A Paradigm for the Church Music of the Future

All of us have personal preferences. Some prefer blue over green. Some prefer a trip to the beach over a trip to the mountains. Some favor grits over hash browns, country music over rock. And almost everyone favors the home team over the visitors.

But while we smile at some of our preferences, our religious preferences are often quite a different matter. For some reason, our own particular religious traditions and experiences tend to color our ideas of what God’s preferences are and aren’t. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of worship styles. How quickly our preferences become biases. And how easily our biases become walls that keep us from the larger body of Christ and from fuller expressions of worship.

The sum total of these distinctives and preferences is termed culture. Every individual and group is part of a culture. Worship and culture are closely related. It is interesting that the root word for culture is cult, which is, in its simplest definition, a system of worship or devotion. You could say our culture reflects our worship. We should neither despise nor deny our culture, for it helps to give us the initial parameters for personal identity, but we must thoughtfully evaluate all our ways in light of God’s ways. When God says that His ways are higher than our ways (Isa. 55:9) he is saying that his divine culture is higher than our human culture. The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 appeals for churches to be “deeply rooted in Christ and closely related to their culture.”

Culture must always be tested and judged by Scripture.… The gospel does not presuppose the superiority of any culture to another, but evaluates all cultures according to its own criteria of truth and righteousness.… Churches have sometimes been in bondage to culture rather than to the Scripture.”

Denominations within the church are typically cultural divisions before they are theological. They have to do with conflicting folkways. A Presbyterian pastor made this observation: “Part of the problem in coming into unity is that we have recruited people into personality distinctives of our own congregations and traditions, rather than into Christ. As a result, their loyalties are more to these distinctives than to Christ’s Kingdom.” In the spirit of Lausanne, we need to evaluate our traditions of worship—whether historic traditions or more recent renewal traditions—in light of Scripture to see if we are adherents of an approach to Christ or of Christ himself.

Toward Understanding Divine Preferences

Music powerfully communicates culture. That’s why the church’s music is so vital in communicating its life. Even the effects of a vibrant sermon can be canceled out by lifeless music. Some would observe that the music more accurately reflects the life of the congregation than do the words spoken.

What are we communicating culturally? What kinds of songs should we be singing? What are the parameters of biblical worship? Do our biases keep us from a fuller expression of worship? The easy answer to these kinds of questions goes something like this: “God is only concerned with the attitude of our hearts, not the forms of our expressions.” Granted, the heart’s disposition is primary, but should we not allow God to transform and enlarge our forms as well as our hearts? It’s not that our worship traditions are intrinsically wrong … just incomplete.

Consider these three statements as beginning points in this discussion of biblical patterns of worship:

  1. True worship is both spiritual and intellectual. “True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).
  2. Heavenly worshipers worship the God of the past, present, and future. “Day and night they never stop saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev. 4:8, see also Rev. 1:4, 8).
  3. In the New Testament, God endorses three primary song forms: psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you … sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16, see also Eph. 5:19–20).

Spirit and Truth

Today some segments of the church specialize primarily in spirit. Favorite teaching topics in the churches would likely include “Hearing God” and “Being Led by the Spirit.” Leaders encourage followers to develop intuitive skills. Worship is generally spontaneous and Spirit-led.

Other segments of the church specialize primarily in truth. Among these groups, biblical scholarship and critical thinking are held in high esteem. Here worship is more orderly and structured.

Each tradition is suspicious of the other and often reinforces its own uniqueness to justify its existence. Facing these tendencies is very difficult but very necessary. But Jesus said that true worshipers must worship in spirit and truth … not one or the other. If we love to “flow in the Spirit” but are impatient with the process of making careful observations, we are not yet the kind of worshipers God is looking for. If we are diligent students and yet we can’t make room for someone to base a claim on revelation, we are not yet the worshipers that please God.

If the worship in our congregation only attracts critical thinkers, it’s time to do some critical thinking about our own cultural preferences. If our congregation is attracting only the intuitive or feeling types, it’s time to ask the Spirit to lead us into all truth. Biblical worship is to be spiritual and thoughtful. These two components are implied in Romans 12:1 in the phrase logikos latreia, which is translated in the NIV as either “spiritual act of worship” or “reasonable act of worship.”

Past, Present, and Future

Some of us are more familiar with what God is saying than what God has said, to the point that we disdain any reference to history. I have heard this referred to as “the cult of contemporaneity.” Others are well versed in what has gone on before us and yet out of touch with what is going on now. One pastor confidently told me that nothing of any significance has happened in the church in the last 250 years. Most likely the church he pastors will be populated with those who are friendly to that point of view.

