I have a question and I’m confused

[The Liturgist]

Given that mix, I'd be looking for a Missouri Synod Lutheran church. (Despite the name, the Synod has churches all over the US.) There are some that are even dipping their toes in contemporary worship music.

Controversially. I am hoping the LCMS and LCC will formally ban such contemporary worship music, and I believe this sentiment is shared by at least a few members of the actual denomination.

 

[PloverWing]

Controversially. I am hoping the LCMS and LCC will formally ban such contemporary worship music, and I believe this sentiment is shared by at least a few members of the actual denomination.

While I share your sentiments about music (my idea of "new music" is music written after 1800 ), it seems to me that a denominational ban would have to have a theological reason behind it, and I can't see a theological justification for banning music written in a particular style or written after a certain year. How would a denominational ban like this work?

 

[The Liturgist]

While I share your sentiments about music (my idea of "new music" is music written after 1800 ), it seems to me that a denominational ban would have to have a theological reason behind it, and I can't see a theological justification for banning music written in a particular style or written after a certain year. How would a denominational ban like this work?

I think a ban on praise and worship can be theologically justified, and if you want to see theological justification for why it ought to be banned, the most compelling rationale was actually provided by the excellent encyclical on Church Music that prioritized Gregorian Chant and early polyphony of Palestrina, Byrd et cetera by Pope St. Pius X, who I am comfortable venerating despite being Orthodox, variously known as Tra Le Sollecitudini or as inter pastoralis officii sollicitudines , published in 1903, which really applies even more to Praise and Worship music and the use of “Christian Rock” music in Church than it does to some of the overly bombastic 19th century settings of the mass which St. Pius X correctly objected to.

You can find this encyclical here: Tra Le Sollecitudini Instruction on Sacred Music

Likewise, the commentary of the Orthodox on the subject is compelling.

Of course, I reckon that the writings of Martin Luther on Church Music as well as his popularization of the Chorale as the Lutheran hymn format par excellence, and the other types of music that he encouraged, such as the continued use of the various settings of the Latin Mass and the various motets and cantatas, which were later greatly enriched by Lutheran composers such as Bach and Buxtehude, ought to be sufficient within Lutheranism to define a normative style for Lutheran music.

But since it is apparently necessary to go beyond what Luther wrote on the subject, the writings of recent Orthodox theologians who have succesfully kept such music out of most Orthodox jurisdicitions, and in the case of the Coptic Orthodox church, successfully ejected it following an actual conspiracy by some charismatic churches to take over Coptic parishes in extrao-diocesan areas, which lacked rigorous oversight since no one other than the Pope of Alexandria had any authority over them, and thus as Pope Shenouda became increasingly elderly, this effort began in earnest in the 2000s, but was stopped in its tracks by Pope Tawadros II, who solved the problem by creating dioceses in the former extra-diocesan areas and appointing the most fiercely Orthodox bishops to deal with the problems therein, for example, His Grace Bishop Abanoub who was appointed to the DIocese of Muqattam in Egypt, which along with St. Mark’s in Washington, D.C. was among the parishes that was most under Charismatic influence.

This website, now archived, which was posted concurrently with the initative of Pope Tawadros II, contains a treasure trove of articles written with Coptic Orthodoxy in mind, but which I regard as, in principle, largely applicable to Lutheran Orthodoxy, or at least, conceptually similar so that the ideas in them could be adapted for Lutheran Orthodoxy (the Lutherans are not as severe as the Copts in asceticism, so an adjustment in that direction can be intellectually performed): Return to Orthodoxy - A Pan-Oriental Orthodox Effort

So between the writings of the Copts, and other Orthodox, and the writings of Pope St. Pius X, and the writings of Martin Luther himself, as well as the exemplary music of Lutheran churches during the 17th century and early 18th century, an era in which Lutheran Orthodoxy was predominant among the Lutheran churches of Europe before the unwelcome advent of Pietism and Rationalism in the mid 18th century, if the leaders of the LCMS and LCC decide to take aim at praise and worship music, and I sincerely pray that they will, they have all the theological justification they would need. It would be trivial to create a Lutheran theological synthesis of the aforementioned resources and to articulate it in that manner.

Likewise one could do the same thing in the case of Methodism and Anglicanism.

I would note that fortunately Anglo-Catholics at least have for the most part shunned praise and worship music, although there are a few contemporary settings in Anglican music that I find unpleasant, although they are traditional, but they suffer from being ugly, for example, the very popular setting of the Alleluia sung between the Epistle and Gospel in both the Episcopal Church and in Anglo Catholic churches like All Saints Margaret Street and St. Bartholomew the Great (fortunately the ultra-Anglo Catholic St. Magnus the Martyr, which has the most beautiful liturgy of any parish church in London, a liturgy surpassed in quality only by what one finds at the Royal Peculiars of Westminster Abbey and the Temple Church, won’t touch it).

