Dear Pastor: Music is not magic

You've quite possibly heard or seen it before.

"If we just (implement x kind of music), we'll (get result y)."

Though it seems most often applied to the x and y "do praise and worship music" and "get young people in church", it really can apply across a wide array of musical styles, each of which has an audience, so to speak.

"Big classical choral music"? "People with money." (The public radio approach, you might say.)

"Good ol' gospel music"? "Real faithful Christian folk." (Judgmental much?)

You get the idea, and you can probably fill in the blanks yourself, no matter how broad or limited your musical experience. Whenever churches go looking for a magic elixir to "revitalize" or boost their numbers, music in worship seems to be a really popular place to start.

And on some level, it can work. A newly-instituted contemporary worship service can draw in some of the curious. A big fancy choir can get some onlookers. I don't know of any church that has decided to go whole hog on the gospel song approach out of the blue, but they might just poach a few old-timers from some churches if they did.

So yes, as the title of this article wants to suggest, contemporary Christian music (or gospel song or "traditional" hymnody, whatever that means) probably is bringing Christians together.

It (whichever style you name) is also driving Christians apart.

Note that I have not read and am not at all referring to the content of the article (I assume I'll get around to reading it eventually, but I'm pretty sure it won't be before Easter Sunday). Since the article is in Christianity Today I can safely that their audience is not my audience, or at least my target audience. But the title itself, as a new iteration of this familiar old refrain, is enough to provoke comment.

And that comment is one rooted in nothing more complicated than human nature. Some will glom onto the contemporary thing, others will run from it as fast as possible. And you can go down the line through whatever variety of congregational song you please, and you can get the same result.

There is reference here to a hoary old trope of music as somehow a great unifier. That itself is probably some variant of the even hoarier old trope of music as a "universal language." Do yourself a favor and spend some time with a broader variety of musics from around the world before ever uttering that line, please? For that matter, spend some time with, say, Hildegard of Bingen and Anton Webern and see if that "universal language" idea still makes sense to you. Folks who try to talk the "universal language" thing are probably not widely familiar with a lot of things, or are mostly interested in pushing a highly Westernized version of those musics (this happens a lot in popular music, in which Western - read 'American' - influence is almost impossible to escape).

One could argue that the same thing has been true in what might be called the "global song of the church" as well. Those in various "mission fields" were largely fed translated versions of American or European hymns as the stuff of their worship. It took quite a while to get away from that tendency and to see the growth of more indigenous musical expressions of faith and gospel begin to grow. Even so, any degree to which the "brings people together" argument for global church song might hold water is going to be largely a colonialist legacy as much as anything Christian.

The same is going to be true across other styles as well. The contemporary Christian impulse has a huge component of stylistic export involved, with the style being extremely American even if its biggest producers come out of Australia.

Disturbing colonialist legacies aside, it really never is the music itself that "brings people together." Music is not magic, as the title here suggests. The uniting or dividing is done by people, just as pretty much everything that happens in or to the church, for good or ill, is done by people. If some number of people choose to come to a church because of its musical performance style (and some number in turn choose to leave or stay away), it's the people doing the moving and choosing.

It would be far more accurate to say that in choosing a particular musical idiom for your congregation, you're also choosing a potential "target demographic" that you hope to bring in. If you end up drawing more baby boomers or GenXers than millennials with your contemporary service, which could easily happen, that's another issue, but the choice to plant one's flag in a particular musical category is also a choice about who you want in your church. Frankly, it should be openly acknowledged as such. You'll get exceptions to the rule for sure, but be clear about exactly what you're seeking with your church's musical choices.

This frankly is not even about declaring such choices right or wrong. You do you, dear pastor. But be honest with yourself about exactly what you're trying to do when you make one musical choice or another, and don't expect music to be a magic elixir that brings the entire world (no exceptions) under your roof.

But what about the people who didn't go to the concert?

