I Believe-Teen Music-part 5

                      What We Should and Should Not Do with Teen Music 

One of the serious problems of youth music pastors in conservative churches is the inability to establish a musical direction and music praxis that is congruent with conservatism. In the process of leader-shift, we sometimes doodle and dabble and dumb down, disdain, discount, disassemble, and destroy worship music.

1.  Doodle: sometimes we just sort of mess around with teen music.  We really don’t do anything positive with it- we just play with it! We music with our youth like a cat does with a mouse she has caught- she’s not hungry so she just plays with it. We fail to catechise or help our youth  establish worthwhile life-long patterns of musicing unto God.

2.  Dabble: we do a little of this, a little of that and a little of the other- sort of like a child plays with matches.  We try to see how far we can go before we develop a musical fire that the pastor and the church board has to put out. Musical "leader-shift" is, in my opinion, deadly to training our youth musically. We must know where we are going philosophically with our teen music and we need to stay on philosophical course.  Rather than dabble, we must develop a music praxis.  We must remember that direction determines destiny.

3.  Dumb down: we treat our teens as though they were MMR- mildly mentally retarded. We dumb down everything because we somehow seem to believe that they just can’t understand.  Just because they are sometimes poor and we brought them to teen church in a bus does not mean that they are not sensitive and intelligent.

4.  Disdain: we wrinkle up our nose at traditional church music and good singing and playing techniques.  I know we don’t mean it but sometimes our attitude is in danger of connoting, “well, they probably will never sing in our church choir anyway.” We must develop a music praxis that will educate our teens in musicing techniques that are of a high musical quality.  Remember, I Chronicles chapter 25 teaches us that it is our responsibility to instruct our own in the "songs of the Lord".  Our music praxis must distinguish between the scared and the profane.

5.  Discount: we go musically for that which is shallow, cheap and trendy because we know good and well that something cheap is easier to sell than that which is of value.  Although quality musicing may be difficult to sell to our youth, the pay off is powerful and valuable to their life-long musical ministry capabilities.

6.  Disassemble: we re-arrange the time-honored building-blocks of music, i.e. by our attitudes and our actions we send the message to our “un-churched” and our “churched” teens that style is not important and that the way that the elements of music (rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone color) are put together do not matter. So, we disassemble the church's music value system with your youth music program.

7.  Destroy: the trendy, trite music that our teens  are sometimes taught in youth church  very effectively develops a bone-fide worship gap in music. There are wonderful new choruses that are theologically deep and accurate and there are also new hymns that use current language that are worth learning.  There is absolutely no need to to train our children and youth to disdain all elements of public worship by the way we music with them in children and youth church.