 

[Neogaia777]

@The Liturgist @PloverWing

"Rejoice with those who rejoice"

Again, it's not all about you, and your preferences, etc.

I would rejoice with any of you no matter what music was playing, etc.

Because it's not all about me, etc.

But you might be way too sophisticated or stoic for that kind of thing, etc.

I guess some people just want to be and stay divided.

Even proposing or resorting to "bans" to do so, etc.

God Bless.

 

[Neogaia777]

@The Liturgist @PloverWing

But, I know, I know, you just want to sit in a church and be holy, so I guess I understand.

God Bless.

 

[The Liturgist]

@The Liturgist @PloverWing

But, I know, I know, you just want to sit in a church and be holy, so I guess I understand.

God Bless.

Firstly, according to St. Silouan the Athonite, if anyone thinks he is holy, this is an extremely dangerous delusion, on a par with thinking we are beyond hope of God’s salvation. Rather I regard myself as the worst of sinners, and put all my hope on the mercy of God.

Secondly, aesthetic taste and preferences when it comes to the style of music literally has nothing to do with it. If you had read the articles I had linked to, you would understand the very strong theological rationale for the rejection of praise and worship music and Christian Rock music, specifically in terms of how it is emotionally manipulative, and derived from secular forms of music which are intended to appeal to the sinful passions.

I myself find it impossible to concentrate on prayer when such music is praying. I evaluate church music based on how easy it is to pray to. During my year in the Episcopal Church, which @PloverWing is familiar with, what he might not know is that while my frined Fr. Dean was one of the last conservatives in the Diocese of Los Angeles, his director of music was, in my opinion, heterodox, if not outright heretical, in that he believed that the Eucharist was, in his words “ritual magic,” which is an idea that I find shockingly offensive (the idea that a sacrament ordained by Christ our True God could be called magic, and thus associated with sorcery, the tricks and demonic practices of deviants throughout the ages), and he was also very much an enthusiast of praise and worship music, and tried to blend it with more traditional music from the 1980 Hymnal (a very good hymnal, by the way), usually with disastrous results, so because of this I made a point of always attending the 8 AM said service.

For I can pray in silence, such as at a Roman Catholic low mass, or at a said service in the Anglican tradition, or when prayerful traditional music is used, but I cannot pray when people are jamming on an electric guitar and the drums et cetera.

Indeed further to the point @Neogaia777 that this is not an issue of aesthetics - there are several genres of music that I personally enjoy that I could not pray to. For example, I love jazz music, especially swing music of the 1930s and 40s, of the sort performed by Benny Goodman, Glenn MIller, Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, but there is no way I could pray to it (some can, and John Coltrane is venerated, perhaps justifiably, as a saint by some African Americans). Likewise I could not pray to much of the Romantic music of the 19th century, and some masses composed by Romantic composers are a problem for me. Even Schubert, whose first two masses and his Deutsche Messe are very easy for me to pray to, I think got a bit carried away with masses 3 through 6, although I could still tolerate these. Likewise, I very much enjoy Barbershop Quartet and Ragtime music, and I also could not pray to that. I enjoy the musical scores of several Hollywood films, such as Lawrence of Arabia, Khartoum, and the original Star Wars and Star Trek films, but I could not pray to those. For that matter I am an enthusiastic collector of military music, particularly military music of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and needless to say, it would be very hard to pray to that. Although I would say with all of the above I can still continue the Jesus Prayer.

However, with pop music, country music and some forms of electronic dance music, and also praise and worship music and Christian Rock, I personally find this music is so stimulating of the passions that even the Jesus Prayer, which is the essential prayer for those who desire to pray without ceasing, (the prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me, a Sinner, or a permutation thereof, which can be as simple as “Lord have mercy”), this can interfere with the Jesus Prayer, and this is why I believe it should be avoided, and not used in the liturgy of any church.

 

[CLEEB]

I’m a Bible believing Christian. I would like to attend an actual church but I’m very confused on which one to attend since there are so many different denominations. There are a few different denominations in my area. What do I do? Can anyone offer me any advice? Thank you.

Worship, pray, study and meditate at home. Look to GOD as your teacher through Jesus. John 6:44-45
The anointing of GODS spirit is all you need and don’t need a man to teach you. 1 John 2:27. All these different denominations are all wrong, that’s why they are different, they’re divided.

 

[BobRyan]

Interesting detail...

ASK AI this in any browser:

"what are the top 3 Christian denominations holding to sola scriptura testing of all doctrine and having a single set of administrators with one single set of official doctrines and having no autonomous subgroups included in the total membership"

<<I am excluding autonomous subgroups because by definition , autonomy does not preserve unity in doctrine so does not represent a single set of church teaching as being held by all the group>>

 

[CLEEB]

C

Interesting detail...

