Thanks for the space to share true worship
Earl

What would be appropriate and insightful questions to ask in an interview? We are a traditional Presbyterian church, and would like to incorporate more integrated music into our worship experience.

Will preach on that in the near future – you gave me my sermon title!

You were spot on with every one of the questions you posed, and am in agreement with what Steve says.

The biggest issue I can sum up is the lack of participatory worship, and I see this in both conservative and contemporary churches.

Accusations of using entertainment are often leveled against “circus” churches, but conservative churches often feature virtuoso classic artists performing to the audience’s thunderous applause. Who is to say that doesn’t amount to entertainment.

In the last two churches I attended sang songs composed by their own people, and often many did not know the lyrics and they were hard songs to sing for amateurs. I often wondered if I was at a concert. Then a lecture from the pastor followed the concert. Again, I found myself sitting on my butt. No participation.

I am not musically inclined, but that does not mean the church should relegate the musically challenged to second class status. Participation should be for everyone.

1. I’m not sure the problem is just that we have too much music at church or just that we have too much music as a whole, though I agree (and Paul Hindemith wrote a very cranky chapter about this fifty years ago in A Composer’s World so this isn’t a new development). It also seems like we let other people make music for us, which gets straight to question 2, doesn’t it?

2. and 3. seem related to me a the level of a vast increase in the musical styles we can know about with a paradoxically simultaneous decline in the average musical literacy that includes knowledge of production. I guess that’s an awkward way of saying lots of people can pick up a guitar and play a song they heard on Christian radio but knowing how to write it down so that a congregation can learn to sing it seems to be rarer and rarer. It seems the gap between what the hired musicians can do and the laity can do is closing as less trained musicians become music leaders.

Half of that seems good in that a musical style will likely be a better fit in a lot of cases but half of it, for some reason, seems bad because it makes music wars worse when people don’t understand how most of the styles people are willing to fight about aren’t nearly as different as people think once you break down the chords, rhythmic phrases, and structural similarities.

For 4. I don’t know why a trained music minister can’t do both the choir thing and the guitar thing. This seems like a broader problem of the nature of American music education. Some styles are held as being styles that can’t be taught and must be “felt” while other styles tend to be perceived as being teachable without consideration for that nebulous “feeling” thing.

Schools by and large don’t teach music that much and in public schools people who study tend to be “band nerds”. I feel a bit mixed about this because it seems like there’s the Scylla and Charybdis of having technical and practical knowledge of musical styles churches use less and less often on the one hand and having a more “with it” musical language but having no capacity to make practical musical concessions to congregational singing on the other hand.

I need the fresh insights that an experienced, gifted and anointed teacher can bring, not the passing thoughts of someone who happens to fancy getting up on their hind legs that week.

What I have advocated has nothing to do with “someone who happens to fancy” doing anything. It has everything to do with each member learning (being taught) to let the Spirit guide their contribution.

And it has everything to do with those gifted to “equip the saints” doing just that, so that the body is maturing.

If we really and consistently pursued, taught, and modeled maturity in the body of Christ (not just conversion, not just attendance, not just serving the institution itself), the straw men would blow away on their own.