The White Horse Inn radio program and Modern Reformation magazine recently cohosted a roundtable discussion on the divisive subject of contemporary trends in worship music. The participants were Michael Horton (MH), editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation and co-host of the White Horse Inn, Ken Jones (KJ), pastor of Greater Union Baptist Church in Compton, California, and co-host of the White Horse Inn, Ronald Feuerhahn (RF), associate professor of historical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, and Scotty Smith (SS), pastor of Christ Community Church (PCA) in Franklin, Tennessee.
MH: How have you two resolved the style-versus-substance issue that is ravaging many evangelical churches? Is style neutral? If not, what role does it play?
SS: I don't think there are many neutral areas. For my congregation in particular-we're in the Nashville, Tennessee, area in the middle of so much style and trendiness-it's been a challenge but a joy to think through how a biblical worldview impacts everything from style to substance to whim. We're trying to tear down the false dichotomy between style and substance. Hopefully everything will be substantive if it's done to Christ's glory.
RF: As a professor who sits in the pew on Sunday mornings, I have a slightly different perspective. I visit a lot of churches where the style-versus-substance issue is a reality. It may have changed its complexion slightly over the last few years from our repeatedly stressing that substance is the main point. The church's mission and message are crucial and style should always follow them, but historically it has almost always been the other way around.
One principle observed throughout church history is that "the way of praying is the way of believing." But it should be the other way around-belief or doctrine should lead and guide everything else. In my own denomination, some people are saddened by the tension we are experiencing regarding some doctrinal matters because this seems to be preventing us from giving full time to the church's mission and evangelism efforts. But actually these doctrinal controversies determine the message we preach. The faith-the message-is the substantive thing in church life and the rest must follow that. You don't have good evangelism unless it's based on substantive faith and doctrine.
MH: Is it possible to have substantive faith and doctrine with stylistic diversity?
RF: I think so. You can have stylistic diversity because the style can serve the situation.
MH: Scotty, what role do you think music generally plays in the weekly worship service? I ask because whether we are talking about-I don't like these polarizations-traditional or contemporary worship, music seems to be the most divisive issue today.
SS: In the last couple of years, we have taken some leads from the post-exilic community when God brought his people back from the Babylonian captivities. We studied how Ezra and Nehemiah's leadership was brought to bear as God's people re-established themselves as a worshiping community in the promised land and found three poles to emerge that enabled us to look at worship and music in fresh ways. They are the historical, the contextual, and the eschatological poles. The minor prophets whom God raised up at that time emphasized the historical pole. They helped God's people to rediscover their story. Likewise, we must rediscover this story, for it binds us to the gospel's whole meta-narrative. This means that we must sing the great hymns of Zion. Yet as God's people re-entered the land new songs were also being written-songs representing both the laments of those who remembered the old temple and grieved and wept real tears as they saw the disappointing reality of the rebuilt temple, as well as songs representing the good news in that particular moment of God's outworking of his historical/redemptive plan. We also need to have new songs that we can sing about our particular moment in redemptive history. God also called his reestablished people to look to the eschaton through Zechariah and Haggai. And eschatology must shape how we think about worship and music because one day we will gather with God's whole covenant family around the throne of grace, where life's rich diversity will still be manifest even as it is celebrated in the perfect unity that will mark God's whole people.
Music is not neutral, so its style needs to be shaped by these poles that God has established for his pilgrim people. So we try to get our bearings each Sunday in terms of them. How does our worship on this Lord's Day establish our community with the church triumphant and militant, the historical moorings? How are we now experiencing the gospel by God's Spirit? What are the new songs that are being written? And how should the song of the New Jerusalem shape what we do even now as we connect with the larger international family of God?
MH: Thinking for a moment about the historical pole, some of us are concerned about what is happening inter-generationally. It seems, especially as some churches move to a traditional service followed by a contemporary service, that we are pulling the generations apart by doing niche marketing. To what extent is Christianity inherently inter-generational and to what extent does the music in the worship have to express that?
SS: For me, inter-generational worship must start with helping young and old alike rethink how we define worship. Is it the other-centered adoration of God for his sake? Or is it simply some consumeristic orientation where I, in any given service, find the songs I connect with? Worship is always response. We must always declare God's Word and think more about how we can bring pleasure to the heart of the God who has so generously given his Son to us. So we must move away from the insidious consumeristic orientation that blights so much evangelical Christianity today.
