One of the biggest barriers for me in worship has been my musical training. Sounds ironic, I know. But I’ve found through the years it’s a common problem.
My piano lessons, from 2nd grade through my piano scholarship in college, taught me to be specific and exact when playing a piece. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of notes, were practiced over and over until they could be performed without error, and often at high speed. In college, I was expected to practice 4+ hours a day minimum.
In the midst of all that, at 17 years old I felt God calling me to the ministry. It was something I had mixed feelings about, partly because I found much of the music I played at church to be so uninteresting. There was a murky mediocrity to much of it – it wasn’t horrible music, but most wasn’t great either. There were a few exceptions, with the songs of Ken Medema and John Purifoy. But much of the rest was written at a level the average church musician could play, which immediately limited it. There probably wasn’t one octavo I accompanied that I didn’t improvise on top of the written notes, trying to make it sound better or to just keep my mind from wandering.
Honestly, I was bored by most of it.
But my musical education in college added something toxic to that boredom: snobbery. Either subliminally or sometimes out loud, my instructors taught me that classical music was “real music”. It was generally written with more complexity, and it didn’t pander to what the general public wanted. For them, that meant it was simply better.
Of course the yokels, the unwashed masses, could enjoy their bluegrass, their country music, their pop and rock ditties on the radio. All that was “lower music”. The “higher music” they were teaching wasn’t concerned with being popular, it was just satisfied with being “better”.
Strangely enough, I heard this same appeal to snobbery from my rock music friends who liked “Yes”, “Emerson, Lake, & Palmer”, and other progressive rockers. They prided themselves on not liking anything on Top 40 radio, and considered those who did inferior. They were “too cool” for that junk, and the music they liked was only enjoyed by the elite few who “got it”.
Both my classical music teachers and my prog rock friends were acting out their own version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – only truly wise people can see the King’s “magic suit”. They liked different styles of music, but both were victims of the same condescending snobbery.
Happily, I saw through that and realized good music is pretty much whatever moves people. Music is at its heart emotion encased in sound. Good music affects you in some way. A good rock song taps into your aggression, the way Saturday Nights Alright For Fighting made me feel when I snuck my first Elton John record into the house. Likewise, a great classical work like Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé pulls something inside me upward in sublime rapture.
I can enjoy both those styles, and most any other. Good music is music that moves you. It may make you feel sad or feel happy.
Bad music is music that leaves you feeling nothing, regardless of its complexity or lack thereof.
Thankfully my initial fears about being bored as a church worship pastor were quickly dispatched. The choral music of Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir stirred an incredible passion within me. I knew when I heard it I’d never have to be bored in church again! And the lush orchestrations of folks like Lari Goss and Bradley Knight put me in the much the same rapturous territory as Ravel and Rachmaninoff had. Plus, the urban-contemporary Gospel of Kirk Franklin, Fred Hammond, and their ilk satisfied the musical urge I had caught initially from Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, and Andrae Crouch.
In the years since college, I’ve watched as trained musicians struggled with changing styles in music. While styles have continually evolved in church music, I’ve occasionally heard some long-time church pianists protest how the new styles weren’t “real music”. I saw organists frustrated with rhythmic patterns they considered beneath them, but as a musician I could see through their argument. Those rhythms were actually BEYOND them.
Some of the new music was fairly complex, but it was a rhythmic complexity that was beyond the ability of some traditionally-educated musicians.
Many of these academically-trained musicians had simply never been challenged before to grasp complex rhythmic figures. The music they played rarely went beyond a dotted eighth note. So when attacking a syncopated section of music, their playing sounded mushy and behind the beat. While those who played by ear just felt the rhythms, they were awkwardly trying to parse through it note by note.
Instead of admitting their limitations and putting in some hard work, many of them attacked the new music. Instead of admitting the songs were too hard for them rhythmically, they bemoaned the changing styles as “beneath them”.
Much of the “worship wars” we’ve witnessed in the past 50 years have been less about whether hymns are better than worship choruses than we think. Many were caused by musicians who were used to playing that easy church music that bored me as a teenager. They had been lazy learning rhythm (likely avoiding their metronomes like the plague), and now were lashing out instead of admitting their inadequacy and working harder to learn the music.
They resorted to that same snobbery I’d heard from classically-trained musicians, as well as from my progressive rock friends. My classical teachers looked down on other music styles because they wanted people to respect their degrees, and resented the adulation an ear-trained musician could get on the pop charts without submitting to all their academic rigor. Likewise, my church music friends felt left out, and anxiety about their skills becoming obsolete made them lash out.
