Introduction
Originally, the essay below was constructed at the invitation of a Christian web site that featured a chat and response location for Christians to talk about music as it applies to Christian service and community. It was clear from a perusal of the site that virtually the only music being considered, and the only issue being discussed, among the dozens upon dozens of communicators had do with rock and pop music. As a jazz improvisator, composer of new music, and a Christian, this has been a concern of mine.
The difficulty is in trying to find where contemporary Christian music is anything other than pop and the like. What of 20th Century classical? Jazz? Avant garde, in the higher art sense? Believe it or not, there are such. But where to find it on any Christian web page is a question. I mean none disrespect, but Christian music has come to mean only that which speaks in youthful vernacular, all too often set to adolescent mating music. And notice how virtually every Christian music web page advertises the music with fantasy images.
Is it really true, then, that Christian music is only about what is easy to sell? And do Christians, as with the broader range of American society, believe that only children can make new music?
This is not about worldly versus heavenly. There is more to be considered in the matter than what has so far been brought out in the discussion.
Most answers in defense of rock seem irrelevant, such as pointing to the numbers of persons being saved at this or that rock concert. Numbers have nothing to do with evidence of true salvation. Take a follow-up look at the 60's Jesus Movement, and you will understand. Young people, amidst peer pressure and not yet in control of themselves, will always tend to follow the latest trend, particularly when it splats in the face of the parent generation. And "standing up for Jesus" was a rebellious, therefore popular, thing to do at that time in American history. But life happens, and sooner or later surface the facts of whether or not a conversion actually took place.
Popularity as evidence of value or proof of goodness, in its modern development, is a peculiarly American phenomenon not to be honored necessarily.
The best answer I've read so far, has been to point towards the performer, the reason he or she performs - whether it be for God or not. Of course, this presents another problem that can only be controlled by establishing a corps of Attitude-Police.
Be that as it may. Once upon a time, the story goes, a talented but deaf-mute acrobat, unable throughout his life to join in the assembly of praise in the normal way, suddenly rises from a pew in mid-service, goes before the altar and, in front of the congregation, performs his acrobatic skills for God, raising a ruckus of objection from members of the assembly. As he is about to be dragged off, a statue of the Lord comes alive (this is a Catholic parable) and moves to protect the acrobat, evidently on behalf of the principle.
Certainly motive makes a difference. But, what are we talking about here? None of the forty performers in a recent church concert of my work, for example, were investigated as to their moral credentials in order to qualify them to perform. In fact, although the church offered prayers in Christ's name, I know that more than a few were not Christian in having Christ as personal Savior. He, to them, was merely a good man.
Several of the participants were also homosexual in their lifestyle, members of a church with an active social-gospel of good works, caring and providing for many from among our economically disenfranchised citizens.
The point that I would wish to make here is that the performers at this concert were effectively doing the Lord's work, whether or not they continued to do it in their offstage lives, and the audience, not concerned about or even aware of the private lives of the performers, was getting an intrinsically Christian message put into their ears.
The church that my wife and I were attending at the time of this writing was an explicitly Christ-centered, somewhat charismatic congregation. Both churches feature music in a big way.
The liberal church has an SATB choir of approximately thirty-five voices, usually accompanied by an organist and/or a pianist, sometime augmented with other instruments, some exotic, and including at times a string quartette. The church we were attending had a small group of worship singers, strong on melody and simple, extemporaneous harmony, usually accompanied by a pianist, also augmented at times with other, usually rhythm, instruments including the ubiquitous guitar.
Participants at the liberal church were required to read, although not all read equally well. The only person able to read at our church was the music director.
Music at the liberal church covered a wide expanse of styles and historical periods from throughout Christendom. Music at our church was fairly limited to what was catchy to the musically illiterate.
The liberal church was open to new music. Our church had no system to introduce new music that was unlike the forms familiar to its participants.
I was asked by the liberal church to be featured artist-composer-songcrafter at one of their biennial Scholarship fundraisers. My attempts at our church to introduce new music failed repeatedly - not that they were unwilling, but that they were unable. And being willing to even let new music be heard is more than can be said for most churches.
I have stepped through the above in order to reveal how twisted is the situation for Christian makers of new music. I hope no one will try to tell me that new music is coming from rock, when only the words have been changed to fit the occasion, and only slightly at that.
Music, that is the non-verbal, instrumentally executed, in its 20th century harmonic landscape - the complex of shifting tonal centers - if not unknown at least by way of rumor, is hardly understood and utilized to any extent by pop and rock musicians.
