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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I recently attended the funeral of a long time friend and Christian brother. Part of the service was a 20 person ukelele band that performed a well rehearsed 15 minute medley of familiar Christian hymns and Gospel songs. Was this excellent music?
This is the question that has kept this type of discussion going for decades. Just give us actual examples or a list of excellent Christian music that is acceptable along with actual examples or a list of music that is unacceptable so people don't have to worry.
We are told we should use excellent music. We agree. Yet no one will give us an example of excellent music. We are told we should not use "sinful" or "bad" or "uncheckable" music. We agree. Yet no one will give us an example of that music.
People need simple answers.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
I do not expect that I will participate much longer in this thread, given the nonsense and false claims about me that Bert Perry has again injected into yet another thread.
Rajesh (and anyone, really). There is another option when criticism seems unfair/inaccurate/bad tone. It’s an option I’ve used a lot. You can always ignore it and refocus on what you see as the relevant points of agreement and disagreement.
Human interaction is always pretty messy. I often think it’s a miracle that people ever understand eachother at all! So sometimes the line between debate and meta-debate (debate about the debate/other stuff that isn’t really relevant) is murky.
I’m in favor of a “just refocus” approach.
That said, this post is almost entirely meta-debate, so far. … which just goes to show that sometimes it has a place.
But to refocus, questions like “What does the Bible teach about music styles?” are definitely downstream of questions like “How do we interpret narrative and other kinds of OT writing?”
In any debate you have to have points of agreement to use as bases for making your case/defeating the case for another view. In issues concerning arts, entertainment, culture especially, hermeneutical points of agreement are vital. If you don’t agree on a general approach for handling the biblical evidence (or even when it is “evidence”), you don’t have much to talk about.
Well, you could have a debate about sound interpretation/hermeneutics and how we derive that. But you can’t really have a debate about the cultural/arts/entertainment topic… because you kind of don’t speak the same language.
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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