My favorite week of the year comes in June, when my son Christopher and I continue our trek to attend a baseball game in every major league stadium. This year we saw games in St. Louis, Milwaukee and both Chicago stadiums (stadia for purists). We have now visited twenty of the thirty ballparks. Of course, baseball is not the point, although it's enjoyable. The great pleasure comes from spending a week with my son.
Chris is always entertainment director for the trip, and I get to listen to the music he keeps on his ipod. Like most of today's teenagers, he has eclectic taste. If he sets the ipod to play titles randomly, I hear music from many genres. I seem to remember our generation being more stylistically confined. Didn't we categorize ourselves at that age, confining our listening to either pop or metal or country radio stations? Today's kids don't live with a lot of self-erected barriers, and that seems like a good thing to me. I can't help remembering a man in a congregation I served years ago who told me, "I like both kinds of music, Country AND Western."
As I enjoyed listening to this eclectic sampling of music and singing along with my son, I couldn't help wondering about the benefit of seeing Christopher's ipod, where so many songs co-exist, as a metaphor for a better church. Everywhere I look, churches and their appointed music leaders are fighting over music. The arguments about musical style have taken on a significance wildly out of proportion to the larger goals of the church. In our city, a member of a church's personnel committee can drive past homeless or inadequately housed people, drug addicted people, poverty-stricken children, poorly fed families, seldom-visited senior adults, and sick uninsured people on their way to a meeting where they will discuss terminating their church's music director because they don't like the music chosen for worship. This seems terribly perverse.
I had a conversation this week with a friend who is a church musician and an academic leader in a school that trains future church musicians. He was excited about reporting on a conference he had attended where there was a joyous welcoming spirit displayed by participants who came from different sides of the worship divide. He felt so energized by the fact that contemporary church musicians enjoyed being with traditional ones, and traditional ones enjoyed being with their contemporary worship colleagues. It was exciting to discuss the possibilities for the church if our musicians and congregations all displayed this openness to one another.
I am among those church musicians who live in a very liturgical, classical world. But no matter how I may try to serve the church diligently by presenting my best musical leadership, my value to the church's mission is diminished when I try to criticize or minimize the efforts of others whose worlds are characterized by "contemporary" or "praise and worship" styles of worship. No rendition of classical music is more valuable to the church than a pure and contrite heart. Every time people competed for Christ's approval in the Bible he dismissed the competition. Today's church musicians work very hard and live under a lot of pressure, and that situation can cause them to become like the brothers who argue about who will be seated on Jesus' right in the kingdom.
I suggest that all of us who direct music in the church, no matter what style of music feels like home to us, seek to lead the way to unity within the church. First, let us view our music leadership as an exercise in stewardship rather than performance. Let us strive to be the best stewards of our musical resources, and to lead our church's musicians and congregation to do their best. Then I suggest that we don't just try to use our musical tools to accomplish this within our own churches, but rather that we reach outside our comfort and employment zones. Let's call our colleagues at differently-worshiping churches and combine our efforts to build a "Habitat" house, or volunteer at a shelter, or tutor at-risk kids. Let's show that we can serve without receiving applause or validation. Let's show that the church is more to us than a performance opportunity. Let's exist alongside each other like the different songs on Christopher's ipod, never thinking that part of our purpose is to supplant the other songs.
