New question in the worship wars: Why have many worshippers stopped singing in church?

Not hard to understand. If a church designs its worship service to incorporate the style of secular concerts, then eventually people stop singing and just watch the show.

If you watch secular concert footage, you'll see that the audience is participating and signing along. Now part of that is that if you pay $25 to whatever for your ticket, you're self-selecting for people who are rather devoted to the group, but it does nonetheless demonstrate that secular concert scenes are not opposed to participation per se.

Personally, I'd guess that the key factors are unfamiliarity of the songs (I've personally been stopped when I suggested an unfamiliar hymn), weakness in the poetry for the lyrics (irregular meter, lack of rhyme schemes, etc..), and melodies/harmonies that are uncompelling or even nonexistent. A final reason is that too many church musicians are (this is related to the poor/nonexistent melodies and harmonies) simply not competent--instead of playing the music as written, they often use the instrument more or less as an extremely expensive metronome.

I find myself in the odd position of being generally supportive of the use of modern music in the church, all while admitting that all too often, CCM is awful, musically, lyrically, and theologically speaking.

Bert Perry wrote: Personally, I’d guess that the key factors are unfamiliarity of the songs (I’ve personally been stopped when I suggested an unfamiliar hymn), weakness in the poetry for the lyrics (irregular meter, lack of rhyme schemes, etc..), and melodies/harmonies that are uncompelling or even nonexistent.

This is mostly it, in a nutshell. When I have visited evangelical churches with praise bands rather than traditional music, I do attempt to sing along to the songs that are well-known and performed with a normal tempo. Most of the time that works, although unfamiliar bridge sections and tunes are added that make it hard to sing along.

Very often, however, songs are picked that are not any kind of standard. They do put the words to those on the overheads, but the timing is unusual, or even changed up in the middle of a verse or chorus, so even if I’m trying to puzzle out the melody (sometimes, as Bert said, trying to find a harmony is impossible with the accompaniment being used) and sing along, nearly everything about the way the song is constructed defies being able to sing it congregationally.

And which church gives handouts for songs not in the hymnbook today? Those help with the timing, notes, and even the words when the overheads are poorly designed. My previous church used that method with new songs most of the time, and it was super helpful. I agree with Wally a bit that most praise teams seem to be slanted too much to the concert/performance idiom, but even their attempts at getting people to sing along need much work, and are hardly an improvement over “old-fashioned” worship singing. It may sound good on the surface to use music that “connects” with people today, but if they can’t sing along with it very well or at all, it’s defeating the purpose.

Bad music occasionally performed well, but, more often, bad music performed badly.