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?

Much like Calvin and Hobbes, I often find myself paralysed by being able to see all sides of every argument. Does that make me a unique individual? I don’t know, but it does annoy me sometimes — would it be so hard to be one of those people that tenaciously clings to an idea long after its expiration date?

But then again, those types of people are common enough in these circles. I tell you, there’s nothing more frustrating than discussing something with a person to whom it has never occured that they might be wrong.

If anything, for me, Relevant Magazine has been one of the least relevant webzines I’ve ever read. In all their haste to embrace pop culture under the guise of “relevance”, I’ve often wondered if they are actually advocating anything other than becoming more like the culture under a different name. So essentially becoming like the world, just with a splash of Christian.

On the other hand, this article was found on their website, an article I think would be a beneficial read for just about anyone who has ever attended a “worship” concert or large gathering of that sort.

This is what I get for trying to find the chords for songs to put in the songbook. Fie upon thee, internet.

Now, off to link Goldmine and Business Vision together on the server with no idea what to do or how to do it! Yippee!

Something that constantly amazes me is how much music stylings have changed in the last hundred years or so. I mean, most of the great operas in history were written withing a thirty year radius of the turn of the 19th century: now nobody writes opera, and hardly anyone listens to it (though I do). Suddenly, today most of the music created and listened to is pop music, a musical culture that has very little art in it; I’m sure a lot of people, on reflection, understand that Nirvana and The Clash represent a dumbing down of art on a scale unprecedented in music history.

That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t wonderfully artistic music going on today. There is. But it exists on the fringes of the music-buying public’s consciousness, farther from the centre of the groupmind than art music ever has been before.

Another interesting issue is the art of the church. I’m going to be the first to admit that the hymns of yesteryear aren’t terribly artistic (when compared to, say, the psalms), and neither are the songs of our more modern “worship movement”. But I don’t think that great art is the final purpose of worship music — at least, not for corporate worship. The Roman Catholic church wrote some great religious music, but it was for performance, not praise.

The thing is, there’s no reason not to change styles with the times. That’s not to say forget our hymnic heritage, but to at least 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. The music of the 1952 Psalter Hymnal — face it — isn’t relevant to today’s music. And irrelevant music is the last thing you want the youth of your church bored with; 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.

See, no one has a problem with Dalit Christians in India singing songs that sound utterly foreign to our ears; that is, after all, their culture, and who are we to change it? Hardly anyone, not even the esteemed and very wrong Dr Pipa, has a problem with African hand drums — as long as they’re in Africa, simple because the culture shock of Africans singing along to an organ deny what the gospel really is. The gospel is an adaptable thing, designed by God to stretch away from the children of Israel and their esoteric rituals, and to encompass the cultures and traditions of a thousand different lands.

And in a sense, the children of today are living in a different tradition than their parents. Why not treat their culture like any foreign culture?

I have a difficult time dealing with people’s expectations. I expect, for instance, that my life will hold some joy and some heartbreak, that I might not get married, that I might not have children, and that if I do have either of these, they will both bring with them good times and bad. But what I don’t expect is that my wife be a certain thing, or that my children be a certain way, or even that they make sense.

People that expect everything in life to make sense sometimes frustrate me. No one will ever be able to explain everything. In fact, the psychology of humanity will never be explained, as far as I can tell, and people will do stupid things that don’t make sense, or do perfectly wonderful things for no reason at all.

Frustration arrives with people that make up their own special rules and expect the rest of the world to follow along with them. I have some things in my life that I have as rules for myself that I don’t expect anyone else to follow: in fact, I don’t even expect my children to follow them, because they are simply not me.

Steve pointed out today how personally we take things. Why is that, I wonder? It’s like people have the slightest disagreement about something and suddenly become mortal enemies, unable even to talk to eachother without calling lightning down from heaven. I have this sometimes, too, but it’s something that bothers me about myself. I just don’t want to surround myself with enemies made over minor infractions.

I have nothing to write here. Drawing a blank. It’s raining outside. It’s a grey day. I only got 4 hours of sleep.

Now I have to rush home and get the camera cord. For some reason anything having to do with the camera is a bit of a touchy subject with el bosso.

Have you ever had a rough day? I bet you have. The kind of day where you feel like you’re the dirt under life’s fingernails, and that life is using a nail brush. Well, Mary knows how you feel. And if you’ve ever been to school, especially for law anything, you know what’s going on here.

Peter’s written a play. It’s cute, but it’s not going to win him any Tony awards. Oh, and it’s short, so it’s not going to win him any Going The Distance awards. And, FYI, it sounds a tad bitter, so it’s probably not going to win him a Pulitzer.

I bet you’ve always wondered why it’s easier to be a man. Well, it isn’t. We have to do this thing called “leadership”, and when we don’t, our wives and girlfriends and pet goldfish do it for us. And then we get into trouble, don’t we. But from a somewhat lopsided version of the facts, Laura explains why it is easier, after all. So, admittedly I will never have to push another human being out of my body. I still have to change the oil in the car. My, that was feeble.

Kevin likes to round up his weekend for us, but doesn’t think anyone reads it. Well we do read it. We’re just to jealous of his sterling existance to add comments. That, and we have other things to do. Like hair. And the Locomotion.

Apparently, Jamie lives in the hood and has ghetto experiences. I could tell you all about the sordid tale, but you could just read it here and save me the trouble

If you’ve never understood single-issue people and their respective electoral candidates, oh boy, does Josh have something for you. And doe he ever. Woah. Read that and weep, heartlands of America.

