"Church survival doesn't depend on music style."

Since about 1994, my church has had both traditional (organ, grand piano, robed choir, hand bells, etc.) and contemporary services (guitars, bass, keyboard, drums, etc.).

As I wrote above (earlier in this thread):

“In which service type are we experiencing…growth? It’s virtually all in the contemporary services. The traditional service attendance has been steady, but relatively stagnant. It is in our contemporary services that we are seeing the great preponderance of visitors, new attendees, salvations, baptisms, and new members.”

“From a church that was 100% traditional barely two decades ago, our attendance break-down today is about 20% traditional vs. about 80% contemporary.”

“As new people come into a church and hear the kind of music they have already been listening to, just with different lyrics, they are more likely to be drawn in to the worship. In some ways you might say it is the same kind of battle the Protestant Reformers fought to get worship in the language of the people.

I think churches should examine their worship to seek God’s desire for what corporate worship should look like in their church. Lots of times, worship that used to be meaningful has lost its cultural relevance, and if we are going to engage the hearts, minds, soul, and strength of the worshipers, we must find a language that they can speak in. Too many of our churches are resting comfortably in the safety of tradition, not wanting to rock the boat. Change is generally not easy, but is so often necessary.

Some things to consider: Statistical data shows that growing churches today more often have a contemporary or blended style of worship. There are some churches with very traditional worship that are also reaching people. The vast majority of churches in America have traditional worship, yet the majority of churches experiencing tremendous growth are of a contemporary or blended style. Ed Stetzer, in his book Comeback Churches says that there are some churches that have found traditional to be an effective approach in their community, but this is an exception, and most comeback churches (declining/plateaued churches that have made an incredible turnaround), he states, are moving in a more contemporary direction.”

http://blog.ncbaptist.org/renewingworship/2011/03/03/worship-wars-4/

Growth-for-the-sake-of-growth (purely for pragmatic reasons) is unacceptable (see: Joel Osteen). I would be the first to argue against that modus operandi that results in growth. That’s not what I’m arguing for.

What I’m arguing for is an honest evaluation of whether an engrained preference is what hinders some of us from reaching greater numbers of the lost.

Greg, if you don’t start with good logic, you can have multiple earned doctorates, and the only thing you’ll say of value will be effectively by accident—broken clock theory and all. There is no amount of expertise that can redeem bad logic.

Period. Full Stop.

Moreover, are you really going to assert that a misuse of a term (maybe) means that someone can’t figure little things out? Seriously? By that logic, an error in stating a theorem of calculus would mean someone couldn’t do basic arithmetic. See a wee little problem there?

Here’s a sample, if you’re curious, of my music experience. I’m one of the taller clarinetists on the right side, I think we placed 3rd in the nation that year. So yes, I do happen to understand that the left arm should be doing something, about crescendos and descrescendos, about tempo, and the like. So your comments are not merely logically ignorant, but factually, too.

There is a point to expertise, but that point is not groundless personal attacks based on the minutiae of how a term was defined for you in music theory class in college.

The study indicates that churches with traditional music can effectively grow and reach their community. The study also indicates that the majority of growing churches utilize contemporary music. Therefore, some conclude that churches wanting to grow and reach their community should use contemporary music. Or not.

Besides the twin problems of effecting growth by the “give ‘em what they want” approach, and assuming that numerical growth equates with effective outreach, could there by another valid conclusion to draw from this evidence? Consider this: since some churches that employ traditional music grow, using contemporary music is clearly not essential to church growth.

Why not turn things around? Decide first what style music is most God-honoring, employ that style, and then trust God to make the church grow as it pleases Him. Or does such an approach force us to depend too much upon Divine blessing rather than human strategizing?

It seems to me that the contemporary Christian music defense is overly driven by pragmatism rather than principle.

