More on Christmas Music, and Worship Music in general

In the pause between getting K home from Michigan and some of the entertaining tomorrow and Saturday, I want to reply to Tom, (Dad), John and Bruce. Perhaps not reply but consider further....and to give thanks for CDs and our local NPR/Classical music station (WKSU, one of the best in the country I claim unapologetically), which this week is playing all Christmas all day (9 a.m. to 3 p.m) under the tutelage of Mark Pennell, a terrific announcer/teacher/believer. Count on Tom to go to the heart of the matter to pinpoint consumerism and idolatry. We miss regular interaction with you, Tom! Something you said several years ago at a regional staff conference, however, complicates matters a bit, making me wonder what role class plays in the whole matter and what role being missionaries does.

Class first. Dad scoffs at not just CCM—I doubt he even knows about that genre though it was that one represented on the Christian radio station—but some of the praise choruses we sing in our services. At the same time he is a country music fan who loves to dance to line-dance music and play his harmonica to computer generated songs. Just a couple of weeks ago, a dear man in our church had “special music” in which he not only sang but also surprised us all when he pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and played some. Suffice it to say that such “special music” would never happen in Calvin CRC. Yet it cheered the hearts of many in our church, which is full of farmers and factory workers and the unschooled and unemployed. R. was offering this music to God as worship and to the congregation as a gift. Even some of our best performing musicians have no musical education and learn what they sing by ear, not by reading music. Our worship leaders work hard to chose only the best of the choruses as well as the best of the hymns (I don’t know that we always succeed, but we always try). Many of the church’s grumps about praise music love the worst of the hymns, the ones they sang when they were teens or young adults. They stand or sit there and scowl during the musical portion of worship—and we do blended worship—killing the spirit of worship for many who are trying. I have observed over these ten years of this kind of worship that many of the new things are very dated—popular for a while and then I (at least) tire of them easily. A sign, I think, that they are not among “the best.” But some have survived.

Missionary: Tom, you said several years ago, that while you don’t enjoy much of the music sung by the students these days, you are a missionary to those students and thus you (what’s the right verb? Make use of? Employ? Sing?) them. One of the reasons we don’t stick to the old CMA hymn book is that we are trying not to be a dying church, catering to the over 70 set in every regard, the people who are resisting every kind of change that makes us a place welcoming to the young (who have left in droves), to the people who haven’t just grown up in the CMA, to the students at the college, to….anyone who is not “us.” Their scowls don’t help. If God is the God of all cultures, and all cultures have both good and bad in them, then surely there is good represented among those cultures’ music that can be given as offerings back to him and as means to reach out to those cultures. Cf. Acts 17 in this regard. It takes discernment among the body to sift out the consumerist and idolatrous and to employ the good (if not best), but surely that is a task those of us who have a musical education, who have an understanding of culture and missions must take on. What we prefer to listen to in our homes may not be what we always sing or play at church or on campus.