom the church seeks (see my essay: "The Tyranny of Personal Tastes"). This tyranny of tastes and preferences being foisted on the music of the church, by a new brand of church leadership, is matched in tyranny with a lack of appreciation for a diversity of both music and the Body of Christ.    

 

But why? Nowhere else in the church are artistic values being questioned and censored. The church does not reduce its pulpit to preaching on Judges every Sunday. The church kitchens aren't serving chicken croquettes at every church supper. It does not command its Sunday school teachers to teach only about wee Zaccheaus. Its landscaping isn't held to a croton bush. Where else in the church are things regressing except in the music department? And this regression is drastic: not only is any music more than 20 years old deemed hopelessly dated to the "modern" church, but the great music of the church age has been thrown away as useless. Choral arts are seen as out-of-date, and choirs of singers are equated with the horse-and-buggy era.

 

With choirs and choir risers gone, this creates more space. When choirs are stripped from the inside of the church, a whole lot of extra room is freed up. This expanse has been filled with guitar and electric bass sets, amps, digital keyboards and synths. To free up more space for the conversion to the New Order of One Kind of Music, churches have dismantled their electronic and pipe organs and donated them to Goodwill Industries, who then wait for those fuddy-duddies to come along and rescue them. Goodwill is indeed a worthy recipient, if you first assume the desperate need to surgically excise internal organs from the church, so to speak. There is no such need.

 

We have received no confirmation from the world - or the youth of the world - that anyone outside the doors of the church are done with choirs, organs,.. or even robes, although speaking personally, I would donate those to Goodwill.  Music schools continue to offer choral arts, choral conducting, organ studies and degrees in all these disciplines, and we have no word that the American Guild of Organists is turning their headquarters into a Guitar Center. The church's choirophobia is not shared by either the academic or the arts world, and this goes for the youth, who are still, guess what?.. taking choral and organ studies in schools all over the earth. 

 

Congregations don't make these kinds of decisions; church leadership does. No referendums are held in the vast majority of church congregations to choose the order of worship, the styles of music, and sermon topics. Church leadership solely creates the desired modes of worship, including the styles of music in play, and then a congregation gathers that likes what is happening.  Congregations aren't called flocks for nothing: they are led by their shepherds, and they do not generally stage protests because there is no choir in place. Neither do they stage protests against choirs and demand that the leadership cast them out; church leaders make these decisions unilaterally. 

 

It is important to be clear where the problem lies: it lies with the ever newer, younger and more callow leadership, not congregations. It is pastors, youth ministers, salaried musicians, elders, deacons, and board members that have come up with this idea that choirs have somehow lost their appeal to either the unchurched of any age, or youth in particular. Both assumptions are woefully wrong. How and why have new, younger pastors, youth ministers, and music people come up with this narrow-minded misconception that choirs cannot be a part of a progressive 21st c. church?  This erroneous outlook is a result of their own narrow experiences in music and the arts in general, and their own underdeveloped musical tastes and preferences, and this stunted growth in a full appreciation of music is being imprinted on their congregations.

 

Clearer still: It is not choirs that are suffering from a narrowing of musical tastes, it is new leadership that brings a narrower musical palate. Choirs are not lacking in the public artistic eye, leaders are lacking in their private artistic lives. It is not the choral arts that are untoward, but it is the one-idiom-only shrunken-down musical arts of the new leadership that is out of kilter. It is not the churches who retain their choral programs who have a myopic view of ministry in this age, it is that leadership who throws away choirs that is short-sighted and pedestrian. One more (I promise): It is not choir people who need to be taught the "right" ways of this new age of ministry, it is the leadership that needs to go back in a time machine and be taught a full range of musical tastes all over again. They then need to come back with wide open eyes, the better to see that choirs and the choral arts will have a major place in society forever.

 

If there were time machines, and if the new church leadership could be convinced to make the trip back, these are the instructions that they should hear just before they flip that time dial to, say, 20 years ago:

 

1. Return to your impressionable youth and this time pay more attention to all music, not just contemporary music.

 

2. What do you say we jump off of guitar amps less, and take more music lessons in various instruments and the voice.

 

3. Join a choir, for heaven's sake. You missed that formative experience your first time.

 

4. When anyone tries to tell you that the future is choir-less, tell them they are as badly mistaken as you once were. The future is crammed with choirs.

