John Stackhouse has another perspicacious post, this time on the homogenization of music in contemporary churches. I know nothing about the "white gospel" style he laments in Disappearing (Musical) Languages but his experience strikes a sympathetic chord, since my musical "mother tongue" for worship is equally endangered.
That's much more encouraging than being told to get over it and learn to like the new languages. It's helps to realize that when it comes to church worship music I am a Native American child forced to speak only English in school, a deaf child forbidden to sign, or a Scot required to use the language of his conquerors. Prudence tells me the value of learning the dominant tongue, but a higher wisdom calls me to preserve that which is in danger of perishing. Call it the genealogical impulse.[T]he Welsh, among others, would tell us to keep alive the languages we love. Those who still speak them must take them up as sacred causes, maintaining these vital ways of perceiving and articulating the world without which humanity is diminished.
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