The Fall 2008 Issues in Christian Education features an essay by musician Carl Schalk, entitled The Church's Song: Getting to the Heart of the Matter. These sentences gave me pause to think:

“... as Pietism developed, its hymns, often written for personal,devotional purposes, became increasingly and more intensely personal, subjective, individualistic, and less suited for corporate worship. Ultimately, its lack of intellectual strength and vigor resulting from its strong emphasis on human feeling, left the field open for a movement known as the Enlightenment or Rationalism.” (p. 15)

One thing leads to another. Often the trajectory is predictable. As Leonard Sweet pointed out recently, much of what passes for today's so-called “contemporary” music really dates to the 70's and 80's. It is boomer oriented. Those who are younger than us boomers may be mystified by this attraction, but they shouldn't be. Trace the trajectory backward and you will see how predictable this could have been. My generation was raised on a strict diet of TLH page 5 and 15, with an occasional Matins thrown in. So from 1947 to the late 70's, it was essentially the same service every Sunday morning. I moved through the stage of being proud that I could do the whole thing without cracking open the hymnal, to realizing that with that mastery came a curse – I had freed up a goodly portion of my mind to think other things while singing the service. While I don't pretend to speak for a whole generation, I do think that significant numbers of us were desperate for anything that would stimulate and reawaken our brains musically and when it hit, we bit.

So now let's take stock of what we have in our day: a wonderfully diverse hymnal with multiple musical settings and a rich variety of ancient and new hymns on the one hand, and on the other, worship featuring songs not too dissimilar from how the music of pietism was described above: intensely personal, subjective, individualistic, less suited for corporate worship. Don't take my word for it. Richard O Johnson of the Forum Newsletter wrote about music recently sung at the installation of an ELCA bishop:

“Virtually all of the songs in the service were about us... it's feel-good music, and that's why people want it, and why some pastors and congregations embrace it. It's the music of human potential. Or if it does get around to God, it articulates Richard Niebuhr's famous God without wrath bringing people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the work of a Christ without a cross.”                     (A Song to Whom it may Concern, Forum Letter, Sept 2008, pp 2-3)

I know how I'd like to see this trajectory go into the future: those who are raised on this hymnal appreciate a rich heritage and are addressed by God through the liturgical actions that rehearse God's Gospel story every week, while those following the “contemporary” path become restless for something with more meat on the bones and find it. Neither will happen automatically. Unless pastors do more explaining of the liturgy with their own enthusiasm shining through and unless they use all of the treasures that are in the hymnal, we will simply repeat the past trajectory. (My 5^th grade granddaughter already knows the service by heart; will she eventually wind up as disaffected with it as I did?) And unless those who write contemporary music hear cries for something meatier and distinctively Christian, their offerings will only leave the door open for the wolves who are tomorrow's equivalent of the 18^th century's enlightenment and rationalism.