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  1. GW Bill Warren
    23 January 2011 @ 6:46 am

    This piece reresents some very good work. Thank you. I will be distributing this issue in the congregations I serve.
    I am old enough that my music training in grade school, junior high school, high school, and college were all centered on sacred literature. At 40 I began regular voice lessons that covered ten years.
    Each person has a venue of popular music that we become conscious of at eleven or twelve years old and extends to about twenty years old. In my case the period began about 1951 and extended through the Korean War emphasis on spiritual pop music, to rythym and blues, tight vocal groups,to Fats Domino, Bill Haley and the Comets, and later Elvis Presley. My music tastes were set long before the beetles came on the scene, it ended with the Kingston Trio and Limelighters reintroduction of traditional folk.
    I can’t listen to a radio station that plays pop hard rock with scriptural text very long because it offends my sense of the sacred.
    The schools no longer train our church musicians in traditional sacred music, unless we attend a specialized Christian school or post high school with a sacred music emphasis, executing and listening to traditional sacred music is foreign to most ears.
    Yet, look how people respond to the flash productions of the Halleluia Chorus from Hendel’s great interpretation of the biblical references to the Messiah.
    Keep up the great work,
    Blessings
    Pastor Bill

    • rcottrill
      23 January 2011 @ 8:37 am

      Thanks for your input, Bill. And let me add a few comments of my own.

      So much of modern pop music is so vulgar and immoral that is scares me. Scares me because I know many, many young people are listening to it for hours each day. It is sad, as well, since there is other secular music that is wholesome and enriching, but it is totally beyond the awareness of many youth. I taught a class on philosophy of music one time, and had a student comment, “If it ain’t got drums and guitars, I ain’t interested!” Oh my! What he’s missing!

      And this narrow focus has had a detrimental effect on the music used in some churches. There is an attempt to christianize the popular genre of the day with religious lyrics–often vague, and sometimes unbiblical–and make it a part of the Sunday services. Am I saying that all contemporary Christian music is like that? No, of course not. But preaching appointments have taken me to many different places, and I know what I hear. Many of the principles discussed in my article, Sacred Music in the Old Testament, are being ignored.

      Is it possible that a host of God’s people–and many local churches–aren’t even aware of what the word “sacred” means? I think so. The word means separate, or set apart. Separated from what is worldly, or sinful, and characterized by what is righteous, and edifying. Set apart from common use, and reserved for the service and glory of God. What would the consistent application of that concept do to what regularly happens in the house of God?

      We may tickle the ears of the carnal, but we don’t win points with God for making the music of our churches as much like the pop music of the world as possible. My father led a great quartet, back in the 1940’s. They introduced their weekly radio program with a little-known song of Fanny Crosby’s. It begins, “Here from the world we turn, Jesus to seek.” That’s how believers should feel on entering the house of God.