It is not, however, just harmonic technique that is at risk here. There is the vast array of human emotions to be considered, and how music goes about expressing and/or evoking them. This is subject for another, lengthier treatment which cannot be gone into here for reasons of space and focus.
The pop music industry and what it inspires is all about making products that can earn money and/or social status, as the case may be, i.e., utility music, which automatically excludes anything really new. And that which appears new is invariably surface difference - usually via sound - that helps to stimulate the mating urge of the emerging generation.
Utilitarianism, a doctrine of the Industrial Revolution, is the teaching that utility is the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions. Slave owners, for example, used the arguments of utilitarianism to plead their cause.
When a song spells out a clear message that is meant to teach or to tell one what to do, it is utility music, a tool. The pop music industry itself deals entirely in utility music, i.e., music that is made to earn money.
Erik Routley (The Church & Music: An Enquiry into the History, the Nature, and the Scope of Christian Judgment on Music [Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 3 Henrietta Street, London, W.C.2. 1950]) discerned the dawn of utility music as being concurrent with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. At about the same time arose the Christian Revivalist Movement, with its unfortunate hymnody based on utilitarian principles.
Many American churches and various outreach missions continue to sing these hymns today, which has given rise to an understandable resistance among recent generations, and a turning away towards developing another hymnody more in keeping with their own sensibilities.
It is being developed without supervision from knowledgeable churchmen, and taken into the liturgy with little critical oversight. It is a curtsy of condescension towards children doing their own thing, in a nearly desperate attempt to keep the young in church.
I have seen music directors looking this way and that for what to do next. There being no particular place at the local level to look for fresh forms of music, some are asking children and other untutored young persons of varying and idiosyncratic musical skills for direction. Thus the flow into the churches of popular musics.
The fact that these music directors are generally grossly underpaid, having to take second jobs to make ends meet, leaving them little time to study new works, are additional perplexations that exacerbate the problem. Add to this the absence of any budgeting or grants for composers of new music, being set aside by churches, or offered by members of the Christian community, many of whom could easily afford to do so.
A preacher I knew, as cost-cutting policy, and who understands the necessity of tithing, sees nothing in Scripture, at least in the New Testament, for the music to be paid, despite strong Scriptural precept to the contrary. An instance is given in Nehemiah 13:4-12, where tithing, a legal and religious obligation for Jews, was not reinstated until musicians who had been removed from the temple for economic reasons were reinstalled.
This preacher pays the maintenance personnel, the electricians, the carpenters, the painters, the secretaries, the various administrative assistants, et al. He says that anyway there are always musicians who will play for free. Despite that there is also no instruction about tithing in the New Testament, God maintains this preacher in his earthly needs - as though by example - in the tithing.
This preacher is not alone in his attitude. Pastors and their boards know that they can always find some musician to work for free. This is, of course, a form of pragmatism, i.e., doing what seems to work without regard for fixed principles of right or wrong - precisely the policy occurring in Red China (latter-day though it be) being criticized by Americans, Christians among them. It is easy, then, to see how it is that pop musicians, ever eager to be the performers, can become a practical choice for churchmen.
No one is equally endowed with all gifts. That the preacher might be aided with music which can set a mood for people to be more receptive to his sermon is a plus, for which he should be grateful.
But music is another station in life. It may or may not be put into God's service. That is up to the musician. And it is up to the musician, not the preacher, to determine the content of the music. The pastor, of course, might make suggestions. This brings us to another issue, the musician's responsibility.
A gift from God is both direction and responsibility. A true musician follows as though along a dotted line, on an internal search for artistic completion, and makes no impatient leaps. The problem with most pop-rock musicians is their impatience to be the show.
The creative process, aside from being a restraining channel for one's passions, is self-control, consisting of, among other qualities, contemplation. The opposite of contemplation is action. Erik Routley relates that St. Augustine, in De Musicas, refers to the "love of action" as "the characteristic of the person who will tolerate nothing that he has not himself invented, thought of, modified, or experienced . . . who [sees] everything as given to him for his own use, not as demanding from him the courtesy of an unselfconscious attention."
And this, says Augustine, "is at the root of bad art and failure to appreciate the good. The rebellious will can neither seek nor make good music - the love of action that distracts the soul from truth." Augustine equates this love of action with pride.
What also disturbs about pop music being used in Christian service is how so many of its practitioners remain uninformed by study - developing attitude in place of craft. Is this what is needed in a leadership position? How many from among the legions of rock performers actually study music? Or, of those that have, who continue to do so? That is, at least something of the major forms of music in all their various disciplines, from throughout history as they have come down to us in our present time, as well as other musics concurrent with their own.
