What is “Traditional Worship Music?”
A
recipe for frustration is when a church puts a young worship leader in charge
of their “traditional service.” The
traditionalist worshippers get frustrated with the song selection and the
worship leader gets frustrated because even when they pick 50 year old hymns
the people still aren’t happy. The young worship leader feels like they are
playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey randomly picking “old songs” and constantly
sticking their donkey’s tail on the wall missing the secret list the
traditional worshippers keep in the back of their memories.
Maybe
sll this frustration is because each of our lists of
“traditional” music is different? Perhaps
we developed our “favorites” list based on varied experiences in different
denominations, different parts of the nation. Isn’t “traditional music” different
for a someone in their 70’s from someone in their 60’s…
or fro a Baptist from Maine and a Wesleyan from Iowa? Maybe there can be no
such thing as a “traditional service?”
Or
are these lists strikingly similar? What if you made a “play list” of the 30 worship
songs that mean the most to you? What would you include? Sharon and I recently took
a day and did exactly that. We 30 songs that we
consider our own personal “traditional music” list.
We
were surprised at some of the songs we included and others we left off. For
instance we included almost no gospel songs from our teen and college years. We
remember these songs clearly and can sing every verse—but we don’t cherish them. Many of the songs came
from the worship of our late 20’s through 40’s. However we also listed a few
more “recent” songs like “We have come into His house.” In making our list we noticed that many were adoration songs which was interesting to us. We also noted
that we recalled particular solos or even choir numbers associated with some
songs—particularly a song sung were we felt “God move” in the service and we still
associated that experience with that particular song. IN some cases we just didn’t know why we
cherished the song—we just did.
What I’m wondering this week: is it even
possible to have a “traditional worship service?” How does a
younger worship leader even find out what “traditional worship music” of a
congregation is? If everyone in a church
made lists like we did, how many of the songs would even overlap? Would they be similar or would they be
totally different? Would any of the “Traditional
songs” on my list be on the list of someone in their 40’s or 20’s? We can
easily agree on what is “contemporary music”—it is the latest music nobody
knows yet. But, what is “Traditional worship music?” Whose list of songs would we use?
Sharon and Keith’s personal list of
“Traditional worship music”
So, what do you
think?
The
discussion of this column is on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=161502633
Keith Drury September 28, 2010