Introduction: One of the things I have noticed about Christian parents is that they can be on hyper-alert about keeping certain forms of corruption out of their homes, but clueless or carefree about ...
Rotify & Your Kid’s Immortal Soul
The Queen of Repetition
I was talking the other day with a friend about the propriety of making fun of cheesy Christian music. We both agreed that there was a time when it was called for, and that there was a time when it was not called for at all. But where is that line, and how do we …
Hauling In a Ten-Pound Fish on a Five-Pound Line
I am currently working my way through a fascinating book about Reformation-era music called Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, written by Joseph Herl. It is a tightly-packed scholarly tome, but would be a great read for any pastor interested in musical reformation — as every pastor ought to be. Church music can be divided into …
Rap Tide
There has been a goodish bit of Internet response to this short video. A number of men were asked for their take on Reformed hip hop artists, and their response was overwhelmingly negative. In that negative response, there were some fair points — the cult of perpetual immaturity that cool always tends to foster, the …
Shoot Me Now
One objection to the exhortation to cultivate a “biblical” approach to music is that we don’t have musical notation from biblical times. We have the lyrics of the psalms, but not the music. Here, in brief, are my staccato responses. First, there is a good argument that we do have an idea of what the …
Treacle, Dreck, and Schlock
As the fellow said, one of things we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. And this was true on its own terms, back in the day when when history stayed more or less the same. How much more is it the case when we have seen a transformation of history in …
When the Church Organ Speaks in Tongues
I have often quoted Chesterton when he said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. There are some exceptions to this and church organ music is one of them. Done well, organ music is glorious. Done poorly (and there are many avenues for that) it is an affront to both God and man. In …
Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream and Rock n’ Roll
I had an interesting exchange with Rick Warren the other day — but only made possible by some sort of flux in the space/time twitterverse. Rick started it by tweeting this: “There’s no such thing as “Christian music” -only Christian lyrics. The words,not the tune or music style make a song sacred.” This is a …
Church Music and the Other Kind
I take it as a given that God can be worshiped and genuinely glorified, in a Lord’s Day service, with different styles of music, and with different kinds of instrumentation. I do not say any style of music, but I do say different styles of music. Some music is of course excluded because it is …
A Music Minister With Little Cymbals Between His Knees
My post on Mozart and Vince Gill got a friendly rejoinder from Scott Cline, and that rejoinder can be found here. I have a few things to say in response, but not a ton, because I think in some places we are arguing the same (basic) point with different vocabulary. But we shall see. Scott …