A flotilla of flack will be coming my way for saying it. In defense against this charge, will exceptions be thrown at me? Actually, an objection - one in the major category - against having any pop musician officially put in charge of music is this flaw in the study department. This is also an objection easy to bring to bear on music leaders in most of the traditional churches.
If anything should cause pause among churches considering the matter, it is this fundamental deficiency combined with a consequent stylistic single-mindedness. If a potential role model does not study, how is he or she to be an example to follow, especially for the generation succeeding? It would not be recommended for the pastor. The Christian life is as much study as it is doing. Without study, one's life slips ever steadily towards solipsism.
In his essay "The Intelligence in the Service of Christ" in Christianity and Philosophy, Etienne Henry Gilson (1884-1978), writes,
Do these performers of pop and such, now singing in churches, study music, drawing upon its history to improve their skills? Are they doing their all in all respects possible to substantiate claims made by them that what they are doing is being done for God? Or are they satisfied to merely match what they do to ssecular pop-industry standards, concentrated upon shaping their musical output towards popular thus commercial success?
Idiosyncratic performers with a passion to be seen, even in church, is hardly the stuff to follow upon Christianity's great music tradition. Idiosyncratic means that which is peculiar to the self without attachment to [the greater] tradition. Rewards and status being given for the products of hasty effort is what will be exemplified to successive generations.
Children, as the most vulnerable in this concern, do not care what is being said, only what they see being done. It is preferable that music in a church service should not be the show. Well enough said. But, I have heard ministers put that to musicians, and then get onto the podium and, treading the boards of show-biz Christianity, become the show themselves.
The problem is not just what is going on inside some of the churches, worship gatherings, and evangelical outreach ministries, but also what is coming out over the airwaves as "Christian" songs, being projected with all the marketing force of major media exposure. "One child can change the world," in anticipation of one yet to come, is a repeated phrase in the lyric of a popular Christian song. Has that job been recently removed from Christ?
Considering the plethora of youth oriented music (can anyone escape it?), youth fashion, youth-aimed commercial products, and youth and youthism having replaced age as a measure of excellence, it is a bit much to have to hear a song on Christian radio bemoaning, "Will anybody listen to what young people have to say?"
The sad fact is, with the concurrence of church and its secular industrial tributaries, what we have is a totalitarianism of teen taste that dictates current music culture in American Protestant churches and communities.
How often, nowadays, are the faithful unwittingly carried away by the performance of the moment into singing a doctrinally unsound lyric?
It is essential to remember what art is, and what it must be to be art. Propaganda is something else. If non-Catholic Christian churches really want music only to teach and tell people what to do, well and good. They would be in sympathy, then, with the communist political principle that music is proper when it serves for marching and for telling people how to increase their productivity.
Current arguments about music preferences center around the self. How I want "my" favorite music to prevail. What rockers, having their music performed in a substantial number of churches - certainly in their communities - but still complaining over being called names, have ever observed that only in the extremely rare Christian environ - church or community - is to be found 20th century classical, jazz, or serious avant garde.
Rock and pop musicians should be thankful for what does exist for them in church and community. American Christian mission makes no outreach whatever to the persons peopling these other music milieus. There is so much in the way of compensation going on, of unashamed ignorance being covered up with eccentric advocacies. A lot of aggression.
But the frustration is easy to understand, when one takes into account so much stiff-necked opposition from religionists against anything replacing, or even standing next to, the clung-to familiar. Their's is also a "my" music position - nay-sayers who violently wrench Holy Scripture out of context to bolster argument.
Customary cultural rigidity at the local congregational level across the nation has resulted in successive generations coming to the point where they no longer sing the same songs - or even want to.
We are not seeing much in the way of humility in the dispute. And by that I do not mean always giving way to another's position. Humility, rather, that respects another as being at least equal to oneself, that defers where possible. Where possible is critical. Jesus, of course, being humble, did not defer to another's view where it went against truth.
Perhaps all this disagreement is an opportunity not being taken to set aside what the "me" wants in order to practice humility. To study rightly is to be humble.
How music can be is beyond human comprehension. Being the manipulation of sound, the very stuff of creation, it can, literally, affect the atoms of physical property. It cannot be ignored. With iniquitous hands it is potentially insidious. The wrong and right of it is relative to place and time. It is too important to ignore. The talent to shape it is a trust.
Being a musician, that is an artist-musician, is immensely more than learning to pick a guitar well enough to perform in a rock band. It is a path of responsibility, often a trail of tears. It is, if we decide to accept the job, regularly a mission impossible - but for God willing.