 

5.  If anyone tries to tell you that churches in the future will want no choirs because they will be passé, tell them that they have perhaps hurt their heads on the amp-jumps, and no such ridiculous thing will ever come to pass. Add that choirs, choral music and the human voice blended with other human voices, is forever and ever. And lastly,

 

6. When you're back there 20 years ago, don't just be a hip pre-teenager, playing  early video games and listening to rock music; become a whole person, thou Philistine!..

 

...and come back to the future with more meat on your musical bone than P&W... which, while tasty, is paltry in the big picture, and by the way,.. in case you are interested in the significance of it all, this musical smallness is why the general arts and music community pays little attention to P&W, nor goes to contemporary Christian music concerts. They are too busy going to choral concerts, among others. And since the church, through the narrow influences of its underachieving leadership, has fired the choir, the un-churched of all ages, young and old alike, are defaulted to getting their choral music from the world outside the choir-less, guitar-infested church. 

 

Go ahead: tell me I don't like guitars!  And be sure to tell that to Martin,.. my 1969 vintage D-35. He'll be surprised (I'm fairly certain he's a "he" even though it's notoriously difficult to sex a guitar... sort of like parrots). Where guitars are concerned, I have been accused of, not bias against them, but the opposite bias many times in my music career.

 

I have been implored by certain pious congregants and church officials to lose the "devil's instrument" (guitar) and play a more Godly one, perhaps a clarinet. The guitar has an unfortunate image problem with some who haven't adequately thought the situation though: rock bands play them; rock music is traditionally the devil's music; ergo, the guitar must also ascend from out of the smoky pit. Of course, this simplistic logic doesn't account for classical, flamenco, and folk guitars, or for that matter, orchestral guitars that were part of the Glenn Miller rhythm section, just to mention a few that might not be so satanic. 

 

A cursory inventory of this web site will certify that I am a guitarist who likes guitars. I also prolifically compose and arrange praise and worship and Cont. Christian music. I regard the idiom highly and enjoy writing, singing, and... guitar-ing it.  The clarinet – not so much. But I don't want to sing and play, and use in ministry, only that single style of sacred music for a lifetime. I am always astonished that there are many who are satisfied with this narrow musical experience. It is much narrower than music is portrayed in Scripture.  

 

Speaking of Scripture and instruments with strings on them, those of us who are sola scriptura in our journey to ascertain Truth, will want certification from Holy Writ that stringed instruments are Biblical, and that they were played in the praise of God, at least in the Old Testament, and presumably, God's musical tastes are like his basic character: unchanging. Of course, the famous reference is Ps. 32:2, where a virtual string band is enumerated: harp, lyre, psaltery, and the instrument of 10 strings. This last item cooks it for me: with the ordinary guitar having only six strings, I am Biblical with four strings to spare. Now my 12-string guitar could be suspect, but I'm counting the two pairs of unison strings as one each - total: a biblical ten, and I'm sticking with that exegesis. 

 

Clearly I have no anti-guitar or anti-contemporary bias in my heart. That I would be accused of having an anti-guitar stance will elicit huge guffaws from all of my choir singers over the years who have tried with mixed results to wrest the guitar from my mitts during choral numbers that seem not to need that extra instrumentation.

 

What I have is a one-kind-of-music bias. I also have an anti anti-choir bias. I always have an aversion to minimizing and reducing the musical experience in the church. I want contemporary Christian music, guitars, basses, amps, organs, bells, brass, woodwinds, early instruments, harps, lyres, psalteries, any instruments of 10 strings; choirs, high and low choral music, the full range of choral arts; oratorio; Caribbean Christmas carols; medieval plainchant; Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Bach and Handel, and even clarinets.  

 

I want to add here, that I endeavor to have a measured Biblical view of not only the nature of music inside the church, but a informed estimate of music's intrinsic importance in the church. It may surprise some people to hear me say that I don't deem music to be an indispensable and must-have element in worship. If this were true, then worshippers would necessarily be at the mercy of their lack of musical abilities, and some deeply spiritual people have no musical abilities at all, nor any real interest in music.  

