Where do you stand on contemporary worship music vs hymns/psalms and why?
In my youth, I was a vigorous defender of contemporary worship music. I saw it as true worship and hymns as more or less a type of dead formalism.
Now I'm of the view that:
1. Worship, thanksgiving, praise and even lament are good and Scriptural. However, not at the expense of edification and testimony of God's work - namely the death and resurrection of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. I feel like in our age the educational purpose of song is greatly lacking. There are many verses in Scripture about making music to the Lord, but I think perhaps Paul best summarises it in Colossians:
"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God." - That is, an important function of song is to teach and admonish one another in faith, contrasted with, say, repeating
"God I love you", which in and of itself is good, but suffers from individualism and is not very useful for people to learn about Jesus.
2. Closely related to the above, I feel like many contemporary lyrics are trying hard to be vague and neutral in order to pass for secular music. A lot of lyrics merely allude to Jesus without actually spelling out His name or the specifics of His person and works. (Even just a
"Jesus died for you" would suffice!) I'm skeptic to vague lyrics as a tool for outreach. That is, I'm of the view that whatever means we use to fish with, eventually that becomes what we have to use to keep people in Church. viz. if a Church spends a lot of effort on social events to attract people, it typically ends up in a loop having to serve these same things to keep people interested. I think the same applies to music. It can easily fall into a kind of outward or artificial membership not formed by the Gospel and the renewal of the Holy Spirit.
3. I'm agnostic to the style of music. I don't think any one music genre is holier than another. To me this is a matter of adiaphora. Nonetheless, the older I get I do think there is something to be said for having music with a sense of reverence. Whatever form that takes, I think people can be their own judge of.
4. Somewhat on topic, I don't think secular music is appropriate in Church. What is often considered "clean", though it may not have profanity, is almost exclusively theologically challenging and inconsistent with the Gospel if you really consider the lyrics.
That's me. Not denying that I have a fairly strong stance on the subject, but I'm interested to hear yours. There may be things I haven't considered and I'm certainly not looking for any level of heated debate. What do you reckon?