Selfishly, they were willing to denigrate music that was encouraging many people to worship, simply because they couldn’t play it well.
They wanted music in the church to stay where it was in 1969, before the youth musicals of the Jesus Movement brought the first set of drums into most churches. They wanted it to stay academic, tethered to only playing what was written on the page. They wanted choral octavos they didn’t have to struggle to perform, and resented the teenagers who felt it naturally.
They wanted to keep the music mediocre, because that was the level of their musicianship. Oh sure, they would break out Handel’s Messiah or The Seven Last Words of Christ every now and then. But those classical works were things they had played over and over through the years. Now music was changing, and new songs were flooding into the church. God was doing a beautiful new thing and changing young lives, and those young people wrote new songs of worship. But that spiritual revival meant little to them if it meant they might struggle with the new rhythms of Good News or Celebrate Life.
I’ve known choir members who only wanted to do the same choral pieces they did 25 years ago, and get frustrated when they had to learn new things. Some of this was a clinging to tradition to avoid change. But it was also a musical laziness that only wanted to do songs where they could shine with little effort.
So it’s ironic when they put new music down as being inferior, because the truth is they were actually struggling to keep up. Like spoiled children, they want to keep everyone else off the monkey bars because the rungs are too high for their little arms to reach.
Now that I’m in what is probably my last lap of ministry in church music, I’m wondering how I’ll react as music continues to change. What if something happens in popular music so that all the things I’m skilled at musically are no longer required? I’ve already experienced some of that, as we moved from grandiose Sandi Patty-styled music that made me shine on the piano to more guitar-oriented pop/rock worship music where I’m stuck in the background.
What will I do when the kind of music I do well actually holds back my church’s music program?
Sure, I can be a snob and say it’s all inferior to what I used to do. I can yell the easy battle cry of “tradition” and get mad when the new worship guy won’t sing “Pass it On” or “We Shall Behold Him” in the Sunday service anymore.
I can gossip about how he’s destroying the music program when he no longer chooses “Thou Oh Lord” for the choir to sing.
But wait a minute, it could get worse than that!
What if the choir actually dwindles to the point there’s not enough people to cover all the parts?
What if they do away with the baby grand piano altogether, since it constantly has to be retuned and is a pain to move? What if they want me to play one of those red Korg keyboards instead, with all the confusing knobs?
What if, in order to reach a new generation that’s experiencing spiritual revival, my church embraces new songs birthed from that revival that I don’t already know and have to learn to sing or play?
And heaven forbid, what if I can’t sightread those new songs easily the way I could the old songs?
What happens when I become musically obsolete?
The best answer I know came from an 85 year-old Dutch woman named “Hermagaard” (we just called her “Hemmi”). She was part of a church I planted to reach unchurched people in Florida about 15 years ago. I loved to watch her worship. She was noticeably enthusiastic during my contemporary worship sets at church. She would sing, clap, even raise her hands in worship. There was literally no one in the room more active during worship than her, when some people her age barely even tried to sing along.
One day after church, I asked her, “Hemmi, how is it that even though this is not the style of music that comes naturally to your generation, you are so engaged during worship?”
I will never forget her answer.
“Young man,” she said firmly, pointing a rather bony index finger about 3 inches away from my chest, “there’s not one song you’ve got in your back pocket that I can’t learn! There’s no way I’m going to let worship pass me by without putting my voice in! No rock is ever going to have to cry out in my place!”
She smiled about half way through that speech, letting me know she wasn’t angry. But I could tell she was quite determined. If God was doing something in His church through worship, she was not going to be left behind. I have no doubt she listened to lots of Christian radio so she could be familiar with songs we were singing. She even suggested a few along the way I hadn’t heard.
Hemmi knew worship wasn’t about what she was comfortable with. It wasn’t worth holding a church back from where God was moving it, just so she would feel comfortable. She was determined to be a Caleb from the Old Testament – a warrior in his eighties who refused to take it easy, but instead begged to take the high ground.
When the sound of worship changes again, and no doubt it will, Lord please help me to be like Hemmi.
Let me worship like she did to the sound of a new song that’s flowing fresh from Your throne. Let me put in the extra work it may take to keep up, or maybe just sit back and enjoy when the younger folks launch in where I can’t keep up.
And Lord, help me remember to point my own bony finger in some young worship leader’s face, just so he’ll know there’s nothing he’s singing that I can’t handle.