 

I see music in the New Testament as being tellingly understated and rarely mentioned. This lack of emphasis cannot be ignored. Music is not among the most important aspects in the church, but is only one of many subordinate helps in the worship of God. I have no visions of grandeur that vaunt music above its scripturally prescribed role. The church has many other pressing responsibilities and mandated tasks that dwarf the significance of any choir or music team. Among these are the preaching of the word, ministry to those in sorrow and in need, and seeking the lost in the world outside. Music is but one of many tools to help in these tasks, and not an end in itself. There are some churches where a gymnasium would be a more valuable tool of ministry than a music department. God knows where to raise up the right tools for each situation. 

 

On the other hand, in every church in which I have been a music director, the congregation has loved the choir. I suspect that if no choir had ever been there, they would have been content with whatever else was in place. Congregations, for the most part, are malleable and impressionable entities: they can be deeply influenced, especially by the subjective art of music.  

 

As an example of this malleability and openness to new ideas, when I first came to the Redlands church early in 1990, I sought permission from the elders and pastor to present a community concert that would be a night event and advertised citywide.  It would be the very first of many concerts to come. It would be, I told the officers of the church, a Country/Bluegrass gospel concert. "Great!" they said.  We were, after all, in a rural part of the county, in an agricultural area, and literally in a field that used to be filled with zucchinis. I couldn't have suggested anything more appropriate to their demographic and it seemed like a natural. The concert was held in the fall, and it was a full house. Everyone was ecstatic. A Country/Bluegrass gospel concert down in the country: a perfect fit.  The congregation was supportive and quickly formed a good initial impression of the RCC Choir, and those positive impressions held over to the Sunday morning services, and the good times lasted down the years.

 

But that style of music was a predictable success. Soon after the first of the next year, I made another concert pitch to the elders and pastor. This time, I said I wanted to do an ancient concert, using only the music of the medieval, Renaissance and baroque eras of Western Europe, and employing only historic period instruments in use 300 to 500 years ago. There was silence in the board room. The good church officers stared blankly at me.  I continued: this is all called "early music."  I want to do an early music concert, and call it "Night of Ancient Music." More silence. And then one elder said, 'Well,.. I suppose we... what?" 

 

They never fully understood what I was talking about and this wasn't their fault. They were not unintelligent people. It was merely that their musical knowledge as non-musician laypeople, did not stretch to the distant and arcane world of early music. I knew this and I had to eventually ask them to trust me.  I told them that the concert would work, that it would be well-attended, the choir would love doing the concert, the congregation would take to it enthusiastically, and it would be praiseworthy unto the Lord. They stared a little longer at me, and turned and stared at one another, and said, "Okay!.. you can do this... whatever it is." 

 

We began rehearsals right away, and even the choir had a huge learning curve up against them. Most had never sung any early music other than the Hallelujah Chorus (which they were unaware was early music) and the whole experience was new to them. The Country/Bluegrass,.. that was easy. The Redland is the country.  Early music was an undiscovered country, and that country was overseas and way back in time. 

 

All spring we practiced being a chamber choir of the 16th c. We formed a madrigal group within the choir, and learned how to sing those songs with stylistic accuracy.  I was also rehearsing simultaneously with the early instruments, and began bringing the consort to the choir rehearsals. Little by little, the singers began to assimilate the choral arts required of period music. Bit by bit, they cultivated a taste for early choral music. Rehearsal by rehearsal, they saw the concept and all light bulbs went on.

 

A month before the concert, the banner went up on the church front lawn.  It was a first, I'm sure, for the area: here we have U-Pick strawberries and tomatoes all around, and the banner screamed, "Night of Ancient Music." "Early Instruments." "Choir of 20." At this point, the congregation saw that something exceedingly strange was going to happen. Congregants began to ask me and the other singers what sort of concert this was. We basically had to tell them that it was hard to explain, but if they attended, they would like it. The congregation trusted us in the same manner that the elders did.

