I knew someone would one day respond to this post, and behold, Kevin did. Ergo, I just had to respond. So here we go with blockquotes within blockquotes. I’ve also taken the liberty of cleaning up some of the writing.

I was wholeheartedly nodding along to your arguments until I reached the 4th paragraph. My responses to excerpts:

…get to a point where we don’t sound like we stepped out of a time portal and were plunked down in the middle of the country.

I don’t particularly want to sound like that, but there’s nothing really wrong with being that way either.

Agreed, that there is nothing wrong with sounding like that. But I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. I’m merely arguing expediency. Do we want to reach out to out culture? Yes. Do we want to reach out to our youth? Yes. Then we need to have at least some bases to touch with them, and one of those bases is stylings: that is to say that the music of the 1700s is largely no longer relevant to them. Why sing only them then? (Note the emphasis; I’ll get to that later.)

The music of the 1952 Psalter Hymnal — face it — isn’t relevant to today’s music.

Yes, but why would we care if our worship songs were relevant to music? Any music? We want our worship songs to be releveant to our Lord, and our relationship to him. Ultimately, tune matters little. Rather it is words, motives, and feeling that do.

You and I will continue to disagree there. Tune matters a great deal, because we are not dealing with robots here, we’re dealing with real live human beings, real human beings that can distinguish a good tune from a bad one. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the songs we sing to be considered excellent songs, whether that be the sentements expressed or the tune sung, but you have to realize that what was an excellent song 100 years ago can be somewhat tired-sounding today.

And irrelevant music is the last thing you want the youth of your church bored with…

Why? These hymns are not to entertain us. These hymns are to praise God. It’s all about him, not at all about us. If people … get “bored” by the songs, they need to refocus.

Worship is God-focused, yes, but it is also man-made. You simple can’t argue that you can sing the same G-note in a steady rhythm for five minutes and as long as the words are fine, it’s all peachy. Again, it’s not wrong to want to sing a song that is enjoyable, because though worship is God-focused, it is man-affective as well as man-made. Perhaps “bored” was the wrong wording, though.

…even I hate some of those old hymns. I can appreciate what they are, but that doesn’t mean that I actually enjoy singing them.

I know, man. Some of the tunes sound like funeral songs. And I am not against incorporating some newer songs with better music into our worship services. What I am against is incorporating newer songs into our services only by virtue of the fact that they are newer. Who cares when they were written?

I’ve sort of already explained why we care when they were written. But you know me better than to think that I want to replace all the old songs with new ones: what I want is to replace some of the songs that most people agree are passe with good songs written in a more contemporary context.

You see, worship doesn’t just happen in a vacuum like you seem to think; it happens in the context of culture, and the culture of hymns is something we just don’t have anymore. As soon as you rip worship out of the context of culture, on some level we really start to lose some understanding of it. Let’s not forget our history of hymns, no way, but let’s also not forget that there are plenty of great songs floating around that are not only God-glorifying, but also fit the stylisms of our modern culture.

An example: most of the hymns are written in verse form, with a constant rhyme and rhythm. Some have choruses, but not in the same way we do them today. Our modern V/C/V/C/B/C form has become dominant, and it’s what most people understand when you say the word “song”, whereas that wasn’t really true before Blues and The Beatles came around.

There is an importance to changing what we do with our surroundings — not our content, but our styles, guardedly — because I want church to be just as much a vibrant part of my life as anything else, not like stepping into some shift in time. Certainly you can understand why it is that people just do not understand our brand of Reformed Church unless they’ve grown up in them?

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