Out of ou have probably had this experience, either in real life or in a bad dream: you arrive at some gathering and discover that your interpretation of “casual dress” is radically different from that of everyone else at the party. You’re in your favorite faded shorts and tee shirt, and the rest of the room looks like they just stepped out of the show window at Banana Republic.
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Life is full of instances like this, when something that we really like and are comfortable with—clothes, music, food, even vocabulary—is perfect for one occasion and just not right for another one. Placed in the wrong context, the item ends up drawing attention to itself in a negative way, because it’s out of sync with the situation. It seems as if it belongs somewhere else! Questions about this kind of “belonging” are often a part of the discussions concerning music in the church. What kind of music is fitting for church services? Does every kind of music we like and are comfortable with also fit into the context of the Divine Service? A research study I conducted a few years ago gave me the opportunity to ask a large number of teenagers, almost 500 kids from high schools around the country, what kinds of music they thought would be appropriate for worship. I played lots of choices for them, from traditional hymns to praise choruses, Gregorian chant to Christian rock music, and asked how “right” it would seem if they heard it in their church. Researchers begin with a hypothesis—how they think the study will turn out—and mine was that I thought teenagers would consider all of their favorite musical styles to be acceptable for worship. After all, most high school students stay current with popular music and will choose to listen to those styles over anything else. It would stand to reason, I thought, that they would want to hear that kind of music wherever they were, including worship services. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even though these kids told me that they liked rock music and other pop styles, a huge majority thought that those musical styles didn’t belong in church. So what prompted these teens to decide that the music they really liked and were comfortable with didn’t fit in a church service? A lot of them told me that they had never heard the specific musical examples I
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