 

A few weeks before the concert, the choir and I began to offer a few previews of the impending concert in the Sunday services. This congregation had never heard a church choir present a 16th c. motet in a church service.  It could not have been any more of an alien experience if we had been that space bar combo in Star Wars.  And yet, it was heartily received, and thus began the extended music education of this congregation and of that entire area. Even the Homestead Newsleader, which was more at home publishing notices about rodeos, county fairs, square dances, and what bars had the best electric bull, became adept at heralding our annual ancient concert and took it in stride. You would have thought they were town criers in 15th c. London. 

 

The concert was thronged and every seat was taken. The choir had learned its early music disciplines, and the ancient instruments were weird and fascinating to the audience as they should be. It was a fine concert and we did 8 more of them in the coming years, every one stacked to the walls with people. The congregation quickly began to see early sacred music as another idiom that could be used in the church to praise God. They had been influenced for the good, and had assimilated that influence with a good spirit and a willing heart, even though only months before, they had never heard of a krummhorn and wouldn't have known a sackbut from a sack of rutabagas. 

 

This is one of a multitude of examples of how pliable and malleable a congregation can be. When a willing congregation is exposed to a wide diversity of music, they can not only appreciate, but learn to prefer many kinds of new musical experiences.  In order for this to happen, the congregation has to have opportunities to grow and expand their artistic tastes, and this is where church leadership must step in and offer a broad palate of musical opportunities to the people.

 

Make no mistake, congregations face a roadblock in hearing a broad selection of sacred music styles. The younger leadership coming into today's designer churches have a quite different cumulative musical experience. They are coming in with their own personal tastes and preferences in music that are much narrower than preceding generations. They are unilaterally making the congregation's musical taste-related decisions for the church people. That decision: no out-of-fashion choirs in our modern, progressive, hip church!  

 

So the choir and the choral arts, which are unknown musical experiences to the new leadership, is unfairly cast as being disposable. The guitar becomes the predominant musical instrument in the church: not the pipe organ, not the three-manual electronic Allen organ, and not even the acoustic grand piano. The new leadership has transformed the church into a mono-idiomatic one-style-of-music, contemporary-only, no-other-music-need-apply guitar fest, and you can buy their obsolete, cast-off, choir-infected instruments down at the thrift shop for, well, a song. 

 

Is there a kind of music that we should be using by mandate from God? No, there is no transcendent idiom of sacred music. Contemporary Christian music has not been anointed on high by God, and neither has any other style of music, including choral. Scripture has stopped short of exalting a specific kind of musical expression, no doubt for the same reasons that many other things are left unspecified: we have a tendency to make icons of things we want to believe God favors. But we know of no music that God favors, especially, no period of music time-wise. 

 

There is no style of music with a Biblical mandate that we must exclusively follow because we think it is more blessed of God, or more spiritual in essence. We are told in scripture that the N.T. church sang psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, and for millennia, we have endeavored to interpret those three kinds of music in modern terms. Instead of trying to figure out exegetically what specific idioms we're supposed to be singing (and playing), I believe this verse infers that the musical choices available to us from God are vast, and I believe the Old and New Testaments support that wide variety of choices, by naming a wide variety of instruments, and by certifying multiple ways of singing.  

 

I want it all. I don't want chicken croquettes for every church dinner or even pizza. I don't want the pastor to only expound from Judges, and wee Zaccheaus is a great story for once a year. Out there with the croton, I'd like to see some palms, ixora, Brazilian sunsets, and a cactus or two.  

 

And musically, I want every sacred (and even secular) idiom of music available that is known to the church age, and accompanied by every instrument common to the musical experiences of churches everywhere and for all time. I want none of it to be unavailable or censored from my use in praise to God, and in my calling as a church music director.  

 

I want the musical tastes and preferences of individuals, including the leadership of the church, to be subordinate to the corporate tastes and preferences of the congregation. When an assessment must be made to ascertain what these corporate tastes may be, I want the church leadership to assume the obvious: that the humans inside the church will have, or can be influenced to have, and therefore can have the same tastes as humans outside the church doors, which tastes are vast and unrestricted. In short, I want the music of all the spheres, and not just the one contemporary sphere. The world, in case the new church is listening, wants the same thing.

