The Controversial Gidon Kremer
October 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
At a post-concert party in the early 1990s, Saul and Aron Bitran, the violinists of Cuarteto Latinoamericano, were debating the merits of virtuoso soloists. Gidon Kremer’s name came up, and there was a pregnant pause. One of the brothers, I don’t remember which, said quietly, “I think he does things just to be different.”
The other shook his head in dismay. “Oh, I don’t agree. His readings have real merit.”
That’s the way it is with Kremer. He leaves houses divided.
In this performance of the Giga from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in d minor, he varies the tempo in ways that I don’t understand. But Kremer’s playing is brilliant, full of unexpected colors, clean articulations, and rhythmic interest.
He even divides me.
A Strategy That Calls People to Sing
October 7th, 2009 § 5 Comments
by Matthew Raley
The reason churches need to recover the folk singing dynamic is that individuals need to be called out of their own heads to participate in the singing of the body of Christ. Believers are too rooted in their own passions to grow in Christ. They need to pull out their headphones and make music with others, as Ephesians 5 describes. I believe that what’s at stake in this issue is not their emotional satisfaction in worship, but their spiritual growth.
So here is the strategy we have followed in Orland to recover the folk singing dynamic:
1. We’ve given up the right to sing the music we each prefer as individuals.
Look, if I never sang another chorus, I’d be happier. Speaking as a music consumer, the entire CCM industry could disappear tomorrow and my quality of life would be undiminished.
But the reality is that very few believers feel in their guts the kind of music that I feel in mine, the kind of music that I respond to most passionately as a listener. So I have to make a decision. Am I going to claim the right to sing in worship the music that I prefer for listening?
No, I don’t have that right. Christ is glorified, and I am edified, when I join others and we raise our voices together.
In Orland — a rural, small Evangelical Free church — we brought in all sorts of instruments, including the dreaded drums, without a worship war. Believers here saw the need to give up this “right.”
2. We’ve made no effort to produce a certain style.
Six years ago, when our we began to change our worship, we did not pursue a certain demographic, demanding that those not in that demographic get out of the way. We said frankly that we didn’t know what the style of the music was going to be. Our style would emerge over time.
3. We have embraced the musicians and singers we have, in all their diversity, and asked them to work together to lead the congregation.
We have the usual instruments, and the usual musical backgrounds: classical, rock, CCM, bluegrass. We asked all the musicians to go back to basic rehearsal and performance skills, like listening to the other players and finding a good blend, establishing rhythmic integrity, and responding to the expressiveness of others. We found that the classically trained musicians picked up improvisation, while the rock players saw better results from lower volume. (More in a moment.)
4. We have adopted a stripped-down singing style.
Vocal leaders understood that their job was not to have a personal worship experience in front of the congregation, as if they could lead “by example.” Their job — their service of worship to God — was to give leadership that the congregation could follow musically. Singers did not slide up to notes, syncopate for expression, or ornament melodic lines. They sang the notes that they wanted the congregation to sing.
A funny thing happened. The congregation sang.
5. We put strong doctrinal and devotional themes into our singing.
A theme is a developing idea. “Jesus” is not a strong theme. “Jesus is loving” is not a strong theme, either. Both are too general. A strong theme has potential for development: “Jesus’ love is sacrificial” is somewhat better.
For several years, we aligned the sermon with the scripture reading, and took a theme for the singing from them. This year, our readings aren’t aligned with the sermon, but cover the history of redemption up to the birth of Christ. Next year, the readings will cover biblical doctrine. We sing lyrics, regardless of style, that best develop the themes in the readings.
What’s that? You don’t have scripture readings in your worship services?! What exactly is the source of your unity, then?
6. We encourage a variety of musicians to do solos, including young people.
There is a place for solos — that is, for individual testimony in music to the greatness of God. Just as we combined a variety of musicians in the leadership team, so we encourage a wide range of styles in soloists. We have bluegrass, Gaither, CCM, classical. We’ve even had fifes. It was thrilling.