ASK AI this in any browser:

"what are the top 3 Christian denominations holding to sola scriptura testing of all doctrine and having a single set of administrators with one single set of official doctrines and having no autonomous subgroups included in the total membership"

<<I am excluding autonomous subgroups because by definition , autonomy does not preserve unity in doctrine so does not represent a single set of church teaching as being held by all the gro

 

[CLEEB]

Confusion

 

[BobRyan]

CLEEB said:

Confusion

you appear to be saying their is confusion in the world. But the question was about selecting a single denomination with the criteria listed where they actually are one single denomination and and not a federation of disparate groups.

 

[CLEEB]

A

you appear to be in a state of confusion in that post. Did you want to be specific about how you came to that point.?

the churches you listed disagree on many things. This person is asking for advice but you can’t tell him which church is the real outgrowth of the Pentecost church. There is only one church composed of people that all know and speak the same things, unified in doctrine. I don’t see that in this world. What I see is confusion.

 

[The Liturgist]

Worship, pray, study and meditate at home. Look to GOD as your teacher through Jesus. John 6:44-45
The anointing of GODS spirit is all you need and don’t need a man to teach you. 1 John 2:27. All these different denominations are all wrong, that’s why they are different, they’re divided.

That’s not what the Bible says. See 1 Corinthians, entire.

 

[The Liturgist]

Interesting detail...

ASK AI this in any browser:

"what are the top 3 Christian denominations holding to sola scriptura testing of all doctrine and having a single set of administrators with one single set of official doctrines and having no autonomous subgroups included in the total membership"

<<I am excluding autonomous subgroups because by definition , autonomy does not preserve unity in doctrine so does not represent a single set of church teaching as being held by all the group>>

 

[The Liturgist]

Interesting detail...

ASK AI this in any browser:

"what are the top 3 Christian denominations holding to sola scriptura testing of all doctrine and having a single set of administrators with one single set of official doctrines and having no autonomous subgroups included in the total membership"

<<I am excluding autonomous subgroups because by definition , autonomy does not preserve unity in doctrine so does not represent a single set of church teaching as being held by all the group>>

Which AI?

Also, as I must remind you, AI is not an inherently reliable source - remember when Grok declared, and I proved with screenshots, that Pope Gregory XVII, had canonized Ellen G. White?

I would note the Google AI that appears in web searches is particularly unreliable - frankly I wish they’d remove it, as its wrong about half the time. The problem is LLMs require immense compute resources; the better an answer, the longer they take (for this reason GPT 5.1 Thinking takes much longer than GPT 5 Instant, for example). Google’s search engines are too high volume to allow for the kind of processing power to equal even the now retired chatGPT 3.5, let alone Google’s actual professional grade Gemini, Grok 4, GPT 4o, o4 Reasoning, et cetera.

I would also note your question is ambiguous - it does not define a denomination, which can have multiple meanings. For example, there are two main groups of Seventh Day Adventists, the SDA General Conference and the SDA Reform Movement. Are these groups, in a state of schism, separate denominations? It would be absurd to call the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East separate denominations, and they don’t even have any doctrinal differences, merely different hierarchies.

Also, what is Sola Scriptura? Does a denomination that accepts as inspired prophecy extra-Biblical texts, such as the writings of Ellen G. White, Sola Scriptura in the same way that for example, the Calvinists are Sola Scriptura? And of course we have the fact that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer and John Wesley all placed some value on church tradition - in the case of Luther, Cranmer and Wesley, quite a lot of value, which is why Lutheran and Anglican churches frequently look the way Roman Catholic churches looked before the Novus Ordo Missae was introduced and the “wreckovations” of parishes as some call them happened in the 1970s (removal of altar rails and the installation of free-standing altars; some Lutheran and Anglican churches have these but many do not, instead retaining the traditional Western style altar rail and non-freestanding altar, which was traditionally used in most Western churches outside of some high altars in Rome, and also in all Armenian, East Syriac and West Syriac churches; the free-standing Holy Table being the norm in the Altars of Coptic Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox churches.

And a single set of Administrators? What is an Administrator? In many denominations, Administrators are defined as the secretaries who manage parishes, but lack ecclesiastical authority. In some cases, like the LCMS, you have a parish pastor, parish elders, and bishops, my friend @MarkRohfrietsch could explain it. In the Orthodox, Anglican, Catholic and Assyrian churches, and the Methodists churches, you have Bishops (Episkopos, meaning Overseer), Elders, referred to by the term Presbyters (also called Priests, an older Anglifization of the word Presbyter, confusingly used in the KJV to refer also to the Kohanim and Hierus referred to using distinct terms in the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek text), and Deacons, from the Greek word Diakonos, meaning service - the seven Deacons ordained in Acts, including St. Stephen the Illustrious Protomartyr, the first person to die preaching the Gospel of Christ, even before St. James the Great, who was the first Apostle to receive the Crown of Martyrdom (not to be confused with St. James the Just, who wrote the Epistle).

