I've been in church and had another one of those sermons about music. How we are all stick-in-the mud and we should loosen up a bit, and the young people in church won't like all that old boring music and some of the older ones should be prepared to listen to new music.
Well fine.
At least it wasn't as bad as the preacher a few years ago who said there was a new wave of music sweeping the church (I think he meant John Wimber, or maybe the Blessed Graham Kendrick of South London), that addressed God personally, that wasn't afraid to talk about emotions, that wasn't cold and intellectual like the old stuff. What old stuff was this? Not the psalms I guess. Maybe he was talking about that famously cold and unemotional poet Charles Wesley, who was so reluctant to express his feelings, or to address God personally, that he manage to write:
Jesu, lover of my soul
Let me to thy bosom fly
But that wasn't the burden of our recent preacher. He wanted livelier music, better music, music that would be more acceptable to a young audience. Ignoring for a moment that this is an obvious technique of social control - by defining the congregation as old and stick-in-the-mud, by constructing us as old fogies, he is putting himself in the position of New Labour where all opposition or discussion is seen as merely a habitual response of obstruction by those who are insufficiently modernised - ignoring that for the present, there are at least three big problems with all this.
The first, is that most new church music is bloody awful. It isn't modern music or up-to-date music at all, it is second-rate sub-country-and-mid-western middle-of-the-road medium-wave US stadium rock pap, which I wouldn't have wiped my bum with when I was a teenager, never mind now. For at least 30 years (and for all I know 300) well-meaning preachers and youth-workers have been making idiots of themselves with excruciatingly embarrassing versions of whatever they think teenagers are listening to now - which usually means watered-down versions of whatever 25-year-olds were listening to 5 years ago, cleaned up for the grannies and with easy chords.
Secondly, it can all too easily be exclusive, even of the young people it is supposed to be attracting. When it is done well, it will probably piss off at least two-thirds of the potential hearers because they like something else. I have very little idea of the details of what 17-year-olds listen to on the radio or dance to in clubs these days but I am willing to bet that the further it gets from sub-pop-pap, the more sophisticated and to-the-point it is, the more some people like it and the more others hate it. If you try to do it properly you will please some, annoy others, exclude others and just show the real fans that you don't understand after all.
Thirdly, normal church services are not a place for difficult or exclusive music. They aren't a place for music that should be listened to. They are a place for music to sing words to. Worship is about a participating congregation, not an appreciative audience. There is a role for recorded music in church, for mood music, even for dance music, just as there is a role for organ recitals, chorales and anthems, or solos sung with feeling by elderly and slightly out-of-tune contraltos. But it is a small role. On the whole music in church should be for singing, and it should be for everyone to join in. And that means, on the whole, simple, singable tunes. It doesn't matter whether the tunes are 3 weeks old or 1300 years, (as a few are - the best survives) but it does matter that the ordinary mass of worshippers who have a vocal range of about an octave, and are out of tune as often as not, can sing it. A church service is not a performance. You can go to a concert for that. It isn't really a place to be quiet in, you can do that at home. It is a place to meet people and to worship God together. If the people are listening to music and not singing, then probably something is wrong.