A Lutheran pastor on church music

Couldn’t resist sharing with you more of the Revd Larry Peters’s thoughts, this time on music in LCMS worship.

In his Pastoral Meanderings (see Blogroll) Pastor Peters has several posts on the role of music in worship.  His reflections are perfect antidotes to the praise-band trend we so often read about these days.

First, if your congregation would like to own a real organ but has little space and even less money, Pastor Peters suggests the Moller Artiste model from the late 1970s.  In ‘On the Way Home’, he explains:

To those who insist that real pipes are a luxury in churches today, I say take a gander at a good used Moller Artiste or one of its many derivations.  For a few thousand dollars they can be had.  A few thousand more in transportation and installation, and you have a reliable instrument that keeps it tuning and will serve well the congregation for many, many years to come.  Check out eBay or the Organ Trader or the ads in TAO magazine or the Diapason or you can look at the Organ Relocation Service.  Sometimes a phone call to organ service folks or regional organ builders will help you track down one of these little gems.

Less expensive than an electronic and yet very serviceable for most organ literature, you hear the sound of real music being made and not digitally sampled music being mimicked.  It is not that I am totally against electronic organs but that is not the only option open to most, make that all congregations … What we will end up with is a very serviceable instrument that will support the room, lead congregational song, and equip the chapel to serve its function for smaller services, weddings, and funerals (50-60 in attendance). 

His ‘A Different Approach to the Role of Music in the Service’ discusses why his church selects certain hymns and styles of music:

We pick music (hymns, song, and service music) that express the mood of the service (joyful, somber, encouraging, reflective, etc.) and in this way music is primarily evocative.  And then there is the understanding of music as mood maker where the role of music is to bring together the assembly and bring them to one place.  Music is used to make the mood (often here the songs are both performed and sung repeatedly and the singing goes on continuously over some period of time as opposed to hymns or songs that are sung one at a time and in alternation with other parts of the service … )

Music is not merely some sounds around the text but, with the text, is woven in such way that text and tune become one fabric, one message.  The primary purpose of music is to communicate THE message of Jesus Christ.  If you page through Lutheran Service Book or Lutheran Worship or The Lutheran Hymnal, it is easy to see what I mean.  There are hymns there that tell a story over many stanzas, both summarizing and saying in the actual words of Scripture the message of the Gospel (and not only Gospel but also Law).  They are theological as well as doxological — in fact we might say that in order to be doxological they must be theological, conveying and confessing the truth of God’s own self-disclosure and revelation …

George Weigel, noted Roman Catholic theological and social commentator, has noticed this as well.  Read what he has written:  I love hymns. I love singing them and I love listening to them …

For classic Lutheran theology, hymns are a theological “source:” not up there with Scripture, of course, but ranking not-so-far below Luther’s “Small Catechism.” Hymns, in this tradition, are not liturgical filler. Hymns are distinct forms of confessing the Church’s faith. Old school Lutherans take their hymns very seriously.

Most Catholics don’t. Instead, we settle for hymns musically indistinguishable from “Les Mis” and hymns of saccharine textual sentimentality. Moreover, some hymn texts in today’s Catholic “worship resources” are, to put it bluntly, heretical …

 He gets what some Lutherans have forgotten or chosen to ignore. What we sing is either what we believe, teach and confess or it is simply what we think or feel.  While there is nothing wrong with feelings and passion in worship, what we sing is not an aesthetic experience, not an artistic experience, not a musical experience, but the place where the Word speaks and music assists the speaking of that Word. 

Yes, and that is what so many of us grew up with and what we miss today.  A number of people have correctly noted that the praise band thing really relates to how we feel, not how best we can give praise and glory to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  When we reads the Old Testament, particularly the Psalms, we grasp the importance of worship — prayer, praise and song which glorify God. God’s Chosen worshipped Him with reverence and thanksgiving.  (I’m omitting the times when they made imperfect sacrifices and flawed acts of worship.)  Is that because they had a closer relationship to Him than we do?  How do we change that?  How do we get to the heart of the matter that He is sovereign over us, fallen men in a fallen world? 

Those of us of a certain age remember a Friday night television programme in the US called In Concert, which featured the top bands from the early 1970s in 15-minute sets. That, to me, is what some present-day services resemble: son-et-lumière, loud music and an atmosphere designed to appeal to our earthly senses.  Do we imagine that God is pleased with this?  Many would say yes, but do we say that to justify ourselves?  If you’re shaking your head along to music in the pew or in a comfy theatre-style chair, is that giving praise to the Almighty?  Let’s think that one through.

My final feature of Pastor Peters’s is on liturgical language, another personal favourite (or is that bugbear?) of mine.  In ‘The Language that Soars’, he writes:

The language of the liturgy is not primarily to communicate clearly but to elevate this communication to the highest level of poetry, to the sublime and elegant …

Sadly, there is too little language that moves us upward and too much that is eminently forgettable when it comes to the worship of the Lord’s House.  I am not speaking of something contrived (unless we deliberately seek to confuse and confound) but the ability to turn a phrase into a moment of grandeur that stays with you.  We all recall the phrasing of the classic collects (O God from whom all good things come…, for example).  This noble and elegant prose seems almost poetic in the way the phrases lift our attention and move us — not in competition with what they say but saying what is said with the best of our gifts …

I lament the loss of language’s gift with respect to Bible translations, much of contemporary hymnody and church song, nearly all of the home grown liturgy, and the prayers of the Church.  It is pedestrian language — boring to the speaker and to the hearer.  Devoid of the elegance deserved by the words that speak of the Word made flesh, we are left with a flat tongue that says what it means but empty and mundane in the way it says it.

When I pray the Te Deum from TLH I am reminded of the power of language and of the great loss when we fail to use its gift well in service to the Lord and His House.  With each succeeding hymnal we lose more and more of the power of this language.

Just so.   

Church services really need to return to the notion of being centred around God not man.  We have been bombarded for decades now about the so-called importance of changing to meet the culture.  No!  Worship is our cherished opportunity to meet God in a sublime way.  So many people I talk to miss the mysterium tremendum of the traditional church service.  Whilst I can appreciate that not everyone reading this will have grown up in a strictly traditional or liturgical environment, those of us who have would do well to consider the legacy which we are so rapidly losing to popular culture.  Don’t forget, in time, that, too, will change — and, once again, we’ll need a whole new hymnal and liturgy to ‘meet’ it on its even more miserable terms.