Larry, I would tend to agree that music is one quick way to recognize a church that is ready to grow. I’ve seen it myself as my family left a closet wannabe KJVO** church with traditional music for a fundamental church (EFCA) that used modern music. About a third of the people there had left the old church, many with the same comment “I’m not going back”. It was uncanny. Music was a big part of it—there are only so many revival songs you can take—but all in all, I’d argue that it was more a shorthand for “we understand that we have to minister today, not in the 1960s.”

David’s comment at 10:48 yesterday illustrates this very well. If you unthinkingly hold to old music, you’re going to unthinkingly hold to a lot of other things, and then you’re going to wonder why young people have no desire to be around.

**Closet wannabe KJVO defined; where the pastor flat out denied he was KJVO, but over time we noticed that every resource he brought in was KJVO, including two sources that flat out contradicted one another—one (Chick) arguing for the Old Latin, another arguing for the TR.

…. so …. music is the ingredient for growing churches …. and not preaching

be found faithful than to see it grow for growth sake. Then, we have a saying at HSBC:

Nobody comes to San Francisco to go to church.

Most of our growth has come from new believers or from folks who don’t want “contemporary” services. Though, in SFO, the later many times also includes the pulpit.

[G. N. Barkman]

Why not turn things around? Decide first what style music is most God-honoring, employ that style, and then trust God to make the church grow as it pleases Him. Or does such an approach force us to depend too much upon Divine blessing rather than human strategizing?

It seems to me that the contemporary Christian music defense is overly driven by pragmatism rather than principle.

I can agree to some extent but disagree that only one style is God-honoring (not really sure if you took it that far or not but usually anti-contemporary generally means hymn only in our circles). Since Scripture doesn’t address the style and specifically show us what is most God-honoring, you have to glean from Scripture how it says we honor Him through music. The purpose of music and singing is to worship (we sing to the Lord in Eph. 5:19 and Col. 3:16) and to edify one another (we sing to one another in both passages and edification is shown in I Cor. 14:12). It is interesting that singing for myself doesn’t seem to be the focus in any of these passages! The only place that gives any indication of singing for my benefit is in I Cor. 14:15 where it says we should sing with understanding. That passage was talking about speaking in tongues and people coming in and not understanding anything. It then uses singing as an illustration that we must sing with understanding. Certainly that means for outsiders as well since it is in the context of the passage. That would seem to indicate that we do have those without the church in mind as we sing…we want them to understand as well. You can interpret that to mean that we only need to worry about them understanding the words but if they can’t get past the strange music or style to even get to the words then we really have a problem. Likewise, there are people in the church that can’t get past a contemporary style and also some that can’t get past the hymn style to understand the words either. So what do we do? The Ephesians passage talks about addressing or speaking to one another in song and then goes on to say “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The trajectory of Scripture seems to be that I do what edifies others more than seek to please myself. Should we have a reverse worship war? I don’t see anything in any passage that limits the style to one. On the contrary, it would seem to indicate many styles and much diversity. Granted, I can’t be dogmatic on some of this but I certainly don’t see ground for limiting to one style either.

BTW, you spoke of pragmatism and contemporary music. Considering the result of an action is not pragmatism (not sure if that is how you would define it) as illustrated by the passages I just mentioned. We should use the tools God has given us to help others (even those outside the church) sing with understanding and to help edify the believer and to worship God. Doing that is not pragmatism but is Scriptural.

This statement seems to be crucial:

Decide first what style music is most God-honoring, employ that style, and then trust God to make the church grow as it pleases Him.

It appears that each “side” seems to have made that decision.

