|
BCMC JOURNAL
2008
President's Address
Rebuilding the Wall: Reclaiming Music as Ministry - PART ONE
By Tom Bolton, 2008 SBCMC President
Go to Part Two
Last night I gave you a cursory look at our conference theme, and today I would like to expand on this theme of “Rebuilding the Wall: Reclaiming Music as Ministry.” I want to reiterate that when I talk about music ministry as a wall, I am not speaking of a wall that is built to divide, but one that is built to fortify—a wall with deep, strong foundations, built to last for generations.
The Original Wall: Vision and Construction
Before we look at rebuilding the wall, let us look back to how and why the original wall was built. During the early part of the 20th century, music in Baptist churches consisted of congregational singing of hymns and gospel songs, with vocal music in most of the larger Baptist churches provided by a paid quartet who sang solos and choral pieces. These musicians usually had no formal theological training. In smaller churches it was left up to volunteers, usually with little to no musical or theological training to stand before a congregation and, in whatever way they could muster, “encourage” them to sing. In both cases, they did the best they could with what they had, but there was no plan or method of training and utilizing music and musicians to accomplish intentional ministry.
A wall of music ministry fortification was needed, and God sent directed a few visionary men to act as “architects” of that wall. In 1925 I. E. Reynolds, the first dean of Southwestern Seminary’s School of Music, presented a resolution to the SBC, meeting in Memphis. He proposed a committee of five who would meet and bring back to the convention recommendations “for the advancement of music in the SBC.” The resolution passed and a committee was appointed with Reynolds as its chairman. The next year the committee brought back a resolution that indicated a need for improvement of the quality of church music through more competent leadership and the addition of more full-time ministers of music. They also acknowledged the need for more concern and involvement by pastors in this area and the need for more emphasis in denominational colleges. Finally, they recommended the establishment of a church music department within the Sunday School Board (now LifeWay) in Nashville. While the resolution itself was approved and referred to the Sunday School Board, that body rejected the request for a separate department.
However, the Board did not completely ignore music. In 1935 the Sunday School Board employed as music editor Baylus Benjamin McKinney, a Louisiana native well-known as composer, church musician, and Southwestern Seminary professor.
In 1937 there was a motion made at the convention to take a survey “to determine the actual state of music in the churches and to ascertain their needs.” This motion passed, and a survey was taken the following year. The results showed a critical need for a music education program for church musicians. By 1940 B. B. McKinney had managed to edit and publish the Broadman Hymnal, which for the first time established a common body of worship materials among Southern Baptists. He also inaugurated an annual Church Music Week at Ridgecrest (1940).
Finally, in 1941 the Department of Church Music was formed, with McKinney as its first secretary. I am not sure why there was such a delay, but in 1944, a comprehensive report from the 1937-38 survey, augmented with other data, was presented to the 1944 convention in Atlanta and was adopted. The report “instructed” the Sunday School Board to add music personnel to “develop a music program equal in scope to the other programs being sponsored by the Board and states of the convention.” The report of 1944 suggested such an education program should involve churches, associations, states, colleges, universities, seminaries and other institutions making up the convention. Cooperation was needed in order to develop curriculum and material, as well as to promote and encourage local-church participation in these programs.
One of the best moves B. B. McKinney made was to hire as his assistant in 1946 another Louisiana native who had spent his formative years in Texas, W. Hines Sims. Together McKinney and Sims developed the first study courses in church music (1946), and began publishing a periodical called The Church Musician (1950). Upon McKinney’s untimely death in an automobile accident in 1952, Sims took on the role of secretary and served in that capacity until 1970. It was by his vision and under his direction that graded choir curricula for children and youth, church music periodicals, festivals, and inspiring weeks devoted entirely to church music at Ridgecrest and Glorieta were developed. He was the founding editor of The Church Musician and editor of the 1956 Baptist Hymnal. And it was his idea to establish the Southern Baptist Church Music Conference, an idea which came to fruition in 1957 in Chicago. More than any other individual Hines Sims was responsible for developing the model church music ministry in the SBC and during his tenure the music ministry assumed a prominent role in many Southern Baptist churches.