 

Continuing to address the misguided position that choral music and choirs are on the wane everywhere: choral music is being written and published with ever increasing vigor in society. Choirs are not becoming dated, even though many churches treat choirs as if they are bustles and spats: obsolete things of yesterday. They see them as no longer in vogue, no long viable, no longer wanted by modern church-goers. But the world outside the church disagrees: the world instinctively knows the human voice, which is the primal instrument, combined in harmony, is never going away, and that even the sacred choral classics are here to stay, much less the thousands of new choral publications released yearly.

 

In Holy Writ, we read choirs stood on the walls of Jerusalem, while the congregational choir sang simultaneously from ground level. Angelic choirs held forth from the heavens at the birth of Christ, but churches continue to deep-six their choir programs as if choirs have not a Biblical mention. Choirs are treated like a time-sensitive idea that has run its course.

 

Choirs are not time-sensitive; they are timeless. Choirs are scriptural and were likely first employed, not by humankind, but by the angels. We are promised choirs in eternity, therefore, if we are denied choral music by today's choir-challenged church, we need only wait for our redemption to remedy that oversight. And remedy it God will, as the music of the choir will be restored to the church in the heavenlies.  

 

This weird purge of choirs and the choral arts by the present-day church is a transitory aberration borne of leadership's artistic short-sightedness and diminished cultural I.Q., but it will be corrected in eternity, if not sooner. The reduction of music in the modern church is a mistake, and it should be corrected now, but failing that correction, at least we can look forward to a time when all music will be returned to the church and to the redeemed for endless time. Only in the present hip church are we music-impoverished.

 

The huge wealth of sacred music known to us in the church age has been redefined as out-of-fashion, but here is a powerful contradiction to that notion: this music-going-out-of-style does not hold water in the instrumental world, as symphony orchestras continue to present classical and baroque symphonic music of yesteryear, and even early music written centuries ago. This demonstrates that music, instrumental or vocal, does not become outdated; It does not molder into disuse; it does not go out of favor; it accumulates... as wealth accumulates.

 

We do not throw away the art of yesterday; we collect it, curate it, display it, enjoy it anew, and add to that cumulative artistic wealth, new art. We then clasp it all to our breasts: the old, the not-so-old, and the new, and we wait for the music of tomorrow, while feasting on every ort of artistic endeavor that has gone before us.  

 

Choral music is the art of the combined forces of the human voice: it does not age; it lives forever. It does not spoil or go flat, it mellows. It does not fall out of fashion; it is reheard and re-sung with a different and appreciative ear and voice, and clothed afresh in new arrangements and orchestrations. Choral music and choirs and the intoned word are no more passé in the modern church than is the spoken word.

 

Then what has happened? What exactly is going on? Why have churches, that seem to aspire to innovation and diversity in every other part of church expression, turned upon its music with the vengeance of a censor and caused 9 tenths of it to be gone? Why have otherwise seemingly sophisticated churches decimated (times 9) its music, but would never dream of reducing any other art form. They must know that, in their congregations, there are patrons of the arts (or should be) who would not stand still for this kind of reductionism in artistic expression?  

 

And if these patrons of the arts are not in the church, then where in the world are these good and impressive people? Where are these protectors of a broad expression of music, if they are indeed missing in action from the modern church's congregation? Are they not of the elect?  Have they been barred at the door, or is it that they have purposely been omitted from being sought by the church?  Are these the unfavored by agreement from the leadership?  Is the church actively and purposely now seeking people who don't have a broad appreciation of music and the arts? Is this why the ouster of choral programs fails to engender any complaints: because the congregation has been meticulously culled and manipulated for their narrow music appreciation... to perfectly match the music reductionism concepts in place by the leadership? Has the church, with purpose aforethought, actively recruited a congregation that would be content with a modest spectrum of music, and then given them exactly that? 

