The Pursuit of Excellence in Conservative Christian Music
“Pop culture and the pop style of music in general has infiltrated and reshaped much of the thinking, writing, arranging, and performing of Christian music, even within much of ‘conservative’ Christianity.” - Taigen Joos
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There are a lot of assumptions in this piece about what’s good and bad in musical styles and developments. One of the biggest—and Joos is hardly alone on this point—is that the church-centeredness of cultural influence in the west before the Enlightenment = superior musical style.
Ergo, the movement toward individual consumers of music and pop influences is a significant step down.
This is certainly plausible. In many ways, it seems intuitive. But I’ve never seen convincing solid proof of that.
A complexity factor, if not a counterargument, is that even in the middle ages, “the church” consisted of not fully sanctified humans. Sinners. And that era wasn’t exactly free of erroneous teachings either.
At the same time, people “outside Christendom” are still humans made in the image of God and create beautiful and good things all over the world every day—often in spite of their worldview and values rather than because of them, but the point is that it happens. A lot.
But where Joos’ take resonates with me is that there is a ton of old but great stuff that is being neglected in worship music these, and we shouldn’t be afraid of ‘high church’ elements. I’d love to see more use of that become a trend.
But music is supposed to teach and admonish (Col 3.16) along with all the OT purposes that carry over. So, it’s art that teaches. It has to teach in accessible idioms or nobody will learn (among other reasons, because they aren’t paying attention). It’s not just about the words.
So, of course, musical styling is going to change over time in changing cultural contexts.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
What strikes me is that with so much mediocre and just plain bad music in the church--and yes I am including "camp meeting" music as too often part of this--I don't believe that the Church as a whole ought to be ignoring good music from any time period. Sure, make sure your musicians can actually play it--no matter how good a Christian rap song might be, I'd be a bad choice to sing or play it--but let's open up to the depth and breadth of music.
And really, that's probably how we get past music with shallow/heretical/meaningless lyrics--we look at the music of the past (including the Psalms), and start to develop a poetic sensibility that one can wed with melodies, harmonies, and the like. I would dare say that as we approach the music of the past, we'll also start to develop (re-develop?) the ability to wed melody with harmony and the like. I hear way too much these days where "musicians" are using their multi-thousand-dollar instruments essentially as a metronome. Pro tip; if you want a metronome, you can get the app on your cell phone!
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I have occasionally seen church musicians overreach and attempt performances that are beyond their skills.
But I struggle with the idea of “excellence.” In some larger churches near Bible colleges, there is a large pool of musical talent to draw from, and so area churches are able to set a high bar for the quality of training and performances.
With the result that lots of people don’t get to participate. There are tradeoffs with that.
On the other hand, in small rural (or urban!) churches, you just don’t have that. So is the music there not “excellent”? I think it depends on what you see as the purpose of using music in worship, but also it relates to understanding your setting. Nobody expects an orchestra at a small rural/semi-rural church. They don’t expect a complete band either.
So one key to “excellence” in these settings is aiming for what you can achieve and developing high quality within that zone, so to speak.
In short, “excellence” is relative to what you are trying to do, where you are, and what you have to work with.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
My take is that in my singing, I am no Pavarotti, but I can basically hold a tune in various genre. But with rap, I would, absent a lot of learning about the genre, show up as so "white", it would basically be a racial slur.
Or in the words of my daughter, observing a duet where the girl was badly flat and the boy horribly sharp, "can't you guys agree on a scale here?". So the acceptable range of musicality would be somewhere between lovelorn cats and the opera. No great demands, but it shouldn't make the congregation cringe.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
We are still left with having to decide what kind of music meets these standards. Personally I want my music to be doctrinally sound and singable. Is my personal standard sufficient? Does Getty or Sovreign Grace music "check"? The absence of examples leaves many wondering what music meets these standards.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
Ron, I definitely “resonate” (to use Aaron’s word) with what you are saying about which music meets their standards.
I prefer something between traditional and “high church” worship idiom myself, after having been exposed to various styles between back-country church, contemporary, camp meeting style gospel music, traditional and high church. But I struggle when people declare that the high church and classical standards are the only way to go, particularly when you take into account other cultures and those not educated in western music.
Whenever you try to nail down someone in Joos’ or Aniol’s camp (and I repeat, I personally love and prefer the type of church music and worship style they are extolling), they can never give usable standards for evaluating music. It’s always either use the exact music styles they say they approve of, or it boils down to “I know it if I hear it.”
