The primary functions of music in worship are to facilitate the dialogue and to contribute to that dialogue. Though aesthetic delight, personal enjoyment, and opportunity for a performer to share a talent may be by-products of the use of music in worship, none of...
Music has the uncanny ability to burrow its way into our spiritual bones. When it comes to matters of spirituality and faith, we are what we sing. There is no need to overstate the case. Music is not all-powerful. Many things shape our souls, including our parents’...
Which style of music pleases God the most? This basic question has generated innumerable different answers from sincere Christians. In the first 800 years after Christ, most worship music was simply unison melody. One day someone added a second part, and harmony...
Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.
Hymnody needs to be popular. It is more closely related to folk song than to art song… It is because hymnody is, in its very essence, a kind of folk song that we must never close the door to new hymns written in the idiom of our day… Time has a way of selecting the...
Ignace Jan Paderewski was, at one time, both the prime minister of Poland and a virtuoso pianist. A story is told about a mother who brought her young son to hear him perform. The boy was just beginning to learn the piano and she wanted him to hear a master, so she...
Maintaining unity among the diversity of the church’s membership requires that we defer to one another in love, being willing to sing one another’s music rather than insisting on the music we most enjoy. from Contemporary Worship Music: A Biblical Defense
We’ve made worship self-centered instead of God-centered. We lobby for what we want: “I don’t like the songs.” “I don’t like the volume.” It’s as if we’re worshiping worship instead of worshiping God. If worship is a decision, then the greatest worship happens when...
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Music is as well or better able to praise Him than the building of the church and all its decorations: it is the Church’s greatest ornament…religious music without religion is almost always vulgar. from Conversations with Igor Stravinsky ———————————Gender-neutral...