What about worship styles?

Question 11029.

Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an important thing to face honestly.

Organ or band, hymnal or screen, choir or worship team, robes or jeans. These questions are not nothing, but they are also not the questions Scripture spends its time on, and the passion they generate is usually out of all proportion to the biblical material available.

What Scripture says and does not say about worship styles

The New Testament gives us remarkably little on musical form. Paul mentions psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Instruments appear all over the Psalter, including some fairly loud ones, and nowhere does the New Testament repeal them. There is no prescribed tempo, no approved instrument list, no ruling on volume.

What Scripture does address is substance. Songs should be true. Singing should teach and admonish. The gathering should build up. Everything should be done decently and in order. Those are the constraints, and they are constraints of content and effect rather than of worship styles as such.

Which means most of what we argue about falls into the category of Christian liberty, and Romans 14 is far more relevant to the average music committee than anyone would like.

Why the arguments get so heated

Music attaches itself to memory in a way almost nothing else does. A hymn sung at a parent’s funeral is not just a hymn any more. A chorus from the season of your conversion carries that season with it. So when a church changes its worship styles, people genuinely lose something, and telling them not to be sentimental is neither kind nor accurate.

There is also a real theological instinct underneath some of the resistance. Older hymnody often carries more doctrinal content per verse than contemporary songwriting, and people who sense that are not simply being nostalgic. They are noticing something true, even if they express it as a preference.

And there is straightforward selfishness on all sides, which we might as well name. The young can be contemptuous of what formed their grandparents. The old can treat their own preferences as apostolic. Both are the flesh wearing a musical costume.

The questions actually worth asking

Rather than arguing about worship styles directly, I would put three questions to any service. Is what we are singing true? Can the congregation actually sing it? Is the gathered church being built up, or is a group performing to it?

The first question is doctrinal, and it is the one most often skipped. A beautifully performed song that misrepresents God has done harm, however moving it was. This connects to the wider point I make about the link between doctrine and worship: what we sing forms what we believe.

The second is pastoral. Songs in a key only the leader can reach, or with a rhythm nobody can follow, quietly turn a congregation into an audience. Whatever the style, congregational singing should be singable by the congregation, which sounds obvious and is routinely ignored.

Cultural sensitivity without cultural surrender

There is a legitimate missionary instinct behind wanting worship styles that do not require a person to become culturally foreign before they can join in. Paul became all things to all people. A church in Lagos and a church in Lincolnshire will sound different, and neither is more biblical for it.

But there is a difference between accessibility and imitation. When a church’s music is shaped mainly by what is currently popular in the wider culture, the congregation learns to expect from church what it expects from entertainment, and that expectation is very hard to unlearn.

The test I use is simple. Does this help ordinary people give God his due weight, or does it help them have an experience? Those can overlap, but they are not the same, and only one of them is what worship actually is.

How to change worship styles without wrecking a church

Change slowly, explain constantly, and never let the young decide alone. Most disasters I have seen came from a well-meaning leader who changed everything in a fortnight and then was surprised that people who had given forty years to the church felt evicted from it.

Keep a genuine mix rather than a managed compromise. Separate services by style are usually a way of avoiding the harder work of being one congregation, and they tend to produce two churches sharing a car park.

Above all, teach. If people understand why a song has been chosen, they will endure a great deal that they do not personally enjoy. Unexplained change feels like loss. Explained change feels like being included.

The historical perspective on worship styles

It helps enormously to know that this argument is not new. Isaac Watts was accused of ruining worship by writing hymns that were not psalms. The organ was fiercely resisted as a worldly intrusion when it entered English churches. Moody and Sankey were criticised for using popular musical idiom in evangelistic meetings.

In each case the innovation was regarded as dangerously modern and is now regarded as traditional. The hymns that a congregation defends today as ancient were the contemporary worship styles of their grandparents’ youth, and were resented accordingly. Knowing that history does not settle any particular argument, but it does administer a useful dose of humility.

The pattern of Scripture is that God’s people have always sung in the musical language of their own time. Psalm 150 lists trumpet, lute, harp, tambourine, strings, pipe and cymbals, which was not a restrained ensemble. Nothing in the New Testament repeals it.

When worship styles conceal a deeper problem

In my experience a fight about music is often a fight about something else. Power in the church, a leader nobody trusts, a change nobody consented to, or grief over a congregation that no longer looks like it did. The music is the visible thing to argue about, and it takes the weight of everything unspoken.

So when a dispute over worship styles becomes disproportionate, it is worth asking gently what else is going on. Has this congregation lost people it is still mourning? Was a previous change handled badly? Does anyone feel their years of service have been dismissed? Answering those questions usually deflates the musical argument considerably.

This is pastoral work rather than aesthetic work, and it cannot be done by decree. A leader who understands the grief underneath the complaint will make far better progress than one who wins the argument, a point that touches on the signs of an unhealthy church.

Content, singability and the direction of worship

If I had to reduce the whole question of worship styles to a single test, it would be this: after the service, could an ordinary member of the congregation tell you something true about God that they had sung? That is a modest standard and a surprising number of services fail it.

Songs that consist mainly of first-person emotional statements struggle here. They tell us how the singer feels rather than who God is, and a congregation fed on them for years ends up with a rich vocabulary for their own experience and a thin one for God. The great hymns and the Psalter both work the other way round.

That is not an argument for any particular era of music. Plenty of contemporary songwriting is theologically substantial, and plenty of Victorian hymnody is sentimental rubbish. Judge by content rather than by date, and the argument about worship styles becomes a great deal more manageable. Ephesians 5:19 has both the singing and the addressing one another in view.

And keep the whole subject in proportion. Nobody has ever been converted by an arrangement, and nobody has ever been kept from Christ by one either. Worship styles matter, and they matter considerably less than whether the people singing love each other.

It is worth adding that no church resolves this permanently. Congregations change, musicians move on, and the settlement that worked for a decade will need revisiting. Treating worship styles as a question to be managed with patience rather than solved once is realistic, and it saves a great deal of disappointment when the subject comes round again, as it always does.

So, now what?

If you find yourself strongly attached to particular worship styles, ask what you would be willing to give up for the sake of someone twenty years older or younger than you. That question tends to sort motives quickly, and I ask it of myself as often as I ask it of anyone else.

If you lead, remember that your congregation is not a demographic. It is people. Paul was willing to give up meat forever rather than wound a brother, and he was not talking about anything as emotionally loaded as the songs sung at a funeral.

And if your church is currently at war over this, consider that the enemy is delighted. A congregation arguing about arrangements is not evangelising anybody. What would it cost you to be the first person to concede?

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”

Philippians 2:3 (ESV)