Here is a further take. In my opinion, the contemporary churches are actually the churches that are following the historic movement of culture within the church. I am not talking about a contemporary church service that looks more like a concert than a church service. But like I said before, I often find the churches that are holding to a conservative style are ones that are held into a 1970’s style that fears any movement. Whereas churches in the past moved with the culture (I did not say look like the culture). There was a time when Fanny Crosby was modern church music, and from what I read, the churches took her music in, even though some of her tunes were secular modern tunes. Most contemporary church services follow the same style. 1) Announcements, 2) 2-3 songs, 3)offertory, where someone plays some special music), 4) a choir song, 5) another song or special music, 6) preaching for 30 minutes, 7) close in prayer, with maybe a “Just as I Am”. Any change to that style or those songs and heresy is thrown out. I know I am making some generalizations, and not all churches are like this. But I often move around the country every 3 years and I visit a lot of churches, and typically this is what you see. But what is becoming more apparent, like I said above is that many of those conservative styles are actually an indication of the church holding onto some other beliefs or styles that I have issues with. The churches seem dead, dry and stale.

Some of the more dynamic churches that I have seen are those that have a specific philosophy and theology around worship. Where they are looking at songs that have solid theology, do not make it a concert, mix traditional with contemporary, and spend less of a focus on special music and choirs and more on congregational singing, congregational prayer and longer preaching timeframes. Most of the conservative style churches that I have visited are more focused on the specifics of where things are found, their association and that the service is 1 hour long, while most of the conservative evangelical mixed style churches are having services that are 1:30 to 2:30 long, and are focused more on prayer, preaching and strong congregational singing. To me the music is just a broader indication of what is going on in the church. I was a member of a strong and growing baptist church in Florida, where the preaching was often times 1:15 or more, prayer time was 30 minutes and singing was a solid 30 minutes. The singing was a good mix of traditional and contemporary songs with no piano, no drums and about 3 or 4 string instruments (including a guitar or two). There was no choir and there was no special music. The church was filled with young single adults despite the fact that there was not a single young adult program. The growth and dynamics of the church was not really about the music, but about the whole experience, and the music was just one element among many. At the same time, I had previously attended a church in that same city in Florida, and it was a conservative church that was pastored by a very young BJ graduate. The sung out of a hymnal, it was every verse, there was rarely a smile from anyone while they were singing, and it was very cut and dry. The church was dead for all intents and purposes, but unfortunately the congregation hadn’t realized it yet. Again, it wasn’t just the music. It was the quick 30 minute preaching, the 4 songs that everyone already had memorized, as well as other things. To me it is more than just the music, but I think the music may sometimes be one indication.

I know how you feel brother. I have felt that myself. Certain people, because they are a quality control engineer (as I understand it), or because they have read Genesis 1 and have a dog-eared copy of The Genesis Flood, or have read 19th century philosophy of science, think they are experts in Big Bang Cosmology. They have a Bible believing expert in physics and cosmology sitting right in front of them, and they don’t care… Their opinion trumps knowledge I guess.

Oh well…

Sad.

I recently purchased the Trinity hymnal to add some theological depth to the hymns in our service. Is that a regression?

I’d also say that many churches, particularly smaller churches, are lucky to have somebody who can even play the piano half-way competently, let alone a professionally-trained musician. You often have to make due with what you have.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/everyday-people-lyrics-sly-the-family-stone…

Sometimes I’m right and I can be wrong
My own beliefs are in my song
The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then
Makes no difference what group I’m in

I am everyday people, yeah yeah

There is a blue one who can’t accept the green one
For living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one
And different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo

Oh sha sha we got to live together

I’m preaching on Heb 11:1-3 this coming Sunday. I don’t take the word ὑπόστασις to be an abstract assurance or confidence (e.g. Tyndale, ESV, NET, NASB), but a tangible, concrete reality or substance (e.g. KJV, NKJV). Thus, I have entitled this sermon, “Faith - It’s More Than a Feeling …”

Get it?

[Mark_Smith]

I know how you feel brother. I have felt that myself. Certain people, because they are a quality control engineer (as I understand it), or because they have read Genesis 1 and have a dog-eared copy of The Genesis Flood, or have read 19th century philosophy of science, think they are experts in Big Bang Cosmology. They have a Bible believing expert in physics and cosmology sitting right in front of them, and they don’t care… Their opinion trumps knowledge I guess.

Oh well…

Sad.

I wonder if it is more of a blessing or a curse to know everything about everything…