7. We minimize electronic amplification as best we can.
Most contemporary worship services are stupidly loud. You wouldn’t hear the congregation even if they were singing.
A worship service is not a rock concert. So we took out many of the monitors (small speakers that help the musicians hear), lowered the overall volume, emphasized the vocals, and brought up the weaker instruments (e.g. acoustic guitars). These decisions had a lot to do with the “live,” hard-surfaced room in which we sing.
This approach gives enough amplification so that the congregation can follow, but not so much that they’re drowned out.
Over the last six years, this strategy has produced a service that is different. It’s unique to us. People who come with strong stylistic preferences don’t like it. But people who come to participate in a community find that there is a healthy one to join.
People Sing Certainties, Not Questions
September 30th, 2009 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
In recovering the folk singing dynamic, you can have all three of the fundamentals we’ve discussed so far without the people actually singing. A congregation can meet in a resonant space that permits them to create sounds together. The people can share a memory of songs from the past, and they can gain new songs that retain the stripped-down style of folk melodies.
But without the fourth fundamental, they won’t sing.
Maybe I should describe what I think singing is. The murmuring of today’s congregations does not qualify as singing — the shifty-eyed, slouching, hands-in-pockets, worthless droning that advertises in the flashing neon of body language a desire to be elsewhere.
Singing is done standing straight, with the chest up, the throat relaxed, and the lungs filled not from the top but from the bottom. Singing is loud — less in the sense that someone turned a knob clockwise, than that someone next to you spoke with sudden intensity. Singing is loud emotionality.
So, I repeat, believers can have every fundamental of the folk singing dynamic and still not sing. They have to want to sing. You can’t cajole them into singing, manipulate them, or in any way circumvent their lack of desire to sing. If they don’t want to, they won’t.
The fourth fundamental is the thing that supplies motivation for singing — a prejudicial belief system. People sing what is beyond question. You sing what you know.
Prejudice now refers almost exclusively to irrational hostility, especially racial bias, and has become popularly synonymous with a quite different word, bigotry. Where bigotry has always referred to hatred or intolerance, prejudice can be used in a more neutral way.
Prejudice is literally pre-judgment, a decision made prior to reason, debate, or fact-gathering. There are morally important human resources in this word. To take just one example, my father drove into me a prejudice against lying. I don’t question whether lying might be an effective tool, or might be justified in a certain instance. My pre-judged position, my reflex, is, “Never lie.”
The Enlightenment taught us that prejudice of any kind is wrong, and must be debunked as so much superstition. Human beings have the power to transcend their experiences, to know truth with metaphysical certainty, and to unshackle their minds from old notions and subjective perceptions. Through questioning every certitude, human beings can gain control over their environment.
The Enlightenment was full of crap.
The educational project of rationalism has not ended prejudice at all. It has merely created people who are prejudiced and pretentious, prejudiced and cynical, prejudiced and credulous, prejudiced and deluded. The atomic bomb comes to mind.
No amount of reasoning eradicates prejudice, though it may put different prejudices in circulation.
Here’s the point: people don’t sing from purely rational motivations. They don’t sing what they debate or question. They don’t sing to prove a point. There are no songs about the impact of the federal fiscal stimulus on consumer demand, the effectiveness of flu vaccines, or the potential of the new season of House. People sing their certainties, and their certainties are largely unconscious. To be sure, they sing about their emotional struggles, but they do so because they know what they feel.
When you get right down to it, evangelicals don’t sing because they don’t know much. Their faith is painfully conscious. Their prejudices have been leveled — and by their own teachers. They have been taught that the solutions to their relational problems are therapeutic, not supernatural. The Bible is no longer an authority in churches, merely a source of quotations. And, most devastatingly of all, God himself is called high but held low.
Evangelical music has degenerated into “At Last, I Know My Issues!” because evangelicals are now a deeply self-conscious people. And this has to be laid at the door of preachers. “Five Steps to a Better Marriage” is not a theme that will ever burst into song. But as a theme, it will appeal to that rational, calculating demon who constantly asks, “How can I get what I want?” Evangelicals now refuse to know anything about God until they’re sure that their selves will remain intact.