I don’t know if the whole exchange is still available on the SI archive site, but the long interaction from years ago between Aniol and a Christian rapper (can’t remember his name — rap is definitely NOT my thing) was very enlightening. By that, I don’t mean that I came away being able to decisively evaluate appropriate music for worship, but that exchange laid bare just how much of a foundation of sand underlay Aniol’s arguments. In addition, I also realized how much the modern music proponents are similar in that if they think it sounds like good and acceptable worship music to them, then it is.
I would love if Aniol and Joos could clearly back up what they are saying from scripture, since my leanings go that way as well. But the reality is, they have never been able to prove their views on what music is “excellent.”
Dave Barnhart
It was Shai Linne that he had that discussion with. I went in thinking Aniol would carry his point but I don’t think he did.
It was Shai Linne that he had that discussion with. I went in thinking Aniol would carry his point but I don’t think he did.
Interesting. I followed that online debate very carefully and participated very heavily in the comments to the posts on Scott's site. I think Scott did a good job of supporting his views and Shai did not.
I have stated before on SI that I would love to believe Aniol’s position. I “prefer” it myself but I didn’t find it biblically compelling.
I have stated before on SI that I would love to believe Aniol’s position. I “prefer” it myself but I didn’t find it biblically compelling.
I wish that you and others who say that you would love to believe his position would actually be willing to engage at length in discussing the Bible itself in my music discussions on SI. It would be great to get substantive, edifying, and honest interaction in my threads that are intended to intensively examine the Bible itself instead of so much of the worthless interaction that I have gotten in the past in some of those threads. (When I speak of "worthless interaction" in the previous sentence, I am not talking about you, Kevin Miller, dcbii, and a few others on SI who have refrained from such unedifying interactions with me in my threads.)
wish that you and others who say that you would love to believe his position would actually be willing to engage at length in discussing the Bible itself in my music discussions on SI.
I’ve had it on my do list for a while to write something on the use of Scripture to explore questions like music styles. What’s often missing in these presentations is that they are not put in the context of how we properly use Scripture for questions of this type. A result is that there are a lot of category errors in looking at the biblical evidence.
I have some work to do to get to where I can explain what I mean by this, but there is proper way to look at Biblical information and discern what kind of evidence we are looking at, and therefore, what it can potentially prove.
A really simplistic example would be David’s feigning of madness before some king or other he was trying to stay undercover with. The text says his act included drooling (1 Sam 21:13).
Can we properly use this text to prove anything about topics such as:
- Acting
- Undercover operations
- Deceit in general
- How to interact with kings
- Madness
- Drooling
The answer depends on a more basic question: Wat sort of evidential value does this information have?
Because it’s an incidental detail to flesh out the narrative, we really can’t preach a sermon along the lines of “If You’re Not Drooling, You’re Not Crazy.” OK, there’s a major logical error or two involved also, but it begins with the category error: This information has evidential value for principles and practices in reference to drooling.
It is not that kind of information, and cannot be used that way—even if we add it to a thousand other pieces of information of the same type. Accumulation does not increase weight in this case. We could have a thousand stories with people feigning madness and drooling and the situation would not be different in terms of what evidence we have for developing doctrine on madness and drooling. A pile of zeros is still zero.
So when we’re trying to apply Scripture to cultural features and artistic works, we have to understand what kind of biblical information we’re looking at first. That limits how it may even potentially be used. Is it evidential at all for the questions we’re asking?
There is not very much in Scripture that is evidential for styles of music, or other cultural/artistic features, such as…
- Clothing styles/fashion
- Architectural styles/forms
- Speech/language idioms
- Painting, sculpture styles
- Poetry forms
So, if we’re going to idealize the pre-enlightenment West, should we all still be wearing Elizabethan clothes, speaking in Thee’s and Thou’s, building gothic style church buildings, painting in the style of Raphael and Titian, and doing all our poetry in sonnets and and like?
Would this be “excellence”?
I may have some details wrong there, but you get the gist.
Music is special. I concede that. But in what ways and why? This is where the difficult gap lies, rarely bridged successfully.
So there are two gaps, it seems:
a) Rightly understanding the category of biblical evidence available for deriving principles
b) Applying principles in a different cultural context from that of Bible times—in general, but for music in particular.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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