Out of Sync

By Dr. Barbara Resch

You 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.

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 played for them, but that the music reminded them of something else they had heard, or of a place where they had heard it. Many of them wrote on their survey forms the situation that each piece would be appropriate for: brunch at a nice restaurant, a movie soundtrack, Grandma’s bridge club, a relaxing walk in the woods. Some even described a church setting that would fit the music: “This wouldn’t work in my church; it sounds too Catholic,” and “This would be good in a big stone church where it could echo, but it would sound silly in my little church.”

One example I played was a jazz setting of “O Lamb of God,” sung in a sultry alto voice with piano and trap set accompaniment. A number of students thought that the words, taken right from the Communion liturgy, were fine but that the music was “cool, but too sexy for church.” Because music is both intellectual and emotional, it has a mysterious power to stick in our memories and transport us to another place. This kind of mental journey can be enjoyable, relaxing, or exciting. But when the music takes us somewhere that is opposite of the place where we are—we’re in the presence of God, in His own holy house, and we start picturing a lounge singer—that’s when it starts to feel out of sync.

Some students pointed out that congregations gathered for worship included people of all ages, and that not everyone in that group would react positively to some musical styles. As one girl said, “I think the old ladies in my church would get upset if they heard this (Christian rock music), and people shouldn’t be upset by what they hear in church.” Martin Luther said that church music should be “the servant of the Word.” This girl realized that for some people, the music might contradict rather than serve the Word, actually distracting from the message and getting between God’s Word and the hearts and minds of the worshipers.

In one group of students I interviewed, a girl explained that her church offered three different services each Sunday morning. Each one offered a different musical style, so she attended the one with the music she liked, and her parents went to another with the music they liked, which she described as “easy listening.” From across the room a boy said “I like reggae; you have a service for me?” His friend joined in: “I like hip-hop; you have a service for me?” In the wake of the many other suggestions that followed, the first speaker responded in frustration “Well, you can’t please everybody!”

The choices that pastors and musicians make about church music are not based on pleasing everybody by trying to include all of the musical styles that they like. Appropriate church music is probably different from the music people like to hear when they hang out with their friends or let off steam at the end of the day. In worship we are gathered in the name and the remembrance of Jesus, and the music for that time and place needs to flow in sync with that high and holy calling.

Dr. Barbara J. Resch is Director of Music Educator at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and a member of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.