With such a troubled belief system, why would evangelicals truly sing?
C. S. Lewis didn’t like what he called “the lusty roar of the congregation.” I’d love to have it back. The return of the primitive, unselfconscious certitude of singing would demonstrate that people once again knew God, that their questions had been driven from them by direct experience of his grace, and that they had yielded control to his sovereign power.
They would sing again about the true faith: the coming of Jesus Christ, his death, his resurrection, his ascension and pending return, his abolition of wars, lies, betrayals, and loss, the delivery of justice for his martyrs, and the reunion we will have with him. Believers would sing with longing that Jesus Christ be their vision, that they reach that beautiful shore, gathered at the river that flows by the throne of God.
But as they’ve stopped, we listen for the rocks.
There Are No Words for Carlos Kleiber
September 25th, 2009 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
But I’ll try.
Kyle Wiley Pickett, conductor of the North State Symphony, mentioned in rehearsal last weekend that Carlos Kleiber was his model for interpreting Beethoven. You can see why in these videos of the 7th Symphony (1st mvt).
The first thing you notice is Kleiber has no music stand. The moment he begins, it’s obvious that he has not merely memorized the score, but has internalized it down to the finest details.
Kleiber uses gestures that are idiosyncratic. The uniqueness, however, does not compromise clarity. He is able to cue multiple sections of the orchestra with one poke of the baton. His cues do not merely tell players when to enter, but how — and not merely how loudly or softly but with what articulation and emphasis. You can see him giving particular attention to the ends of notes (an often overlooked detail), and to the integrity of inner rhythms.
Kleiber is one with his players. He has conveyed a vision of this music comprehensively to the musicians, and it’s a marvel to watch.
The North State Symphony will perform Beethoven’s 5th Symphony on its season premiere on Saturday, 9-26, in Redding at the Cascade Theater (7:30 pm) and in Chico on Sunday, 9-27, at Laxson Auditorium (2 pm).
(The second video overlaps the first. Start at about 4 minutes, unless you want to hear the development section repeated.)
Get Bob the Trucker To Sing
September 23rd, 2009 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Reset the scenario of the folk singing dynamic: A diverse congregation gathers in a space that is resonant, so that they create a corporate sound. They have a shared memory of songs, a bank of tunes and lyrics that they draw upon together.
What you have so far is an intensively local group of worshipers, who have a strong sense of community and identity. That’s an edifying combination, but there is a problem.
What’s going to prevent the congregation from stagnating in the familiar? People need fresh musical expressions for their faith. Churches need to participate in the high interactivity of our culture, just as 1st century churches participated in their culture’s interactions. This is less a need to retain “the young people,” and more a need to nurture those who are older, keep their strength from becoming rigid.
The ability to interact with other cultures from a strong identity is a sign of health.
So, how does a congregation stay open to a current of new music? Christian pop is the default source for new songs. Is it the right source? If so, how can it be used without destroying the folk singing dynamic?
I think a Christian pop song can refresh a church if it passes my “Bob the Trucker” test.
Bob the Trucker is not musical. Ask him to sing a solo and he laughs at you — and it’s not a merry guffaw, more like a threatening rumble. Bob enjoys listening to country (I’m not equating “not musical” with “country,” I’m just saying …), but at church, the singing time for Bob is entirely dispensable. He not only doesn’t expect the church to sing what he likes, he doesn’t see why the church needs to sing at all.
Bob the Trucker — here’s the crucial point — sees most church music as fluff. And — also a crucial point — he’s right. If you want him to sing, you have to give him songs that are solid. He needs the third fundamental of the folk singing dynamic: a stripped-down melodic style.
Think about the style of much Christian pop in relation to Bob.
Bob cannot sing songs that make him sound like a girl. The breathy, whiny tone of much Christian pop music is something he will never identify with. This means that the selection of Christian pop songs that we can use to unite Bob with a congregation just shrank.
