o1mnikent

After three weeks in southeast Asia, I’ve finally arrived home – not Michigan, of course, but Washington. I managed to stay awake for over fifty hours and saw three sunrises in one day. Somewhere between the first and second sunrise, I said good-bye to Emily, Bert, Bette, Sir Jo-el, Anne, Jay, Machelle, and Jon. Somewhere between the second and third sunrise I said hello to my family and Shelly in Seattle. Since arriving, I’ve been doing a fair bit of writing, reflecting, and sorting through over 2500 photos and video. And going to Victoria, B.C. with my family.

We’ve arrived in Singapore. I’ve had limited internet access for the past two weeks – in the Philippines because of lack of time and in Indonesia because of lack of connectivity.

If you’re checking this from the Philippines or Indonesia, thanks for all your hospitality. Words cannot express our thanks. We’ll be in Singapore until Sunday before I head back to Seattle to spend a week at home. Expect to find pictures and detailed updates beginning early next week on this blog. More coherent reflections will be found on www.calvin.edu/worship.

We’re all familiar with it: the music at the late service. The Matt Redmans and the Chris Tomlins of the world. It’s the stuff covered by CCLI and usually led with guitars and drums (those darn kids!). It’s under labels such as worshiptogether and Integrity Music.

We call it praise and worship music and use P&W for shorthand. Many churches call it contemporary music or contemporary worship, especially if these churches have its antithesis: the traditional service. Some churches, in an attempt to appeal to our penchant for trendiness, call it modern worship or even post-modern worship (multi-sensory, etc.). Such worship conjures up British accents, man-pris, and black, plastic-framed glasses.

All of these words for this new kind of worship music are completely misleading: “praise and worship” because those two liturgical actions are too narrow for an all-encompassing interaction with God (see here for details), “contemporary” because that’s too darn temporal – all music is or was contemporary. “Modern worship” and “post-modern worship” used in the context are terms completely detached from their philosophical and cultural realities. So all we’re left with is British accents, man-pris, and black, plastic-framed glasses.

I spent most of last week at the annual meetings of the Hymn Society in Indianapolis, where terms such as “contemporary worship” and “praise and worship music” invite random beatings by elderly women. Neither my physique nor reputation can handle that.

I almost invited such beatings as I ate lunch with half-a-dozen conference goers last Tuesday. They asked me, like they did everyone else around the table, “Kent, what do you do?”

I told them I was interested in all kinds of music, that music functions in worship as part of a larger conversation, and that musicians needed to discern lyrics of all musical genres and then accordingly appropriate such music into worship. I went on about a few other things, too, but someone interrupted me – “so you like… [pause] praise and worship music?”

“Yes,” I said. Then I added, “Well, I’m actually interested in folk music.”

They seemed more satisfied.

“Modern folk music is actually what I’m interested in – studying it, learning about it, playing it – and I can’t ignore the folk music that is heard and sung in a large segment of the church.” (Well, the evangelical church. For all their emphasis on inclusively – which I mostly support – the Hymn Society doesn’t seem to want to include my own evangelical background. Or the congregation, either, I sometimes think.)*

Modern folk music. That is, in fact, what it is. Folk music has a strange way of working its way into the mainstream until its acceptance by even the most resistant musical purists. Almost all folk music eventually becomes accepted by the cultural elite (Brian Wren covers this in one of his chapters in Praying Twice), much like ragtime of the 1890s, gospel music of the 1920s, the hymnody of the 1950s – all of this started out as folk music. Added to that, we commit ourselves to studying and appreciating the folk music from other cultures, but often fail to appreciate and study the folk music of our own. Eventually, modern folk music or P&W or whatever you want to call it will work its way into culturally elite circles. It might take twenty years or a hundred, or maybe it’s already happening. It seems prudent then, to study it now as a present reality and not wait a hundred years to study it only as a historical phenomenon.

Style, after all, is arbitrary. Preference for a particular style more reflects cultural bias than something inherent to the music itself. We can’t forget identify and examine our biases, too, because their influence is just as signficant.

*My critique comes in the middle of an enjoyable week filled with excellent discussion, plenaries, and hymn festivals. I still plan on attending next summer.