Peter’s Progress – October 25, 2013

When I was a teenager in the 1990s I went to a youth church led by Michael Bishop that rocked.  Guitar, bass guitar, drums and vocals – it was awesome.  The idea of the worship band is now in its third decade.  It’s almost a generation old and oh, so last century.
Yet I’ve been in a meeting where somebody said that a church is not a church without an organ.  I had just come back from a mission to South America and had found plenty of vibrant churches without an organ, or even a band for that matter.
The organ was once contemporary too.  A friend gave me an insert from a church magazine dating from 1929.  Julius Gordon wrote, “Churches which have their organ and choir in a West Gallery have a great advantage in many respects, and the custom is spreading in England.”
His church choir was pushing the envelope by including women, because South African boys’ voices broke earlier compared to those in England!
Band or organ, accompanied or vocals only, music has always been used to dress up the truth. The early church quickly clicked that a good way to teach Christian truths was to put it to music. Paul’s letters in the New Testament contain some of the earliest known songs of the church. Critics of the church at the time complained that using catchy tunes wasn’t playing fair!
In recent times we’ve confused music with worship, where worship should actually be about how we live out our lives before God every day, including Sundays. In time the contemporary band that is synonymous with worship will be replaced with something innovative.
Does it really matter? A famous theologian, Karl Barth, was asked by a student to summarize his life’s work.  He replied, “In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”  Sometimes the greatest truths have the simplest tunes.