The style I’m thinking of is elaborately ornamented (think Whitney Houston’s “Always Love Yooo-eeeooooooo-ahhhhh,” taking a tune that is utterly devoid of interest and adding the sonic equivalent of whipped cream from a spray can). Lyrically, the style is heavy on the first-person singular. It has to be: the drive to communicate comes from how passionately I feel.
Strip out the breathy production values and the fancy solo ornaments of much Christian pop, and see what’s left. Is there a melody underneath it all that stands on its own? Not usually. Unless there’s a compelling, solid tune, I can’t think of any reason to ask Bob the Trucker to join it.
More broadly, Bob cannot sing songs that are written for soloists. Have you ever heard a congregation trying to sing “Voice of Truth” by Casting Crowns? The chorus goes fine, but the verses are written for a soloist to sing/talk through, semi-improvised. When a church tries to sing it, they sound like a bunch of soloists auditioning for American Idol all at the same time. A song written as a vehicle for a pop soloist will not work for a congregation, because as a practical matter, a group cannot sing it together.
This is not just true of pop songs. Churches sometimes try to sing the famous setting of the Lord’s Prayer by Albert Hay Malotte. But the melody requires substantial breath control. It also has triplets that are meant to be interpreted freely, and are difficult to feel as a congregation. It’s a solo.
Bob the Trucker can and will join songs that are lyrically and melodically solid, not interpretively soft. He will sing a tune that uses formal repetition, not improvisation. In other words, he will sing songs that are meant to be sung by untrained groups. And there are new songs by Christian pop artists that meet these criteria.
The reason a song like the Gettys’ “In Christ Alone” has become popular in churches is that the tune is solid and the lyrics are declarative. It is constructed so that a group can sing it. The tune has phrases that are motivically linked and repetitive for easy learning. The syncopation in the melody is natural to the rhythm of the words. The lyrics narrate the gospel story, giving the congregation truths that earn an emotional response, rather than merely telling the congregation what to feel.
The song is not great for listening, nor is it a favorite of mine. For it to work as a solo, the singer would have to vary the repetitions and make them do something compelling. Harmonically, the song is dull. But the emotional power of folk singing is in the participation of the group, not the music itself. “In Christ Alone” has the stripped-down style that meets the need.
So here’s the unpopular reality of the folk singing dynamic, the quality that has driven it from favor in churches. Folk singing expresses and welcomes the emotional lives of men.
The Shared Memory of Songs
September 17th, 2009 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
Let’s assume a congregation today gathers to sing in a space that will enliven their sound. They won’t be singing into a dead zone, but creating a corporate resonance. They will feel from the first notes that they are not in the iPod worship mode, but that they are being called out of their own heads to participate.
So far, so good. A fundamental element in the dynamic of folk singing is present: participation is physically possible. But there’s the question of what to sing.
Folk singing is an expression of shared memory. People sing together because they remember the same songs. They’ve acquired those songs because they’ve lived together for a long time, sharing the same way of life in the same region, city, or neighborhood.
Local memory is powerful.
The British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was notorious as a folk song collector. One of the tunes he investigated was “Dives and Lazarus,” a ballad based on a parable of Jesus. He found five different versions of the tune in different regions of Britain, with various titles, and using each version he composed a string orchestra piece called, Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus.
What happened with this tune is pretty common. It traveled from one region to the next, but within the long life of each place it was remembered differently. The same phenomenon played havoc with colonial American worship, in which the hymnals often contained words without music. Congregations were known to sing variants of the same tune all at once, to general annoyance.
If you want to recover the next fundamental of the folk singing dynamic, you have to sing what can be shared. You have to build up local memory.
And in order to do that, you have to think of your church not as an outlet for Christian pop culture, but as a local community with a life of its own. The unique character of place, time, heritage, work, and cultural mix needs to drive the way a congregation sings, not the most popular Jesus-as-boyfriend ballads on the radio.
Worship leaders need to ask, “Who are we as believers in this place?”
In this connection, there are two cultural reasons why folk singing has been replaced by iPod worship.