Still others of us are so future-oriented that we fail to worship the God of the past and the present. We must not try to confine God’s kingdom exclusively to past, present, or future reality. Each is only partial reflections of God’s glory.

Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs

Some charismatic churches tend to sing choruses to the exclusion of hymns. Some traditional churches sing hymns to the exclusion of choruses. And a very small percentage of churches have any significant experience with spiritual songs. In contrast, God’s Word invites us all to express our gratitude through all three song forms.

To sing a psalm is not necessarily the equivalent of singing from the book of Psalms. A psalm is a song. The term psalm, like song, can be used in a general or a specific sense. In general usage, it would include a hymn, just as there are hymns included in the book of Psalms.

In the specific sense, however, a psalm would contrast with a hymn. Similar to what we today call choruses, a psalm, or song, is generally simpler, shorter, more testimonial, and less theological than a hymn. A hymn would usually carry a greater sense of reverence; a song would be more personal. The psalm is more contemporary and has a shorter life span.

The spiritual song is even more of a song-of-the-moment. The spiritual song that consists of spontaneous melodies around a chord or a slowly moving chord progression, has been referred to as the “song of angels” because of its mystical, otherworldly quality. Even as the Spirit is the believer’s down payment on the future age, the spiritual song must be a foretaste of heavenly worship itself.

The genius of these three song forms is that each is uniquely appropriate to express a dimension of God’s nature and each will speak for a different kind of personality, as well as the different facets of the individual. The hymn corresponds to the God who was—the God of history; the psalm corresponds to the God who is—the God of the now, and the spiritual song corresponds to the God who is to come—the God of the future. The hymn will satisfy our hunger for truth and depth of understanding; the psalm will speak to our need for encounter and experience, and the spiritual song will stimulate the prophet and visionary in us.

The command to employ psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs requires greater cultural flexibility than we have had in order to enjoy the variety of worship expressions. For instance, the youth of the church will probably prefer a more contemporary style of worship than the older members. The common solution to this cultural problem is to segregate the youth church from the adult church. But the psalms-hymns-and-spiritual-songs paradigm begs for a different solution: diversity within unity. This new paradigm allows the contemporary and the historic to stand side by side and challenges our hearts to greater love. It means being both reverent and celebrative, objective and subjective, structured and spontaneous, testimonial and theological.

Instead of affirming our own strengths and acknowledging the limitations of other traditions, we must begin to recognize the limitations of our own traditions and affirm the strengths of others. The result will be that our own preferences will be enjoyed by others, as well as enlarged by others. Like an onion in the stew, we will both flavor the other ingredients and be flavored by them—all the while, remaining an onion.

Paradigm for the Future

The church of the future must become transcultural. The evangelical church must learn to sing spiritual songs; the charismatic church must rediscover the hymns, and the traditional church must begin to sing a new psalm. The young church must respect the older church and vise versa. Bridges of cooperation and counsel must be built between black and white churches. The stagnating pools of our cultural prejudices must be flooded by the river of God’s divine purposes. Accepting and practicing God’s standard of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs in our worship is a simple but challenging exercise designed to break us loose from our idols of ethnocentrism.

Where will all of this lead us? To the most exciting celebration imaginable: the international, interdenominational, multilingual, multiethnic celebration of Christ Jesus, the Son of God! After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. (Rev. 7:9)

Dare we look upon what John saw: representatives from every culture, nation, tribe, people, and language, declaring their praises together with a loud voice, overwhelmed with gratitude for this majestic King who has made them into one people (Rev. 5:9–10)? If we can see that, we can see our destination. The heavenly vision is that of worshipers of many different stripes who are more conscious of the greatness of Jesus Christ than of their cultural distinctions.

If worship styles have been the source of divisions among us, let’s turn the tables and allow God’s design for worship to be a source of unity among us. Let’s pray that heaven’s worship will overtake earth as we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

The Relationship of Church Music and Culture

Throughout history, the church has related to the culture in which it exists in very different ways, choosing in some cases to oppose cultural developments and in others to adopt them to a greater or lesser extent. Such variety is certainly evident with regard to the contemporary church’s response to cultural developments in music. Understanding these relationships and the special demands of contemporary culture is essential in developing a thoughtful approach to church music.

