Part 9-What may happen...removing landmarks

 

Part 9-What may happen after we have removed the ancient landmarks.

         The last thing that I would ever wish to do would spend my time preparing posts for this music philosophy blog that always predict gloom and doom for the future of church music.  However in the musical discourse of Ephesians chapter five, verses fifteen and sixteen warn Christians to, “See that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”  When I was being trained in the U.S Army, our instructors drilled us on the concept that, when we were part of a  patrol, everyone must walk circumspectly.  That means that, as you walk, you must look around at all times in all directions.  Certainly that training has proven valuable to me over the past forty years as a conservative Christian musician.  Every time in my life that I have made the conscious decision to exercise caution instead of disregarding time honored principles of musicing unto God, I have been thankful later.

       What will we have of value after we remove all the time honored principles of musicing from public worship.   One thing for sure, we will not recognize public worship in one generation if we as Christian musicians do not exercise some musical caution about adding the profane and subtracting everything traditional from our music worship. There are Bible principles of how to music unto God.  We may deny that they are in the Bible or we may consider them to have outlived their relevance, but that will never change the fact that they are there and they are profitable to us in the twentieth century.
        We know that the kind and quality of musical offering matters to God.  We know that according to God’s Word, He reserves the right not to hear some offerings and He considers others to be noise and states that He will not hear such musicing.  We have considered these and other Bible principles of musicing in other posts of this blog and in my two books, Music of the Bible in Christian Perspective and Church Music Matters.  So, in conclusion, we may remove all traditional ways of musicing  from our so called "worship" but if we do we will be worshiping "we know not what".  We will also be impoverished spiritually by removing these time honored Bible principles of worshiping through music.