In the first place, people move around more today than ever before in history. The suburban population is especially transient, so that the natural process of building a shared memory doesn’t have much time to work. This movement isn’t inherently bad. The book of Acts narrates the movement of believers from place to place, and I would argue that the mingling of the cultures from different city states strengthened all the churches.
But our moving around does elevate one thing that is shared from sea to shining sea, namely Christian radio. From FM stations, it’s easy to find songs that people recognize and use the hits in worship. (More about the problems with this practice next week.)
Secondly, people have little sense of history. This is catastrophic for worship.
The fact that hymnals are arranged according to doctrinal content is an outworking of history, and it is full of significance. Certain songs came from Reformation Germany (frequently composed by Martin Luther himself), or from immigrant groups (“How Great Thou Art”), or from specific theological movements (hymns by the Wesley brothers).
American evangelicalism did not sprout in the suburbs, and we’re blind when we act as though it did. The past can reprioritize the present, set our troubles in context, and give us a much-needed sense of proportion. The consequences of ignoring the past are pride and folly.
Christian radio, like all mass media, is an endless Now, and that is the mind of illiteracy.
The recovery of this part of the folk singing dynamic depends on a simple but radical shift in leadership. People can learn tunes. Shared memory can be built up, and relatively quickly. But only if pastors stop using music as a way to attract the people they want, and start thinking of it as an expression of a local church’s unique identity in Christ.
The Folk Singing Dynamic
September 9th, 2009 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
"Seated Old Man Facing Right, Singing and Holding Music," by Anton Crussens, mid-17th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The public worship described in Ephesians 5.18-21 is not pop music — music designed first and foremost to sell. The writing of Ephesians predates mass popular culture by almost two millennia. Furthermore, the letter does not describe what I call “art music” — an admittedly trouble-filled term that I use for music written in and for the development of the Western tradition. Music in this tradition starts roughly with Léonin and Pérotin in the high middle ages, more than a thousand years after Paul.
(Complications regarding the interactions between pop and art music I defer, but do not deny.)
What Ephesians describes is folk singing: a group of people making a corporate sound that develops from who they are and how they live. In suburban, white America — as opposed to ethnic enclaves — folk singing is all but dead. We’re way too cool.
I am sensitive to a danger in this line of thought about worship. Practices from the past won’t restore authenticity to a church just because they are old. A church is not a museum. Public worship needs to be alive — that is, needs to express what Christianity is now. I am not warming up to argue that we should recover the past, as if it were possible.
But I am saying that we should know what the past was, and know that it is not interchangeable with today’s default musical practices. In human history, the practice of buying music instead of making it is such a recent development that it might as well have happened yesterday. People who have no sense of the past — I’ll put this very diplomatically — have been setting evangelical standards for public worship, and as a result they tend to assume that Martin Luther thought the same way about music that they do.
He didn’t.
So, what precisely do we need to recover from Ephesians 5? Do we need sheet music for the psalm chants used by 1st century Jews? (It doesn’t exist. And if it did, we wouldn’t be able to read it.) Do we need to ditch diatonic harmony and teach congregations to sing in the quarter-tones ancient cultures used then and still use today? (Americans-by-birth don’t even hear quarter-tones. My violin professor went on a tour of the middle east in 1990. Trying to play quarter-tones with an Arab violinist, he asked whether he was playing in tune. The Arab pulled a face and said, “Close.” Which is to say, no.)
I think what we need to recover is the dynamic of people making music together. Stated differently, we need to rebuild the fundamentals of singing in groups, not as performance, nor as entertainment, but as participation in a way of life. I believe those fundamentals are: a resonant physical space, a shared memory of songs, a stripped-down melodic style, and a belief system that is prejudicial.
So, pretty much all of this will be controversial.
Consider the impact of physical space on singing.
The vast majority of churches built today are designed for visual appeal and technological flexibility. They are designed for sound only as an after-thought — and a quite expensive one. Not far from here is a church my family has long referred to as the golden golf ball. It looks like it fell from a stratospheric height and created an immense divot.
