There are some people, a small but often very vocal minority, who regard contemporary music in a worship setting as too uncultured, too raucous, too uncouth. I invite them to consider the words of a high-toned playwright:
‘What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.” Edward Albee
Thanks, David, for sharing this!
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.” ~ John Cage
Yesterday, after a contemporary music service, a friend said “you know, we HAVE to do this. There are too many other places people can go, if we don’t.” She’s a member of our UU congregation, but also frequents a Unity congregation as well as a Science of Mind Center for Spiritual Living.
Last week, Diana Butler Bass published yet another round of figures on the decline of organized religion in the US, entitled “The End of Church“. Her conclusion:
Americans are searching for churches — and temples, synagogues, and mosques — that are not caught up in political intrigue, rigid rules and prohibitions, institutional maintenance, unresponsive authorities, and inflexible dogma but instead offer pathways of life-giving spiritual experience, connection, meaning, vocation, and doing justice in the world. Americans are not rejecting faith — they are, however, rejecting self-serving religious institutions.
I’m honing in on “rigid rules and prohibitions [and] institutional maintenance”. What better way to describe a dogged insistence on traditional worship? Does our weekly worship practice really offer a pathway of life-giving spiritual experience? Or does it focus entirely on the comfort of current members, while avoiding the challenge of change (which might bring in new faces and ideas)?
In response to Butler Bass, David Owen-O’Quill observes
I would be wary of any leadership argument that suggests we can change things by demanding that we stay right where we are on our collective comfortable asses. This is like the tried and true argument about church growth happening when the younger generation returns because they have kids. The brilliance of the argument is in its action plan – just sit and wait, no change necessary. …
Will the church continue to put forth its resources and work to slow the decline of its current institutional incarnation. Or will we reorient our mission to connect with the vast majority of Americans and be a part of this era’s “new Great Awakening.”
That’s what all my posts are about — reevaluating our traditional practices to “connect with the vast majority of Americans”, which means almost all of them when you count non-UUs. The music is a very important part, but it’s not the only part. I think this song embodies the right spirit: music you can’t get out of your head and a call to action: “Why don’t you break my heart ’til it moves my hands and feet?”
This song by the Wailin’ Jennys is stuck in my head today.
I have transcribed two voices and the viola, but that third harmony just doesn’t want to come. I don’t mind listening to it over and over, though.
That’s one of the things I love about my job — when I get songs stuck in my head now, they’re uplifting and spiritually deepening.
Here’s what a lot of people hate about “contemporary worship”:
Wasn’t that awful? Wait, what was awful? The fact that there’s a commonly used style, which can be made fun of? That’s true of any religious service — it’s called “liturgy”. What’s awful is to think about sitting through 90 minutes of something like that without any more content than that.
The video reminds me of a comedy routine I heard a long time ago (and can’t remember any other details about), where a couple are arguing by describing the type of comment they would hurl at each other, rather than saying the actual words. Along the lines of
She: “Acid comment about time he’s spent watching sports.”
He: “Avoid responding by bringing up recent shoe shopping.”
She: “Angry rebuttal!”
He: “Ill-considered insult!”
It’s funny to hear them speak analytically about their argument, but it wouldn’t be funny if they were really saying those ugly things to each other. If you put a meaningful message into that video’s worship template, one that touches you or encourages you or heals you, would you have the same reaction? What if those songs were your favorites from “Singing the Journey”? Or if the sermon lifted a cloud from your heart. Is it still funny? No, it’s a worship service, then.
The moral of the story, I guess, is for us worship musicians to hold in our minds that it’s the content that’s important; the container is much less so. When we choose music for worship, it should have a lot more depth than just “this is the song that everyone knows”.
This is not necessarily the best way to accomplish the task. Give her a B3 and a couple of Leslies, dude!
(Cartoon by Christian Musician and parodist Bim Ingersoll.)
Some interesting quotes I ran across recently:
Our worship service is designed to help people experience greater wholeness and integration in their lives, to take down some of those barriers between the sacred and the profane that divide our lives and diminish our energies.
One Sunday, a woman visiting with her nine-year-old son told me they’d definitely be returning. They would come back for several reasons, she said, but most particularly she was struck by her son’s excitement over our energized music. He recognized a tune we were singing as something he had heard on the radio and exclaimed, “Mom, they’re singing a real song!” (p. 19)
(from Ken Beldon, “Devotion” in The Growing Church: Keys to Congregational Vitality, Thom Belote, ed. (Boston: Skinner House, 2010)
This gets at the essence of “contemporary style” worship: there’s no secret language or mysterious rituals standing between the worshiper and the direct experience of group worship. John Wycliffe and Martin Luther were thinking the same thing when they translated the Bible into their native languages. Why shouldn’t that process continue?
And in a sermon last year, Rev. John Buehrens poked some fun at “typical Unitarian Universalists”, claiming that they think “Since I’m one of the wisest and most discerning people I know, this church must have been just about perfect when I found it. Therefore, it shouldn’t change, or that would reflect poorly on my judgment.”
So, there’s an argument for and an argument against moving into the 21st century with our worship. You are invited to cheer them on, or to knock down the straw man, in the comments.
When I named this blog, I made a mistake: “loud” is not the defining characteristic of contemporary worship or contemporary worship music.