My worship. MINE. (Another angle)

So it's been a little while since this post, in which the subject of a church offering multiple styles of worship service became a jumping-off point for thinking about the perception of worship as MINE (a la the Finding Nemo birds). There is another angle from which such a title invites reflection, one that touches both on a history of the hymnody sung in many of our churches and possibly certain current practices as well. In this case the problem at hand can be boiled down to three letters: "I," "we."

Worship is a corporate act: that is, the body of Christ is joined together to do worship. For all the folks who go on about how they "find God" in nature or music or whatever, that isn't worship, so let's not be confused here. The very point of worship, right down to the songs sung, is to join that body, that community together in praise of God, confession of sin, proclaiming and hearing the Word and responding to that Word, and being sent out from the gathering to do Christ's work in God's world. It's something we do.

Of course, there have been stretches of the history of the church where its hymnody and congregational song didn't always reflect this sense of the body gathered in worship. Take, for a few examples:

"Will there be any stars in my crown?"
"Face to face with Christ my Savior"
"On Jordan's stormy banks I stand"
"When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there"
"O that will be glory for me"
"When I can read my title clear"
"I am satisfied with Jesus"
"Make me a blessing" (Or, "Make me a channel of blessing" - both present)
"Must I go, and empty-handed"

You get the idea. This comes from the first hymnal of my childhood, a reasonably narrow range of that hymnal. There are, of course, other hymns directed at God without first-person singular or plural usage, and it should be noted that there are also hymns that do reflect a more corporate position ("We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves," "Light of the world, we hail thee," "O God, we pray for all mankind," "We've a story to tell," "We shall see the King someday," and of course "Shall we gather at the river" also appear.) But that's a lot of first-person singular.

And when that much first-person singular gets drilled into your head Sunday after Sunday, it makes a difference. Congregational song forms us, every bit as much as anything else we do in the church and maybe more given the insidious nature of music as what Frederick Buechner called a "subcutaneous" art, one that gets under your skin.

Now imagine such song getting under your skin for thirty or forty or fifty years.

If you want to talk about some of the things that challenge the church as it stands now, and the degree to which the "mine mine mine" mindset affects the church, this is a possible surreptitious culprit to think about. If we spoke before about the possessiveness that can form around a particular worship style or service, it's worth considering how much similar possessiveness can form around a particular church itself. Indeed, the two go hand in hand.

You end up with a church that gives off the vibe or mindset of "don't change anything as long as I'm alive." They can recognize that something's not right, can see that what used to work great doesn't work so well, what used to pack them in now pushes them away, and so forth and so on, but still "don't change anything as long as I'm alive." It's almost become a part of that church's DNA. That particular body both functions as a collection of individuals and as an "individual" fearful of anything that might disrupt each comfort zone. And all the individualized congregational songs, if we take the whole idea of music and its influence seriously, have to have had an effect on that church's (or that collection of individuals') mindset.

[Note: you will possibly remember that I am not of mainline origins, so my experience - you might think - is not relevant. True, I am not of mainline origins; however, you'd be surprised how much churches that get counted as "mainline" now have rather substantial histories of much more "evangelical" approaches to worship, especially to congregational song. Maybe not in downtown Philadelphia, but, across (ahem) certain regions of the country, ... we'll just say that Southern Baptists and Presbyterians didn't necessarily sound all that different when it came time to sing.]

Now, here's the question: how much of that "I-me-mine" mode of thought still exists in congregational song? Others will have to tell me how much of that characterizes "contemporary" worship. Most hymnody that has come out of the mainline has gotten better at emphasizing the "we"-ness of worship, and other sources such as the Iona community are pretty good at keeping song corporate. (Still, some newer hymns do slip into the individual - "O Christ, surround me," Glory to God 543, comes to mind.)

But it's a thing to be aware of. Are we forming the body of Christ, everyone all together? Are we singing "we" when it's necessary to sing a first-person pronoun? There is some - some - space for congregational songs from an individual position, but it shouldn't be the bulk of the repertoire. A church full of Finding Nemo birds doesn't end up being a church with much future.