Erik loves Halo 2. But he loves Half-Life 2 a whole lot more. This makes his a geek. But don’t worry, we’re all geeks here, except those of us who aren’t, which is everyone but me.

If you like being random, and Caedmon’s Call, you could go see what beautiful mess Mic has gotten herself into. Although to be honest, it’s less of a mess than normal. It’s sort of a beautiful half-straightened room. Like my room. Okay, my room’s a mess. And there’s nothing beautiful about it. Except me. Right? (Chorus from audience: “YES!”)

And that’s it for today, forks. This is where the blogtrain stops, and so do you, unless you keep reading and wonder why I’ve posted so much today. I think I’m obsessive compulsive.

The New Yorker recently ran an article about the iterations that a particular phrase may go through in the sphere of the public mind. Here’s a quote that voices a sentiment I quite agree with:

When I read the original reviews of “Frozen,” I noticed that time and again critics would use, without attribution, some version of the sentence “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” That’s my phrase, of course. I wrote it. Lavery borrowed it from me, and now the critics were borrowing it from her. The plagiarist was being plagiarized. In this case, there is no “art” defense: nothing new was being done with that line. And this was not “news.” Yet do I really own “sins and symptoms”? There is a quote by Gandhi, it turns out, using the same two words, and I’m sure that if I were to plow through the body of English literature I would find the path littered with crimes of evil and crimes of illness. The central fact about the “Phantom” case is that Ray Repp, if he was borrowing from Andrew Lloyd Webber, certainly didn’t realize it, and Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t realize that he was borrowing from himself. Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going.

The thing with intellectual property is that you just can’t control it like you can physical property. And as soon as something is in the public conciousness, it’s out of the control of its supposed “owner”’s control, whether or not the owner likes it. Artists are plagiarists; they always have been. And now, in the modern era of sampling and digital formats, artists are almost compelled to be. It’s hip to copy, and nothing will be able to stop it. Modern culture is built on amalgamation, on freshening the passe and the cliche, on adding and subtracting. The force of law is much like a man trying to stop a flood with his hand: unless he’s a miracle worker, he’s going to get swept away. As well he should.

Everyone’s favorite rabble-rouser, Derek Webb, has just released his latest album, I See Things Upside Down.

Here’s what he has to say about it:

“What are the things that we American Christians value in our culture and how is that different, and often ‘upside down’ from true Kingdom values? I’ve found that often success looks more like failure, riches more like poverty, and have found that real life often feels more like death, as the Christian life is very literally the process by which we are killed.” Derek Webb

See, you thought he meant that he’s seeing what normal people see, and turning it upside down, and maybe that’s partly what it means; but he’s once again on the depravity train, confessing how he sees things upside down from how he’s actually supposed to see them.

Cool.

In other news, Caedmon’s Call’s latest album, Share the Well, isn’t bad at all. Of course, what I used to love about them was their songwriting, but with the departure of Derek from the band and Aaron Tate from the songwriting roster, the focus is much more in the instrumentation now. The songwriting is better than on their disasterous Back Home release, but still nothing to write home about.

If you browse the blogosphere (whichever way you do that), you’ve probably come across the sort of blog I have learned to hate: a tell-all emotionally tangled mess that no one cares about except the author.

I hate to say it, but it’s like wetting your pants in public — it may feel nice and warm to you, but everyone else is pretty much freaked/grossed out.

Not that there’s anything wrong with an internet diary; it’s always a good thing to keep a record of your past somewhere, if only to jog your memory when you start to forget things.

But then again, the web is not an annonymous place. Ladies and gentlement, this is like when your little sister stole the key to your diary and read about your crush on Donny Osmond. If it’s out there, chances are someone will find it and read it, and you will be embarrased when they do.

Just thought we could use the warning.

What is a conservative?

Quite an interesting question, isn’t it. The word gets tossed around a lot — a whole lot — without anyone really letting people know what they mean. Think about it: can you come up with a good definition what what a conservative believes?

Although it’s easy to brand certain areas of belief conservative, there has to be something that undergirds it all. That is to say, it’s not just enough to assume that a conservative is pro-life or pro-family; you need to tell my why a conservative is pro-life and pro-family.

Well, I think this little document sums it up partly when it says,

A person who values the role of tradition and established institutions, such as religion, in society. In American political terms, a conservative generally favors economic freedom while including the role of society in cultural or social matters. Individualism and personal responsibility are stressed by conservatives. About a third of Americans identify themselves as conservative. Conservatives oppose a large, powerful federal government while favoring balanced budgets and low tax levels. They also tend to support the death penalty, school choice and gun rights, while opposing abortion and gay marriage. American conservatives are viewed as on the political right.

But that’s at once too little and too much: American conservatives are hardly representative of conservatives worldwide, and that’s not really what conservatives are about.

I think the right wing is really about resistance to change. It’s true, when you think about it. Not any and all change (though you could say that the Amish are the true conservatives), but change that re-shapes the basic values that aid societal function. Things like resting abortion makes sense in this paradigm, because killing ones children is destructive to society. Homosexual marriage doesn’t accomplish one of the purposes of traditional marriage: procreation.

But we err if we assume that conservatives are individualistic — I think that conservative individualism undermines the very foundation upon which the philosophy is built (at least from a secular perspective). In fact, conservatives of all people should be the least individualistic group around, in that they value the outcome of personal decisions on the social strata when consider holistically.

Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to be a secular conservative. But I digress.