To say there is a diversity in church music at the end of the twentieth century is an understatement. One can visit church services and find almost anything: Gregorian chant; a Mozart mass—either for the ordinary of the mass itself or in pieces as anthem material; a cappella singing and singing with every kind of instrumental accompaniment—from organs to percussion to electronic; instrumental and choral music from virtually every period—of the highest quality and the banalest; classic hymn tunes and new hymn tunes—some carefully crafted, some poorly crafted; Broadway hits and popular tunes; hymns meant to appeal to “outsiders,” performed by choirs and electronic media with little congregational participation; high decibels and low decibels; psalm settings in all styles—with and without congregational participation; African-American and Southern white spirituals; and a variety of Asian, African, Native American, and Hispanic materials. Any of this may be executed ably or abysmally, may follow the latest performance practice standards or ignore performance practice issues altogether, may engage congregations or bore them.

When one looks at this massive variety, the first impression is confusion. The tendency is to see no order whatsoever. That tendency is increased when one realizes that denominational boundaries do not necessarily provide help in sorting out musical matters. Two Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, or Lutheran churches may be as different musically from one another as they are like their sisters and brothers in another denomination. Careful listening and looking can usually reveal roots that differ, but, depending upon the congregation, the musical practice of two parishes in different denominations often can be deceptively similar.

Old alignments may be breaking down. We may be in a period of fundamental shifts, not unlike the time of the reformation. We certainly are fashioning an expanded musical syntax in worship, simply because families, communities, schools, and churches now have numerous ethnic, confessional, and musical memories in their midst—as well as increasingly perplexing personal and social challenges to face. This is very painful: the promise of rebirth is here, but so is the reality of death.

Though old alignments may be breaking down, enduring problems have not changed. Making sense of them is one way to sort out the confusion. H. Richard Niebuhr’s typological framework in Christ and Culture provides a helpful grid for sorting.

The Polar Types

In the United States, groups called evangelicals or fundamentalists—often identified with some Southern Baptist churches, the Assemblies of God, television evangelists, megachurches, and those who choose these as their models—appear to live at the polar extremes of Niebuhr’s types: in both the “Christ of culture” and “Christ against culture” folds. They hold these poles together not in paradox or schizophrenic confusion; they simply apply them to different areas.

In order to appeal to a popular mindset and thereby “bring people to Christ,” they use popular musical styles without hesitation or embarrassment. There is no concern here about whether or not the musical medium is superficial or whether (since “the medium is the message”) it communicates less than the fullness of the faith or something different from the faith. The point is to utilize what the people know and hear in their daily lives—for example, in popular music or in television or radio commercials. This is a Christ of culture position.

At points of moral teaching, however, these same groups tend to argue against any “liberal” drift. They are therefore likely to oppose anything that would appear to accommodate moral ambiguity or a pluralism that might challenge, say, prayer in schools. This is Christ against culture.

Holding these two poles together is no sleight of hand or devious trick. (There is hypocrisy in this camp, of course, as the recent debacle of television evangelists has indicated; but there is hypocrisy everywhere, and its presence or absence does not make or break a position.) It works because these people locate sin only at certain points in the culture. Musical syntax and associations do not fall at those points so long as the music is put into “saving” purposes. That means people in this group can use radio and television and all the modern electronic technical wizardry available, while at the same time attacking the media and even popular music for its godless slant. It means they can use the sounds of popular culture while attacking the immorality of the culture. It means they are not so concerned about an assembled and singing body of Christ as they are about decisions for Christ and the emotive power to propel these decisions—whether that happens in huge throngs carried along in a wash of electronic sound, or through watching such events in living rooms on television screens.

The Mediating Types

The three mediating types—traditionally identified with Roman Catholics as “Christ above culture,” Reformed bodies as “Christ the transformer of culture,” and Lutherans as “Christ and culture in paradox”—live in states of deeper complexity and ambiguity. They and their concerns require people gathered in one place in order to be nourished by Word and sacraments, and in different ways, they all require a gathered body that sings. They cannot, therefore, embrace radio and television the way the more “evangelical” groups can. They are also nervous about sound that submerges the people or substitutes amplified decibels for congregational singing. (It should be noted that similar concerns have been expressed in the past about organs or other instruments, so this is not a new issue. Now, however, the increase in the perception or actuality of loudness, coupled with the artificiality of speakers rather than acoustic instruments, divorces what is heard even farther from the natural human voice.)

1. Christ above culture. The Christ-above-culture folk use sounds from the popular culture in such a way that they lead beyond themselves to something like the purity of Gregorian chant and its polyphonic progeny. Sound itself is not even an end, however. It is a means of entry into the “salvific mystery,” or it points beyond itself to the silence of pure love. The congregation may therefore not sing vigorously (there is a theological reason why Catholics don’t sing), or they may participate in the music by listening to a choir. But they need to assemble to do this, and sound that might submerge them or substitute for them is only a passing cultural accommodation to get to what is of more value.