Granted, it was louder when we started doing this, by virtue of having a drum kit on stage. You must have drums and bass for the music to work. Drums have a certain minimum volume, so that sets the volume level for everything else.
To get that under control, we hunted around found a reasonably-priced used Roland electronic drum kit. The drummer loves playing it, the sound guy loves mixing around it, and those with sensitive hearing or who just don’t like loud sounds have one less thing to worry about.
But — surprise! — it turns out that our cherished 7-foot Steinway is as loud as the drums used to be, even with the lid down. So, we have a new instrument that sets the minimum volume level. Most players can dial it back, but there are some who just have to squeeze all the roar out of it. For those, I’m investigating jamming a wedge into the soft-pedal.
Anyway, I should have called this blog “Liberal Religion Gets Modern”, or “Liberal Religion Gets Happy”, or used some other adjective to describe what we do, but they seemed to imply that all other UUs are troglodytes or grouches, which is not what I think, so it’ll have to stay “loud”. But take that as metaphorical. We’re no louder than the Steinway, which is to say no louder than the choir.
After three years of contemporary worship at a third service on 12:30 Sundays, we are “going primetime”, that is, folding the contemporary services into the two morning services. Current plan is to see how it works with two contemporary and two traditional services a month. (Note that our “traditional” services are already quite eclectic musically, but with a typically UU-structured order of worship.)
Our Senior Minister clearly explains the rationale behind this in her blog:
iMinister
Our worship staff (with assorted spouses and friends) went to some local mega-churches to scope out what they did and how it worked. The ministers and I have spent a lot of time and attention to find what works best for UUs — for the flow and balance of worship — in the mega-church services and in our own, and have settled on a much-simplified contemporary order of service that can also be used in our traditional services.
Just to re-emphasize an important point: contemporary worship is not just sticking some Jesus-rock songs into your usual liturgy. It entails approaching people’s needs and comfort zones in new ways. The whole “look and feel” of your worship changes, not just the music!
The really important thing here is that the ministers understand what contemporary worship is all about, why it’s vital to UUism, and are totally on board with making changes in that direction. We as musicians — even the music ministers among us — don’t usually have the authority or influence to make this kind of change happen alone. But we can educate our colleagues in the pulpit*, assist them or guide them, and learn along with them. It’s been an amazing journey for us, so far!
* One early step is to get rid of the pulpit, if possible. Contemporary preachers have a little table or music stand for their notes, and tend to sit on stools or move around the stage. That might be difficult in a place like Arlington Street Church, but surely not impossible to work around.
One of the thorniest barriers to moving to a contemporary style, I think, is that there are beloved hymns that are going to be sorely missed by long-time members. If you’re moving from a traditional service style to a more contemporary one, this will eventually come up. It may not be a problem to include one in your service, if you have a keyboard player who reads well enough to go by the hymnal.
But if you don’t have one … what do you do when you have to include “Doxology” or it’ll be the End of the World as We Know It? Some guitarists will start to sweat at this point.
A couple of years back, our choir director/pianist got sick, and I got a frantic call from the minister at 3:oo on Saturday afternoon: “Can you play for the traditional services tomorrow?” Of course I said yes, and then I joined in the panic as I looked at the order of service.
But, I was able to get “Doxology”, “Spirit of Life” and “I Walk the Unfrequented Road” into decent shape by the next morning. Since then, I’ve had other occasions to play these and similar hymns and have found that they actually work well on guitar, if they’re arranged properly.
Writing up my method for doing this has been on my to-do list for several months now, but my indolence has been rewarded by the appearance of an instructional video from Gibson Guitars, which covers much the same ground. So, I commend it to you.
There are some differences in method we will have to take into account. First, we can’t “fix” the key to be guitar-friendly. Hymns are pitched so everyone in the congregation can sing them, which means the melodies lie more or less in the range of middle C to e at the top of the treble clef. You may be able to move from the key of F (one flat) to E (four sharps, a royal hassle for pianists but the guitar’s natural key) without anyone noticing much, but look carefully at the vocal range and don’t try to move outside the C-to-e range, or be prepared for pain.
That said, if you’re stuck with uncomfortably high notes (Doxology, for example), be prepared to shift positions, say from playing D at the second fret to the barre form on the tenth fret. One thing that I have found indispensable is to lay out the melody using different chord inversions to get the correct note on the top. Maybe this is so obvious it didn’t bear mention, but it’s what I finally settled on after a bit of trial and error. In a nutshell, if you can play the E, C and A barre chords in any position, you can get the root, third or fifth tone, respectively, on the top string. The other notes of the scale are easy to reach from there. Similarly, look for the Em and Am forms that put you in the right position on the fretboard. Though the open Cm chord isn’t really usable, the four-note Dm (identical to a first-fret Bmaj7) will usually fill in nicely between the Am and Em forms.
And don’t be afraid to fill in single-note runs between chords in the melody, even if you’re playing solo. Piano arrangements do it, so why can’t we guitarists? You might even try just playing the melody as a single-note line, then adding in chords until it sounds full enough.
Hymns arranged this way for guitar are surprisingly effective, especially when accompanying congregational singing. And sometimes (I’m thinking of our arena-rock arrangement of “Wake Now My Senses”) just playing a song the first time on guitar will conjure up a stylistic setting that will keep the melody (so everyone can sing it) while giving it a fresh sound.
Liberal Religion Gets Loud 