The Wall Begins to Crumble
The future seemed to be bright for Baptist church music but the rules of the game began to change. Up to the 1960s building the music ministry wall had been based on a classical education rooted in historical models. But along came a cultural shift that had been in the making for centuries as technology, especially communication, developed and music, as well as other forms of entertainment, became accessible anytime, anywhere through electronic reproduction.
There were other culture-shaping factors during the 1960s that converged to create a “perfect storm” that appeared to set all of society on a revolutionary new course. These factors centered on the generation born immediately after World War II, often called “Baby Boomers” due to the overwhelming numbers of children born to couples reunited after the World War II.
Also in the early 60s the medium of television was coming of age, and Madison Avenue woke up to the tremendous commercial opportunities in this huge market niche of “teens with means.” Although every generation of adolescents develops its own unique expression of burgeoning independence from the preceding generation, television expanded our “neighborhood” to include the entire nation and later the world. Instead of interacting with family and neighbors after dinner, our social communion and “family time” consisted of the new spectator sport of nightly cultural indoctrination emanating from total strangers with products to sell. In fact, one did not have to even bother with dinner first, because we were provided with “TV dinners”—instant pre-packaged food to accompany instant pre-packaged entertainment. The “couch potato” with an insatiable appetite for entertainment was birthed and would merely exchange their couch for a pew on Sunday morning.
Coinciding with this “Ozzie and Harriet” lifestyle were influences of a much more ominous nature. This was the first generation raised under the threat of nuclear warfare as we were engaged in a nuclear arms standoff that was dubbed the “Cold War.” There was also much social unrest as the longtime oppression of black Americans was painfully corrected through the forced integration of schools. Add to that the political upheaval caused by assassinations of President John Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy. The nation was also embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam, and we saw nightly images of the horrors of war, as well as the civil unrest in massive anti-war demonstrations. The nation’s youth, aided by the media that fed them, began to question all traditional authority, institutions, values, and beliefs that collectively make up the culture.
The expression of this budding cultural revolution among youth found its voice in a new music style called rock ‘n’ roll, which swept the world with its rebellious rejection of the styles of text, melody, rhythm, and instrumentation of traditional forms of popular music. Rock ‘n’ roll soon became synonymous with youth culture, and as Martha Bayles points out in her book Hole in Our Soul: the Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music 2,for the first time in history the youth culture became the dominant expression and driving force of American popular culture at large. Culture that had been based on a historical continuum is suddenly cast adrift from its past, for youth have no memory of, or trust for, the past. Richard Weaver, in his book Visions of Order: the Cultural Crisis of Our Time, comments on the rise of youth culture:
It is anomalous that a civilization of long history and great complexity should defer to youth rather than age. The virtues of youth are the virtues of freshness and vitality, but these are not the virtues that fit one to be the custodian of the culture that society has produced. Deferring to youth is another way of weakening continuity. Mark almost any young person, and you notice that he does not see very much, in the sense of understanding what is present to his vision. He perceives, but he does not interpret, and this is because he is too lacking in those memory traces which lead to ideas and concepts. The memoryless part of mankind cannot be the teachers of culture; they are, however, ready learners of it if the real teachers show faith in the value of what they have. 3
Not only was popular culture taken over by youth culture, but Kenneth Myers observes that it has also “assumed the role previously reserved for high culture” 4. Martha Bayles and others have chronicled how the trends in popular culture since 1960 have also contributed to a decline in high culture in what Jacques Barzun calls “destructive modernism.” 5 Sociologist Daniel Bell writes in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, “Modernity has been defined as ‘the tradition of the new.’ . . . The old concept of culture is based on continuity, the modern on variety; the old values tradition, the contemporary ideal is syncretism.” 6 Therefore, it comes as no surprise that arts education has been all but eliminated from our educational system, so there is little guidance in the development of taste other than that of mass media, which tries to please as wide a market as possible, resulting in the lowest common denominator powered solely by popular demand.
