Lift Up Your Hearts!

Music is such a personal, touchy subject—as is worship.  Put them together and you might as well be mixing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.  Nonetheless I will boldly go where too many have gone before, in order to draw attention to “Pop Goes the Worship,” an interview in Christianity Today (March 2011) with T. David Gordon, author of Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns:  How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal.

I wasn’t expecting much when I began the article (who writes these titles, anyway?), but was quickly drawn in.  A sure way to my heart is to say what I’ve been saying myself, or wanted to say, only much better and with authority.  The article is worthwhile in its entirety; here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite—or raise your blood pressure.  [Emphasis in the following is mine]

T. David Gordon argues that modern worship choruses have trumped hymns in many congregations because for decades, we have been inundated with pop music—to the point that many of us don't know better. If you eat nothing but Big Macs, Gordon says, you will never appreciate a filet mignon.

Regarding church music, Gordon says, media ecologists should ask how music, "once a participatory thing, became a passive thing. What happens when people who used to sing folk music around the house are now surrounded by Muzak? How does that alter our sensibilities of music?"

Many are promoting an "aesthetic" that it is our duty to patronize living artists and not artists who are dead. Should we also not read books that are more than 50 years old, or enter buildings that are more than 50 years old? Christians aren't abandoning their buildings, and they haven't stopped reading Spurgeon or Edwards or Luther or Calvin. We haven't rejected other art forms that are not new. We've done so only with music.

Unless an individual chooses to listen to different kinds of music, the only thing that individual will hear (most of the time) is pop. Sure, one's sensibilities can be shaped deliberately, and many of us have developed tastes that we once did not have. (I spent years cultivating a taste for Brahms, whom I now love, and I spent about two years cultivating my appreciation for jazz.) If I did not believe that sensibilities could be cultivated, I wouldn't have written the book; it is, in some senses, a plea to shape them differently from the way commercial pop culture shapes them. But for people who do not take ownership of the cultivation of their sensibilities, other cultural gatekeepers will shape them for them—and in this case, they will shape them to prefer pop.

In the book, I candidly state that many traditional hymns are outright dogs—just terrible. I never give specific examples, however, because there are always some people who love those dogs, and if I call their beloved song a dog, they will never hear anything else I say. I also think some contemporary hymns are very good; I especially appreciate Getty and Townend (e.g., "How Deep the Father's Love," "In Christ Alone").

Hymns should be easy enough to learn for people who do not read music, so people can pick up the melody quickly. When I was a young child and we'd take drives, the family would sing folk music or hymns. If Mom or Dad started singing "Fairest Lord Jesus," we sang along, and before long we were harmonizing. And we couldn't read music. Hymns aren't too difficult to sing; most of them are easier to sing than the contemporary stuff.  I find it ironic that if I'm attending a blended service, the hymns will have the full musical score, though they don't need it, while the contemporary stuff, which is unfathomable without the musical score, doesn't have it. It's just lyrics up on the screen.

[Modern tunes] are not really easier to learn than hymns (unless they are profoundly simplistic). They seem easier to some people whose sensibilities have difficulty with anything that is not pop. But musically speaking, they are not, as a genre, substantially easier; they just sound more familiar to our culture. When people describe them as "easy," what they mean is "familiar-sounding."

Thank you, Dr. Gordon.  I am so tired of people telling me that "praise music" is easy.  Now I know there are at least two of us in this world who find it "unfathomable" without the music.  (I'm getting better, with practice, at muddling through when I can get my hands on the sheets the band uses, which have chords as well as lyrics; that's rather fun, actually.  I'm still hopeless in the congregation.)

What Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns will contribute to the ongoing music and worship conflagration discussion, I can't predict.  All I know is that the article cheered me up.