2. Christ the transformer of culture. Those who take this position may be understood at one level to identify with what is popular in music. Music for Calvin was like a funnel through which words “pierce the heart more strongly.” But Calvin emphasized the necessity of “weight” and “majesty” in church music, and he distinguished it carefully from the music one uses “to entertain” people “in their houses.” Here the issue is not that music leads beyond itself, but that the music transforms (actually the Holy Spirit transforms, by means of the Psalms dressed in the moderated melody). As Francis Williamson recently suggested to me, Psalm singing for Calvin was a sanctifying action. This makes the singing of the people extremely important, and the absence of instruments in Geneva and Reformed practice more generally was no accident. Those who stand in this tradition (though today they may have accepted instruments) still find anything that substitutes for the people’s song to be misguided, and their major concern is clearly the people’s transformation.

3. Christ and culture in paradox. For those who see Christ and culture in paradox, there is no possibility either of a wholesale embrace of the culture or a wholesale rejection of it, because it is fully sin-soaked and yet the object of God’s grace. Like Luther, they know about the possibility of perverting the gift of music with “erotic rantings,” and, also like Luther, they regard music as one of God’s greatest gifts, which is to be used with gratitude from any source—as long as well-crafted and durable creations result. Today, however, they do not have Luther’s luxury. Luther could carve out a setting of Psalm 46 or Psalm 130 from the hardy quarry of German folk song, but to attempt the same thing in our commercial culture from the idiom of a Coca-Cola or Honda jingle or a popular song is quite a different thing.

Additional Matters

1. Faceless public. It is true there is great diversity; any group may sound like any other group: Roman Catholics and Reformed resemble Methodists or Episcopalians, and so on. People in any group also look over their shoulders and seek to imitate the Christ-of-culture type because it seems to be able to appeal to our mass culture. The mediating types are currently under attack, therefore, because they are seen to be ineffective, at least as far as numbers are concerned; and in a capitalistic mass culture, numbers are the means by which we norm ourselves.

The Christ-of-culture appeal is also its liability. One of our current cultural tendencies is to treat people like a faceless public. Shopping malls bring many people together, but we gather there not in dialogue or contact. We gather there as unrelated pieces of jetsam or flotsam with no relation or responsibility to one another; our only value is that we are bearers of money which we may be convinced to part with.

To adopt the culture as a model means appealing to it with music that manipulates the hearer the way commercials manipulate us to part with our money. When the church does this it too treats people like a faceless public. Such a posture poses a serious problem for the mediating types because baptism and the Lord’s Supper imply a different notion of humanity. Baptism immerses us into Christ’s death and resurrection, and the drenching propels us into the world on behalf of others. The bread and wine of the supper are “for you.” These realities mean it is not possible to treat people like a faceless public; people are persons for whom Christ died, not to be manipulated by music or anything else, but to be treated with the utmost value and respect with which Christ treats us. So for the mediating types, the music we use must value the hearer and singer.

2. Violence and the sweet sound. Our society is violent. Each day we hear reports about someone else who has been violated, abused, or killed. My daughter recently told me she learned in her college psychology class that television gives us five acts of violence per hour at prime time, twenty acts of violence per hour during cartoons, and the average young person will see 13,000 television murders during elementary and junior high years. My point here is not to bash television, but to indicate how deep the tentacles of violence reach.

Society often uses sweet and sentimental sounds to insulate us from the violence. The church has in many ways, across the various types but especially where the culture provides the norm, responded similarly with music that is sweet. Sweet sounds, in conjunction with other sounds, certainly have their place. The problem is that too much that is sweet and confectionery insulates us from society’s violence and provides an escape that keeps us from trying to confront the horror. The result is a fairyland that in the final analysis avoids the gospel, its realism, and its ethical fervor. As Joseph Sittler once told me, “It is not hard like the Word of God.”

3. Reductionism. As one listens to discussions about music in worship, arguments are being made for minimalist participation by the people by using music that imitates popular styles. For those who embrace historic liturgical forms, this leads to arguing that the people’s part is essentially brief acclamations. For those who reject historical liturgical forms, this leads to arguing that the people’s part is essentially what George Shorney and others have called “teeny hymns.”

The argument here is buttressed by four presuppositions: the culture is making a shift from the intellectual to the emotive; this is a new thing in American religion; we live in a post-literate age, and popular and rock music are in the ear of the culture—not classical music.