RF: Ironically, the inter-generational issue has been changing dramatically in the last few years. In one large church of my denomination, the young people are trying to drag their parents out for the 8:00 a.m. traditional service. This is quite remarkable. Insofar as the church is "catholic" (or universal) in the proper sense, we should try to keep the generations together. Otherwise you do have different congregations worshiping in the same place, which does not seem to be a very positive thing.
MH: How do you deal with this claim? "Traditionalists are just elitist and ingrown while contemporary music folks are just pop and want to turn worship into entertainment." Are these caricatures? How can we combat and move beyond them (if they are caricatures) when we discuss important topics like worship music? How have you in practice overcome these caricatures?
RF: Sometimes they aren't caricatures. You can get elitists who are just that-elitists. They do not respond as good Christians should to other people's opinions. Yet having said that, they may often be caricatures and then we can discard them. Lutheran worship always emphasizes God's initiative. This should make anyone, traditional or contemporary, equal in God's presence. We are all there as recipients to be gifted by God. And so, since it is not in the first place our doing or our deciding but God's, we follow his lead. His lead comes to us through his Word in terms of what he says to us about himself, his plan of salvation, and our reality as his baptized children. We respond to those things. That should bring us all together so that our response will be quite similar, no matter what our age or background. My friend Ed Veith talks about high culture, middle culture, and low culture and how the church always seems to aim for a higher culture. Putting it that way explains some things, but someone might ask, "Why should that be the church's aim?" No matter how we label it, we must respond to God in a way that gives him the best there is to give because of the fullness of what he has given to us in Christ. We are open-handed beggars before God's throne. He puts into our hands these great gifts-and as they come into our hands they make us new creatures and so we respond in new ways. We do not respond as young or old, hip or not. We respond as people whom God has gifted, using primarily the language that God has given us, Scripture's language, which is not the world's language. We then begin to catechize the new people in our midst. This is also one of the great gifts of the church-to instruct newcomers about this new experience, this new community, and what God has given us that brings us all together.
MH: The apostle Paul says that music-singing psalms and spiritual songs-is a way of catechizing. It is a way of teaching and admonishing each other. I think, in light of what you have said, that one of the great challenges before us with a lot of contemporary music is that it involves a focus on us and what we are doing. "We bring you glory." "We are bringing you praise." "We just want to worship you." "We . . . we . . . we . . . we . . . we." This is something we don't find even in the pietistic hymns of the 18th and 19th centuries. The piety of those older hymns seems to be saturated in God and what he has done in Jesus Christ. Doesn't Christian music need to attend much more to what God has done in Christ and then extol those mighty acts rather than immediately stepping up to the plate to say what we are going to do in our piety?
RF: We really do live in a different era. In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold talked about living in the sea of faith. There was a vertical orientation, whereas today we are very, very much more centered on ourselves. As Richard Russell said a couple of years ago in the New York Times, now Woody Allen's stammering phrase, "I I I I I I I I I," begins to sound like a complete sentence. And, even for those who try so hard to offer their worship in terms of this "we" phenomenon for what they think are good reasons, this language is basically anthropocentric. It is meant to be otherwise, I assume, but it really is oriented to their own expressions. Even the way the music comes across is at times indulgent in the same way.
SS: It seems like the line between the personal and the privatized is getting blurred. We can certainly appreciate any faith-community that wants the continuum of transcendence and immanence to be balanced. It is appropriate to sing with Charles Wesley's wonder, "and can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior's blood?" Yet what concerns me is the privatization of the way we use these personal pronouns in this culture. We need to see these pronouns become collective and missional so that we are looking at the final center of worship as the new heaven and the new earth where there will be no building where we gather but where the whole of life will be lived to God's glory.
KJ: I am African-American and Baptist. Style plays a great part in African-American worship. In African-American churches, long before you get to the question of substance, style permeates. I think one reason for the emotional flavor-the style-of African-American worship is that it interprets the salvation message in a particular way. We associate with the children of Israel in the wilderness. That leads to a question: In talking about style you raise the issue of traditional versus contemporary. But how much do other issues influence whether the style is considered traditional or contemporary-issues such as denomination? You come from a Lutheran background, Ron, and I know that in the Lutheran church the issue of faithfulness to your standards-the Book of Concord-plays a big part. Then there is the issue of ethnicity. I look at the Asian church and, again, in many Asian-American churches there are great conflicts and questions concerning worship. When they contrast traditional and contemporary, culture and ethnicity play a large role. How much should those issues influence their American forms and expressions of worship?
Sometimes there is a tendency to assume that the worship wars are all about theology versus non-theology. But there are other issues that play a part in reflecting that theology.
