14 September 2015 A.D. The Imminent Decline of Contemporary Worship Music
14 September 2015 A.D. The
Imminent Decline of Contemporary Worship Music
Gordon, T. Gordon. “The Imminent Decline of
Contemporary Worship Music: Eight Reasons.” Aquila
Report. 30 Aug 2015. http://theaquilareport.com/the-imminent-decline-of-contemporary-worship-music-eight-reasons-2/. Accessed 30 Aug 2015.
The
Imminent Decline of Contemporary Worship Music: Eight Reasons
“Contemporary worship” to me is an oxymoron.
Biblically, worship is what angels and morning stars did before creation; what
Abraham, Moses and the Levites, and the many-tongued Jewish diaspora at
Pentecost did. It is what the martyrs, now ascended, do, and what all believers
since the apostles have done. More importantly, it is what we will do
eternally; worship is essentially (not accidentally) eschatological. And
nothing could celebrate the eschatological forever less than something that
celebrates the contemporary now.
By
imminent decline of
contemporary worship music, I do not mean imminent disappearance.
Commercial forces have too substantial an interest to permit contemporary
worship music to disappear entirely; and human beings are creatures of
habit who do not adapt to change quickly. I do not predict, therefore, a
disappearance of contemporary worship music, sooner or later. Already, however,
I observe its decline. Several years ago (2011) Mark Moring interviewed me for Christianity
Today, and in our follow-up communications, he indicated
that he thought the zenith of contemporary worship music had already happened,
and that the movement was already in the direction of traditional hymnody. He
did not make any claims about the ratio of contemporary worship music to
traditional hymns; he merely observed that whatever the ratio was, the see-saw
was now moving, albeit slowly, towards traditional hymnody. If the ratio of
contemporary-to-traditional was rising twenty years ago, it is falling now; the
ratio is now in decline, and I suspect that decline will continue for the
foreseeable future. What follows is a painfully abbreviated list of eight
reasons why I think this change is happening.
1.
Contemporary
worship music hymns not only were/are comparatively poor; theyhad to be. One
generation cannot successfully “compete” with 50 generations of hymn-writers;
such a generation would need to be fifty times as talented as all previous
generations to do so. If only one-half of one percent (42 out of over 6,500) of
Charles Wesley’s hymns made it even into the Methodist hymnal, it would be
hubristic/arrogant to think that any contemporary hymnist is substantially
better than he. Most hymnals are constituted of hymns written by people with
Wesley’s unusual talent; the editors had the “pick of the litter” of almost two
thousand years of hymn-writing. In English hymnals, for instance, we rarely
find even ten of Paul Gerhardt’s 140 hymns, even though many musicologists
regard him as one of Germany’s finest hymnwriters. Good hymnals contain,
essentially, “the best of the best,” the best hymns of the best hymnwriters of
all time; how could any single generation compete with that?
Just
speaking arithmetically, one would expect that, at best, each generation could
represent itself as well as other generations, permitting hymnal editors to
continue to select “the best of the best” from each generation. Were this the
case, then one of every fifty hymns we sing should be from one of the fifty
generations since the apostles, and, therefore, one of every fifty should be
contemporary, the best of the current generation of hymnwriters. Perhaps this
is what John Frame meant when, in the second paragraph of his book on CWM, he
indicated that he had two goals for his book: to explain some aspects of CWM
and to defend its “limited use” in public worship. Perhaps Prof. Frame thought
one out of fifty constituted “limited use,” or perhaps he might have permitted
as much as one out of ten, I don’t know. But our generation of hymnwriters,
while talented and devout, are not more talented or more devout than all other
generations, and are surely not so by a ratio of fifty-to-one.
2.
Early
on in the contemporary worship music movement, many groups began setting
traditional hymn-lyrics to contemporary melodies and/or instrumentation.
Sovereign Grace Music, Indelible Grace, Red Mountain Music, Reformed Praise all
recognized how difficult/demanding it is to write lyrics that are not only
theologically sound, but significant, profound, appropriate, memorable, and
edifying (not to mention metrical). If the canonical Psalms are our model, few
hymn-writers could hope to write with such remarkable insight (into God and His
creatures, who are only dust) and remarkable craftsmanship (e.g. the first
three words of the first Psalm begin with the first letter of the Hebrew
alphabet, aleph (א), each also has
a shin (ש), and two of
the three also have a resh (ר),
even though each is only a 3-letter word. Even those unfamiliar with Hebrew
cannot miss the remarkable assonance and alliteration in those opening three
words: “ashre ha-ish asher”).
3.
As
a result, the better contemporary hymns (e.g. “How Deep the Father’s Love,” “In
Christ Alone”) have been over-used to the point that we have become weary of
them. These two of the better contemporary worship music hymns are sung a
half-dozen times or a even a dozen times annually in many contemporary worship
music churches; whereas “A Mighty Fortress” may get sung once or twice (if at
all); but neither of the two is as good as Luther’s hymn. What is
“intrinsically good” (to employ Luther’s expression about music) will always
last; what is merely novel will not. Beethoven will outlast 50 Cent, The Black
Eyed Peas, and Christina Aguilera. His music will be enjoyed three hundred
years from now; theirs will be gone inside of fifty years.
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