The first three of these propositions are inaccurate. In pre-marital counseling and other contacts, I encounter more and more people who, though they have appreciated worship earlier in their lives, now stay away from it because they find the preaching and the music so shallow and superficial, even vapid. They indicate anything but a turning away from the life of the mind. As to the emotive being new, while American religion has had its thinkers like Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr, much of popular American religion has been essentially emotive, and the dialogue between the intellect and the emotions is hardly new: revivalism and both Great Awakenings generated it again and again. What we have today looks pretty much like a variation of what we have had in the past, varied, of course, by concerns about minority rights and patriarchy, interpretive modes that center in the “I,” and the pluralism of the global village—all of which enlarge the debate, but which do not make the emotive something new. Third, if we live in a post-literate age, where is the memory that marked pre-literate humanity, and why do we have so many books that are supposed to be things of the past? Even more important, is the point of this argument that the church ought to support the absence of literacy? It is surely true that television is a visual medium, that it has generated a visual memory, and that we no longer live in the Reformation’s love affair with moveable type or even Wesley’s world of words. But that is not the same as presuming a literary absence; it simply means the field of play is larger.

4. Popular and rock sounds. The fourth presupposition, that popular and rock sounds are in the ears of the culture, is probably accurate, but it begs the question. It assumes that, in Christ of culture fashion, worship can or should merely imitate the culture. That does not necessarily follow. In part, our worship must use the culture’s sounds because, in order to sing, we have to employ what is in our ear’s memory bank. But the memory bank of the church extends beyond the culture’s current fads. It has in it sounds that is primeval and archaic because the story they carry reaches before our period, back to God the Alpha, before the Creation, even before the morning stars sang together. And it searches out sounds that are perpetually new, pushing beyond our period, because they carry a story that reaches to God the Omega at the end of history.

These observations simply question the accuracy of the analysis that is currently taking place in many churches. In part, they take themes from H. Richard Niebuhr’s mediating types or from his Christ-against-culture type and apply them to music. Taken together, they suggest we are tilted toward neglecting the life of the mind. This is not to say that recent right-brain and left-brain discussions or broader categories like aural-verbal and symbolic-visual are not helpful, or that we should neglect the emotive, intuitive, and psychomotor parts of our being. It is to say that reductionism is dangerous and that a balance, not an imbalance, is necessary.

Concluding Observations

The mediating types have often assumed a stance of maintenance rather than mission. They have also sometimes succumbed to another Christ-of-culture type than the one described above, one which identifies a common spirituality or undefined love and mystery with a Christ principle. The current challenges to the mediating types are therefore healthy.

But that does not mean the enduring problems have gone away. We delude ourselves if we think they have. No matter what our configurations and context may look like at the moment, the issues remain and cannot be avoided. If we avoid them, we will be poorer, and future generations will have to confront the truncated creations we bequeath to them.

Our task as a church, it would seem, is to get some perspective on the whole of the gospel and allow our music to reflect that wholeness and authenticity on behalf of the world. Simply celebrating the diversity we are experiencing or allowing everything to be pulled to a Christ of culture position seems ill-advised.

As we expand our musical syntax, a better approach would be to take our various traditions seriously, not for the sake of tribalism or warfare, or because we want to replicate some past of our futile imagining, but precisely for responsible evangelicity and for the contributions we each have to make to the ecumenical mosaic. This is not to suggest that Methodists suddenly restrict themselves to Charles Wesley, Calvinists to metrical Psalters, Lutherans to chorales and pieces built on chorales, Roman Catholics to Gregorian chant and Palestrina, African-Americans to spirituals, Southern whites to shaped notes, Welsh to William Williams and Welsh tunes, and Episcopalians to Tallis and Tye—though we all would be well-advised to use our traditions and treat them with respect rather than beat up on them. The fundamental point, however, is not only to use them with a muscular humility, but to understand them and embody what lies behind them—for our own sake, for the sake of the whole body of Christ, and for the sake of the world.

Of course, we need to use what is contemporary as well, and we need to expand our own traditions for the sake of the wholeness of the message among the people we serve in specific places. But we need to do that in the context of who we are and what we each have to offer the whole. In spite of the fact that many people live in mixed marriages and have crossed denominational boundaries or that communities are a mix of multiple memories, we still live in churches with confessional histories and loyalties. To collapse everything into a mindless diversity as a norm or thoughtlessly to embrace a fleeting cultural moment is to treat ourselves, the people we serve, and the world beyond with a contempt that flies in the face of Christ’s example. The gospel speaks a different message. So should our music.