 

[BobRyan]

Which AI?

Also, as I must remind you, AI is not an inherently reliable source

Adventists did not write AI for google. I am not targeting an SDA source and my question does not say to avoid Lutherans.

- remember when Grok declared, and I proved with screenshots, that Pope Gregory XVII, had canonized Ellen G. White?

If you have a very short question as in my example, that does not mention any person or any denomination, as in my example, and you get that answer above, then feel free to share with the class.

In fact IF you actually had such a basic question you would have posted it so each reader could try it on their own computer to see if it is actually the case. How "instructive" that you posted no such question in your somewhat long post. hint for the readers.

Or are you simply equivocating between two scenarios that are not at all the same??

(this should be good....)

I would also note your question is ambiguous - it does not define a denomination

Indeed. I was not rigging the question. I just let AI respond to generics. And my post is specifically asking the reader to ask AI the question rather than claiming that I came up with some sort of rigged way to get a desired answer.

If you ignore enough details in my post you can spin it anyway you wish. I would always have said that much is true.

, which can have multiple meanings. For example, there are two main groups of Seventh Day Adventists, the SDA General Conference and the SDA Reform Movement.

Indeed. one is 24 million the other is ??? 40,000?
Apparently an easy hurdle to overcome for AI.

Also, what is Sola Scriptura?

Interesting that you don't know.

It means they test all their doctrine against the Bible alone.

Does a denomination that accepts as inspired prophecy

Both NT and OT churches did that according to "the Bible alone"

One or two people here admit to that obvious detail

extra-Biblical texts, such as the writings of Ellen G. White, Sola Scriptura in the same way that for example, the Calvinists are Sola Scriptura?

Anyone who took 4 minutes to read the 28 fundamental beliefs of Adventists where not a single doctrine uses a quote from Ellen White to prove the doctrine... would know the flaw in that

 

[CLEEB]

Modern Christianity is an all you can eat buffet, a smorgasbord , a gigantic confusing mess. People caught up in it can’t see it. People don’t ask questions or do any real research to discover that there is no church out there that is the outgrowth of the Pentecost church. They are all 501C3’s in competition for members and money. These churches are what GOD calls HIS people out of, they are the unclean thing.

 

[SabbathBlessings]

Its doctrine Jesus calls us out from


Mat 15:9 And in vain they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
Mark 7:7 And in vain they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
8 For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men


Rev 18: 3 For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, (bad doctrine) the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the [b]abundance of her luxury.”
4 And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. 5 For her sins [c]have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities

Sin is breaking God's laws 1John3:4 James2:11

God's church are those who stay faithful to Him and His commandments- God's version His Testimony Exo31:18 Deut4:13 Exo20:6 because there is no one greater than He instead of following traditions and doctrines of man.


Rev 14:12 Here is the patience of the saints (His true church); here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.
Rev12:17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman (His church), and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Sadly many have laid aside one of God's commandments that He asked us to Remember Exo20:8-11 in lieu of traditions of man, forgoing His blessings Isa59:2 and sanctification Eze20:12 and the sign He gives between Him and His people Eze20:20

 

[2404]

A lot of good feedback here.
We live in the country and are a good distance from church.
I believe it is important to fellowship somewhere but if on occasion it is not reasonable to get anywhere you can always stream a service or YouTube.
One minister I like, long way from us, is Chad Lamb.
It is a non denominational church but I believe it to be right on the Word.
God bless.

 

[CLEEB]

Its doctrine Jesus calls us out from


Mat 15:9 And in vain they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
Mark 7:7 And in vain they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
8 For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men


Rev 18: 3 For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, (bad doctrine) the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the [b]abundance of her luxury.”
4 And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. 5 For her sins [c]have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities

Sin is breaking God's laws 1John3:4 James2:11

God's church are those who stay faithful to Him and His commandments- God's version His Testimony Exo31:18 Deut4:13 Exo20:6 because there is no one greater than He instead of following traditions and doctrines of man.


Rev 14:12 Here is the patience of the saints (His true church); here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.
Rev12:17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman (His church), and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Sadly many have laid aside one of God's commandments that He asked us to Remember Exo20:8-11 in lieu of traditions of man, forgoing His blessings Isa59:2 and sanctification Eze20:12 and the sign He gives between Him and His people Eze20:20

Yes, all the false doctrine being taught by all the false churches.