The builders assumed that the sound inside the dome would be wonderful, but for various technical reasons the sound was appalling. In order to control wave-reflection, the interior had to be piled and sprayed with every imaginable kind of sound-absorbing material. The result? You can fill the golden golf ball with thousands of people, and they can all belt out songs at the top of their voices, but the only person you’ll actually hear singing is . . . you.
Farmers built barns that were more suitable for singing than most contemporary churches. Partly, the suitability was a matter of materials. Our forefathers built with wood. The churches they raised were finished inside with plaster. When the people started to sing, you felt it.
(One evening I asked Kyle Wiley Pickett, conductor of the North State Symphony, why orchestra members loved playing in old vaudeville halls, whether the beautifully renovated Cascade Theater in Redding, or the less well-appointed halls in Oroville and Red Bluff. He felt sure it was the plaster.)
Now, the old spaces are too hardened for much electronic amplification, and the pre-microphone past is not one we want to recover. Even so, churches don’t have to keep building dead sound spaces. They could design their worship settings to enliven the singing of the people.
More on the fundamentals of the folk dynamic next week.
Three Conclusions on Public Worship
September 3rd, 2009 § 6 Comments
by Matthew Raley
If I start with Ephesians 4-5 as the authoritative prescription for life in Christ’s churches, and for the musical worship churches offer to God (previous posts here and here), then I am driven to three conclusions.
1. Nurturing and expressing body unity is the top priority of worship in music.
When a congregation gathers to sing, the assumption must be that the people are all different, that they bring to the worship radical diversity of knowledge base, experience, ethnic inheritance, and cultural ways of thinking. This variety, even in a group of fifty people, is immeasurable.
Musical worship, therefore, must tap this intense energy and focus it on the work of praising Jesus Christ. The music must enable diverse individuals to sing as one voice about the same reality. For this to happen, the music must express the truth of the gospel and the impact of that truth on daily life.
I believe the inescapable reality is that musical style cannot unify believers. The effort to unite people through style has driven out diversity and created uniformity, the false fellowship of demographic sameness. What believers need in worship are perspectives that they have not considered before, and that give fresh insight into the truth of Christ.
2. Recovering true worship in music requires an emotional shift.
Most evangelicals now expect music to stimulate their individual passion for God. They want to receive musical expressions that they can join. But when a congregation is singing in the dynamic Paul shows in Ephesians 4-5, believers feel a different passion. Their emotional desires and expectations shift. Instead of waiting to receive expressions they can join, believers give expressions that others can join.
This is a shift from passive, entertainment-oriented expectations to active, body-oriented expectations. Passion in worship comes from giving edification.
3. Recovering true worship in music requires a cultural shift.
Pop music is the vocabulary of a passive audience. The music is sold not to be made, but consumed. I don’t see any way to escape the consumer mindset of contemporary worship by continuing to sing radio hits.
Technically, pop music is designed to be so stylistically strong that it attracts the consumer’s notice and then closes the sale. The style is visually expressed: the hair and make-up, the photography, the graphic design of posters and packaging. The style is also expressed in the production values of the recordings. Ultimately, the music and lyrics are saturated with a certain style.
The cultural shift we need is to recover the practices of folk music.
Folk music is as old as humanity. It is the music of participation, not performance. It grows out of a way of life. It is for people who make music throughout their daily routines, not for people who consume music. It is only in modern times that anyone considered writing this music down, much less recording it. Folk music is not designed to sell or to please, but to express. Indeed, it is difficult to speak of folk music being designed at all. It grows out of life.
The reason the hymns of the church are important now is that they are for the most part folk tunes. That is, the people just knew them, and knew them from infancy. They are an inheritance, not an artifice.
It is this kind of society that Paul is talking about in Ephesians 5.18-20. A Jewish child knew psalm chants before he knew words, just as a Greek child knew pagan hymns before he knew words. There was no marketplace for music as a consumable item.
What we have been developing in Orland for the last several years are ways to make these three principles a reality. We have found ways that our congregation can nurture and express musical unity. We have seen the beginnings of a shift in emotional expectations for worship. And we have made progress toward rebuilding the ways of folk singing.
