Is congregational singing dead?
Here are three folks who think it’s dying:
- Michael Raiter: The slow death of congregational singing
- Michael Spencer: Riffs: The Briefing on “The Slow Death of Congregational Singing”
- Tom Schwegler: Why Contemporary Music Makes Congregational Singing Difficult
I’m a bit puzzled by their complaints. I suspect that an anthropologist could help us out here. If our music today doesn’t sound like the music of fifty years ago it has less to do with the death of congregational worship and more to do with a changing culture. God is the same yesterday, today and forever. But quite often religious people are only interested in recreating the spiritual experience of yesterday. So our Bibles have to sound archaic. And our music needs to sound like Gershwin.
I’m all for embracing what God is doing “today and forever” but still we shouldn’t abandon the past. Yesterday evening I got to attend a picnic followed by a worship service with a bunch of white-haired saints in an RV park. The food was great. The music was…old. And you know what? I loved it. I grew up with those songs and no PowerPoint was necessary. The thin voices of elderly believers rose through pines toward heaven and it was fantastic.
Still folks are saying that church music is dying. But it looks to me like public singing in the secular world is having a renaissance. American Idol. High School Musical. Karaoke. People are happy to sing if it’s music that makes them happy. The days of the hymn sing are dead because folks don’t live in houses without electricity and drive around in a horse and buggy. Can’t we find the divine in this weird and scary modern world we live in? Church steeples and pipe organs were not essential to the spirituality of the early Christian believers. Let it go, folks. A friend of mine is an unpastor at an unchurch where the believers regularly invade bars and hang out with sinners. I suspect that classic hymns won’t fly there. But neither will the sappy songs on K-Love. Matt Redman and Darlene Zschech are the Ira Sankey and Fanny Crosby of our day. If their music sounds alien to you it’s perhaps because you have lived too long in a Christian ghetto. Musicians absorb culture through their skin and transform it into music. Spirit-filled songwriters are able to absorb their culture, redeem it and then offer it as a sweet sounding offering to the heavenlies.
Sorry, but Matt Redman and Darlene Zschech sound alien to me precisely because most of my music listening happens outside of the Christian ghetto. If churches were singing R&B and hip-hop inspired stuff, then I think your argument would have more weight.
Contemporary Christian worship music is more up to date than, say, Sankey. But it still isn’t contemporary – at least not contemporary to any radio or MP3 player I’ve been close to in the last few years.
If Matt and Darlene are getting to be old hat, they will soon be overtaken by a new generation which is not, just as they overtook Graham Kendrick and the other 80s favourites. Indeed there is a new generation of worship songs already in use at my church’s youth service, in a new style which the youth pastor thinks are not so alien – although more rock than hip-hop. I find them hard to sing along to, but I blame that not on the songs, but on my age and the fact that I don’t listen to that kind of music outside the Christian ghetto.
Also worth remembering that in our fragmented, tribal culture there isn’t any such thing as “contemporary culture”. There are lots of cultures. So I think that trying to run a church service that is aimed at being relevant to everyone is more impossible now than it ever has been. Do what you do well I say, and lets not get into slagging off what someone else is trying to do well. No point. I don’t think our choice of music will lead to committed discipleship (in fact the evidence I see is the opposite in fact). But it is worth encouraging lots of styles of worship so that people can get a chance at worshipping in a style that they can enjoy.
[...] Another view of the “dying of singing in worship”. [...]
[...] Another view of the “dying of singing in worship”. [...]
Eddie, I think you’re right. My rhetoric got ahead of reality there. The first question is should worship have a short shelf-life? I’m all for the idea of rootedness but is it in fact an illusion? The second question is should worship within the church sound like music outside the church? I listen to the radio while driving and the CCM is so crappy compared to just about everything else that I can’t bear to listen to it. My three favorite stations: jazz, classical, classic rock.
Peter, you know I prefer Graham! But that possibly says more about my age than the music.
Chris, excellent point about tribalism. I think some of these discussion suffer from over-generalization. When you look at specific instances you often find a long tradition that is interacting albeit uncomfortably with modernity.
Another question here is the way community singing is changing. The examples you give of singing being alive and well outside “American Idol. High School Musical. Karaoke” strike me as people imitating “performers” and not communal singing. What seems to be happening is that singing in public has become almost exclusively performance – even the national anthem at rugb matches is mianly a performance… And singing in church too, except that there if one can manage it one can shout along as well as dance along with the performers
If this sounds like a grumpy old man that’s OK, on this issue that’s what I am. I liked singing tunes that were singable by everyone, with words that were theologically profound. Relevance is a chimera – you can never catch it.
This is worrying, I think I agree with everyone here!
Just a thought… Communal singing is alive and well in the UK (and other countries where they play real football). Though the tunes are hardly new.
I’ve also been told that the whole audience joins in with the songs at the Mama Mia movie (I dread to think what that sounds like – especially if it is an inflight movie).
Could it be that part of the problem is that our churches sometimes fail to express the sense of commitment shared by a football crowd or the sense of togetherness shown by a bunch of forty somethings watching Meryl Streep singing Dancing Queen.
Wanders off into the distance singing to himself… ‘Friday night and the music’s low…..’
Eddie,
When I look at these things on the micro/tribal level a lot of our objections disappear. In my family, or my cell group, or my little community church there is a well-loved and often well-worn set of songs that everyone gravitates to naturally and sings with gusto.
On the macro/globalized level “worship” tends to follow a pop-song trajectory. But even so, if you look at the Top 25 songs at CCLI they look very similar today to what they were a year ago: http://www.ccli.com/usa/LicenseHolder/Top25Lists.aspx
On one hand I’m really tired of almost all of those songs, but with a few exceptions they’re all terrific songs.
Dancing queen! That is a scary thought.
Interesting. I didn’t know this list existed. I still don’t know exactly what it means, surely not an accurate measure of how much the songs are sung – and it only includes ones in copyright, so no old hymns.
There is a lot of overlap between the UK list and the US one, but I note that the UK one still includes several of your favourite Graham Kendricks, as well as “How Great Thou Art” whose royalties benefit your organisation. On the other hand the songs on the US list are closer to what I currently like singing. Perhaps you and I should swap countries!