 

If this is the church's answer: that no one in the congregation cares about a choir, because they have been chosen by an exclusivist outreach policy to not care about a choir, then we must conclude a horrible truth: the rank and file of many modern churches is devoid of well-rounded lovers of the arts. If this is true, then the church needs to go out and hunt down this kind of priceless folk. They are too valuable a breed to leave out in the world, unchurched. While the leadership is at it, they might consider hiring a few musical instructors to give free classes in music appreciation to the congregants. Too much is being missed by too many in the dubious name of church modernism.

 

If the modern church actively sought patrons of the arts, along with their other core constituencies, it would not only raise the musical quotient of the church, but would keep the church leaders honest with respect to their heavy-handed tendency to force their personal musical tastes on the congregation at large. An influx of arts patrons and broad-minded musicians may have great artistic influences on everybody: the congregation, the leaders, the resident church musicians... and other unchurched patrons.

 

A church devoid of well-rounded artistic patrons, and by that, I mean attendees of the opera, ballet, chamber groups, symphony, musicals, local college music school productions, the community choruses, and a wide diversity of all kinds of music, both sacred and secular.. a church that does not have a healthy representation of this kind of person - the musically astute patron of the arts - is an impoverished church, and one that has failed itself in a wide and nonexclusive outreach. 

 

In addition, if the musicians (both volunteer and salaried) of a modern church are not they, themselves supporters of a wide and sprawling diversity of musical arts (as well as fine arts, and the theater), that is, if a church's musicians have never been exposed to the full range of the musical arts, and have not developed a healthy taste for all manner of music, they are under-qualified as musicians, and need to rethink their calling and/or revisit their training.  

 

Of course, even well-trained and well-rounded church musicians will not all have the same musical tastes, even after all flavors have been sampled. Nevertheless, musicians who have locked themselves inside the church, and remain exposed only to contemporary Christian music, and have never tasted the sumptuous world of musical fare available to them, are victims of their own pedestrian and narrow musical experiences. They should not now be complicit in passing this reductionist musical view down to an unsuspecting and impressionable congregation. 

 

Not all adventurous souls who sample a banquet of musical foods will like the whole table. Some may like the opera, but not jazz, for instance, or vice versa. Some may think oratorio is the greatest, while others will tend more to modern instrumental and choral works. Some may love to attend the symphony, but will pass on chamber groups.

 

Nevertheless, it seems that one of the reasons the modern church has erred in its cultural and artistic assessments, and has wrongly concluded that choral music is outdated, is that its own musicians are too parochial and narrowly educated in musical experiences and development to to see this unfortunate idea as a mistake.  If the leaders of a church are musically semiliterate, it is then easy to see from whence the misconceptions (that choirs are disposable) spring.  

 

Have church leaders of today become such Philistines that they have lost their identification with such a valid, scriptural, and historical form of music as the choral arts? Why have churches determined that choir music alone is the evil stepchild in the church artistic family, and must be given away to the Gypsies, as the church plies a small world view of music that sounds only one kind of music, that of contemporary times?  

 

As churches misread culture and get wrong what the world wants to hear in its music, and as they employ musicians with narrow tastes in music, and no broad experience across the wide spectrum of the musical arts, they become increasingly mono-idiomatic and minimalist in musical expression. This means churches are defaulting to the minimal amount of music expression possible in the mistaken belief that this is the latter-day calling of the church in music: to create an artificial, narrowly defined, and substandard music world inside the church that bears no resemblance to the richer and fuller musical world on the outside.

 

In the area of music, the church is behind the world in artistic verve and elán, and could expand that expression without any fear of "conforming to the world." Why is this possible? Because the world does not own music. It did not create the music of the spheres and must borrow music, as does the church, from God, who is then praised in all music directed to Him with a good heart. 

 

The world's response to this error of judgment in church leadership will be the same in every case where the church has misread the prevailing winds of arts and culture: the world will circumvent the church and take a pass on its regressive and reductionist ideas. This need not happen, at least in the musical arts, if the church has simultaneously, a biblical and a pragmatic view of music as it exists everywhere. With a wide and uncensored view of music, the church can have it all: a Godly calling and all the music of the spheres. It need not serve the congregation the musical equivalent of the same kind of food every Sunday.

​

​

​

 

 

​

​