So now the counter-culture of rock music and the value system attached to it have become the shaper of culture in general. Through the years rock music, and there are 187 variations of rock music listed in the 2006 edition of All Music Guide 7 , has become increasingly prone to what Bell describes as “a concern with violence and cruelty; a preoccupation with the sexually perverse; a desire to make noise; an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood; an effort once and for all to erase the boundary between ‘art’ and ‘life’; and a fusion of art and politics.” 8
The dominance of popular entertainment culture on our society is evidence of a breakdown of western values based on the Judeo-Christian faith, as well as the influence of the postmodern perspective that there is no absolute truth, only personal perspective, opinion, and feelings. Now the focus is not on what is true, pure, right, or excellent for mankind, but what is in it for me. When relativism takes truth out of the equation, all that is left is hedonism, narcissism, and pragmatism. If feelings and opinion are all that matter, there is no reason for contemplation and reflection, only reaction. Everything is judged by how it makes me feel, how it entertains me. It is no longer a culture of “us,” but a culture of “me,” totally unconcerned with what has preceded and shaped cultures of the past.
How has this cultural shift played out in our churches? The 1960s saw the Roman Catholic Church revolutionized when Vatican II welcomed the vernacular in both text and musical styles into the mass. Soon afterward the Jesus People movement appeared in California with the emotional zeal of newly converted youth from the hippy generation transferred to rallies, and eventually to the church, through the only culture they had known, that of rock music. And the message was also influenced by the hippy movement, for it centered primarily on God’s love without His wrath or judgment.
The Jesus People fostered an entire new music industry called Christian Contemporary Music (CCM). In an attempt to provide teenagers with religious music they could call their own, they just added religious texts to music like they were hearing on their favorite rock station. Beginning with special youth rallies, they were soon holding Christian concerts, and writing youth musicals to be performed at church, like Ralph Carmichael’s Tell It Like It Is and Natural High. Many evangelical churches rightly saw this as the youth version of the gospel song tradition the adults had embraced years earlier when bringing the popular music of the Sunday school rally and evangelistic meeting into the worship service to stand alongside, or in lieu of, traditional hymns of the faith.
It did not take long for the rock style to migrate from special youth events to the worship service in the local church. And it was not just pop-music style bands and vocal groups that were added, but drama, skits, puppets, dance, and most anything they thought would reach a culture drawn to entertainment.
The Christian concert and recording industry has become such a lucrative business that a number of the publishing and recording companies have been bought by secular companies for their profit potential. So now the forces behind the companies who are making decisions about marketing to Christians are often not Christians themselves. Many concerts are billed as being worship, though it is the artist's name that tops the ads, not God's. And because of their popularity, fans want to emulate these CCM concerts in the worship services of their local congregations.
In 1985 Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death 9sounded a warning against the culturally destructive nature of entertainment as the goal of a generation. Kenneth Myers transferred this warning to the church in his book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, 10 in which he stressed the importance of tradition and the continuum of church culture passed down from generation to generation in a self-sacrificing deference to that culture, rather than only caring about what meets our own personal desires and entertainment needs.
This infiltration of the entertainment philosophy into the church has in large part spawned the "worship wars." However, this is not so much a war about worship as it is about culture and what is "appropriate" in church. The music so influenced by entertainment—that "lowest common denominator" that is dumbed down to be all-inclusive—has not unified the church, but has caused hostile church splits or, at the least, subdivision into services segregated by style. There is much intolerance and musical elitism on both sides of the issue, and both are hurling accusations concerning the motives, spirituality, and even salvation of those on the other side.
Go to Part Two
Notes:
1. The term “Baby Boomers” is generally applied to the generation born between 1946 and 1964. For a thorough study of characteristics of different generations in relation to church ministry, see Gary McIntosh, One Church, Four Generations: Understanding and Reaching All Generations in Your Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002).
2. Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Chicago: The Free Press, 1994).
4. Kenneth Myers, electronic mail to the author, March 5, 2007.
|