More next week.
From Bach’s Cantata BWV 147
August 29th, 2009 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
Christine Schaefer is the soprano, Nicholas Harnoncourt the conductor.
Translation:
Make ready, O Jesus, to thee now the way;
My Savior, elect now
My soul ever faithful
And look down with eyes full of grace now on me!
Individuality in Community, Continued
August 26th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
Evangelical teaching about being “filled with the Spirit” has tended to be individualistic. You have your own personal faith in Jesus Christ, and God responds by giving your own personal immersion in the Spirit.
I don’t deny this teaching. It became an evangelical emphasis because of cultural inertia in churches, in which individuals coasted toward heaven on the strength of group membership. The individual new birth, and the resulting personal transformation, is an antidote to self-righteousness.
But the Bible’s teaching about the Spirit goes into more detail about how personal transformation works. Each of us is transformed by interacting with a Spirit-bonded community.
In Ephesians 4.1-6, Paul teaches that there is “one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” For Paul, all these things are the substance of “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
Individuals in a church have each had a bonding experience. They have come to see their own sins (unique to them, not shared), have heard the gospel of Christ (teaching held in common with others), and have each gained new life directly from the “one God and Father of all” (an experience that mixes the common and the unique).
That is to say, an individual is bonded with Christ and with other believers at the same time. The depth of the individual’s baptism in the Spirit also deepens the individual’s human relationships.
In this context, the personal transformation begun by the new birth accelerates as an individual participates in the body of Christ “in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” That worthy manner requires “all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” Individuals who are jarringly different become more like Christ as they suffer through their disagreements with grace.
(Yes, I have expounded these verses “backwards,” starting with the reasons in vv 4-6 that motivate the commands in vv 1-3.)
As I said in the previous post, this teaching gives life and health to individuality. There is no implication that individuals conform to each other, ceasing to be unique. On the contrary, Paul teaches their continued diversity explicitly (Ephesians 4.11-16).
But in that diversity there is not independence or autonomy, as if the parts of the body function separately. The individuals interact, being transformed by the process of giving and receiving. And their interactions are governed by the one thing we postmodern iPod worshipers instinctively reject: a bond, a tie to others that cannot be cut or ignored. In Christ, the Jew is bound with the Greek, regardless of whether either would choose to be.
Paul applies this theology directly to worship in music (Ephesians 5.18-21). Singing together is one of the interactions that are governed by the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace, and as such is one of the tools Christ uses to express his own self in us. This is Paul’s conception of being “filled with the Spirit.”
Therefore, corporate singing is not about my passions at all, but Christ’s. Music is a way of submitting my passions to His.
Contrast that application with most worship in music today.
1. What holds musical worship together in most churches is sameness of style.
The style of a church’s music is carefully crafted to target a specific demographic. The invitation most churches extend is, “Join us because we are exactly like you!” The other (unspoken) part of this invitation is, “If you aren’t like us, you won’t really fit here.”
This conformity kills the interaction individuals need with believers who are different from them. It replaces a genuine filling of the Spirit with mere human affinity.
2. The demographic bond is cheap.
People in the same demographic share the same media reference points, many of the same likes and dislikes, the same stage of life, the same job. They relate to each other, as T. S. Eliot put it, only with the most conscious part of themselves.
The “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” is a bond at once deeply personal and deeply relational. It supernaturally overcomes ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divisions, and blows away superficial, market-based identities. It makes individuals larger and larger.
The ugly truth is that many churches are actively manufacturing small, superficial people whose ability to interact is retarded.
3. The demographic bond is false.
Many people now link their personal identities to their choices as consumers. The cars, clothes, music, food, and attitude with which they upholster their lives all make up their identities. Thus, people labor to join certain demographics, and flaunt their status once their satisfy their ambition.
What churches create in their pursuit of demographic affinity is a lie. People seem to be bound together. But they are only attached by their choices, which they are free to reverse at any time.
The stark reality is that style-driven worship music resists the Spirit’s work of bonding, his work of love.