SS: Would it be helpful for us to find some synonyms for style? "Style" has gotten a life of its own, but when I think about, for instance, a conversation with my wife, if I really am committed to loving her as Christ loves the church, then I'm going to learn her dialect. I'm going to learn what connects with her, what reflects her heart. Similarly, when I am part of a community of faith, what is appropriate language in that community? The book of Lamentations and many of the Psalms reflect styles that are contextually appropriate to great grief or to the call for repentance or even to the unanswered questions in Israelite hearts. Sometimes Scripture's style reflects high celebration. Quite honestly, there are pictures of worship in Scripture that push me way beyond what I'm comfortable with. For instance, it is going to take a lot of faith and repentance on my part to get in the worship service in Revelation 5, because I don't like to be prostrate on my face. I'd rather sit here in control, thank you very much.
So where does the regulative principle come in? Scripture should become the ultimate arbiter of style so that the question is not whether I either enjoy or don't enjoy doing something or am comfortable or uncomfortable with it. My response should become congruent with the different aspects of the great story of the gospel and thus take on much different styles in different contexts. This may move us beyond doing what we think is abstractly most honoring to God to doing what really is concretely most honoring.
MH: Ron, you talked earlier about the need for catholicity. I think that is part of what Ken is saying, too. We want to link hands not only with our brothers and sisters in our particular culture and our particular denomination but also cross-culturally and cross- denominationally with anyone who is genuinely catholic in the sense of affirming the apostolic faith. But this is something I really can't fathom. How can we be catholic while recognizing that different cultures bring their cultural distinctiveness into worship, and that to some extent they must or we would not be the particular, culturally-conditioned human beings that we are?
RF: Perhaps now I've got to take back everything I've said! But I hope I don't have to. Let me ask this, "By what authority, by what right, could a traditionalist claim that his way is better than the contemporary way?" Those of us who may want to be called "traditionalist" need to answer this question. I might answer it like this. I hope I can affirm much that is contemporary in worship. But let's think for a moment about the divide between the era when there was the sea of faith and today, between a more objective way of understanding Christian faith and a more subjective way of understanding it. Is genuinely catholic faith with an evangelical heart better served by the traditional way of worshiping because it is more objective, because it attends more to God than to me? Friedrich Schleiermacher's late eighteenth and early nineteenth century theology is very aptly described as I Theologie-"I theology"-and we have suffered ever since from this great shift. Traditional worship is rooted in a time before this shift. Now contemporary music can conform to the older standards and thus be catholic and be able to be sung by all Christians everywhere but its actual conformity to such standards is rare. These two standards-catholic in substance and evangelical in principle-balance each other beautifully. They are not opposed. In our day and age, we must come to appreciate that these standards have stood the test of much time, which is in fact what "catholic" in this sense means.
When people say to me, "After all, your liturgy is man-made," I always correct them and say, "Oh no, it's not man-made. It's men-made." Plural. In other words, it is not the art of one man. It's not the act of one man. And that's where subjective, privatized, "me" orientations are overcome. A group of men can still err, but they are more likely to correct one another and bless each other than when they act alone.
MH: Especially when that liturgy has evolved over much time and from so many different cultures. In order to wrap things up, can you each give us some encouraging examples from your own contexts?
SS: In light of what Ron has just so wonderfully said, we find genuine catholicity comes to life the more we use historic prayers and confessions-the more, for instance, we weave into our texture the Heidelberg Catechism and the Confession of Faith and the rest of the Westminster Standards. One of the ways we enjoy our rich diversity of musical expressions without that being just privatized existential fancy is that we shape our liturgy more upon the Church's historic liturgy. That liturgy has a traceable form; and as we champion it and use its wonderful words, saying and praying them together, it seems to do more than anything else to help our church family to get over thinking that "we" are the point.
MH: And your church isn't exactly just the older demographic.
SS: No. In fact, our median age is probably about late 20s, so we are a young congregation.
MH: Ron, do you see signs that we are getting beyond the worship wars about music in your own circles?
RF: Yes. I remember meetings with African-Americans in our church about a new hymnal. I asked them, "Well, how can we help?" And they outlined what they earnestly desired. At first, I was a little alarmed at my own reaction-some of this was so alien to my own experience and I felt very uncomfortable about it. And yet, as we began to talk more, I found myself opening up to the challenge put before me. If catholic-in-substance and evangelical-in-principle really are good standards, then they should be able to serve all of the community in every way. And this is what I am beginning to see is happening. There are also, in a recent hymnal supplement that came out in '98 in our church, new songs from around the world that express the catholic faith marvelously. I'm very encouraged by that as well.
