In my last post I began dealing with the pragmatic approach to ministry. Pragmatism is a philosophy based on the idea that whatever it takes to accomplish a goal is right. In the modern church, what is right seems to be whatever draws a crowd. Whatever it takes to get people to come to church is deemed acceptable even if it is unbiblical. Of course great liberties are taken with the text of scripture to get it to say what the pragmatist wants it to say in order to support his premise. One of the many methods used to “grow a church” is the use of contemporary music.
I addressed in that post my past association with this philosophy of ministry, and I ended it with information about a book by Dr. John MacArthur that drew me away from pragmatism, and directed me toward a biblical understanding of ministry. Finally I mentioned Dr. MacArthur’s Church and ministry in Southern, California as an example of a very large Church that has been built on the consistent biblical exposition of scripture and entirely without the superfluities of the pragmatic model of church growth.
In this post I want to give another example on the opposite side of the country. The Church is the Tenth Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, PA. The pastor for the last 9 years has been Dr. Phillip Ryken. Before him the pastor was Dr. James Montgomery Boice. Dr. Boice led the church from 1968 until his death in 2000. One of their predecessors was the celebrated Presbyterian preacher and theologian Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse who was pastor from 1927 until his death in 1960.
Tenth Presbyterian is an inner city church and under Dr. Boice’s strong conservative leadership, it became a model for ministry in America’s northeastern inner cities. When he assumed the pastorate of Tenth Church there were 350 people in regular attendance. At his death the church had grown to a regular Sunday attendance in three services of more than 1,200. Also under his leadership, the church established a pre-school, a high school known as City Center Academy, a full range of adult fellowship groups and classes, and specialized outreach ministries to international students, women with crisis pregnancies, homosexual and HIV-positive clients, and the homeless. Since Dr. Ryken assumed leadership, the church has continued on the same course established by Dr. Boice. It has grown to an average Sunday Morning attendance of 1500 with additional ministries in place.
I mention numbers again only because that seems to be the driving force in the western church and the motivation behind the pragmatic ministry. And I want to share with you what Dr. Boice who pastored a growing church, has written about one aspect or pragmatism in particular, contemporary music in the church.
Let me first mention that Dr. Boice held degrees from Harvard University (A.B.), Princeton Theological Seminary (B.D.), and the University of Basel, Switzerland (D. Theol.) Also a prolific author, Dr. Boice wrote nearly forty books on a wide variety of Bible related themes. Most are in the form of expositional commentaries, growing out of his preaching: Psalms, Romans, Genesis, Daniel, The Minor Prophets, The Sermon on the Mount, John, Ephesians, Philippians and The Epistles of John. Many more popular volumes: Hearing God When You Hurt, Mind Renewal in a Mindless Christian Life, Standing on the Rock, The Parables of Jesus, The Christ of Christmas, The Christ of the Open Tomb and Christ’s Call to Discipleship. He also authored Foundations of the Christian Faith a 740-page book of theology for laypersons.
In his book, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace, Dr Boice writes the following paragraphs.
"We need to talk again about music. For the fact that worship must be an actual meeting with and adoration of God must have bearing on how we use music in our churches. This is a divisive subject, because music establishes emotional holds on people and we find it hard to give up anything with which we are ‘in love”. Yet we need to think about the role of music carefully, if only because it is so engaging and influential. Can we use contemporary as well as traditional music? The answer is similar to deciding whether we will use extemporaneous or recited prayers: It depends entirely on what these elements actually accomplish in the service.
If the chief end of the service is to turn the attention of the worshiper away from himself (and even from the service itself) to God, then the first question we have to ask is whether this is what our music does. Does it direct our thoughts to God? Does it remind us of something about God and encourage us to praise him for being like this? Does it recall the great acts of god in our salvation and evoke a sense of gratitude for what God has done? Or, on the other hand, does it evoke merely and emotional, claphappy feeling of euphoria? I am afraid that much of our music falls in to this latter category, with the result that people leave our services having laughed and shouted and sung, saying, “Wasn’t that a wonderful worship service?” when all they really mean is that they had a good time. They may not have had even one serious thought about God.
There is a second question we need to ask about our music, though it is harder to answer than the first question: We are told in Philippians… “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, what ever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Phil. 4:8). That is a clear instruction to pursue the best in many categories. And if that is true generally, it is certainly true of music. We should use the best music we can find.
God is worthy of the best. We must not offer him blemished sacrifices. Part of a minister’s responsibility is to point his congregation to the best in every area. Ministers should be lifting their people up to the best music as well as art, literature, and other things, rather than allowing them to slip downward to increasingly lower levels of the surrounding secular culture.
Sometimes we are told that music is merely a matter of taste. I heard that one summer from a pastor in whose church I had been speaking. I had been talking about a loss of absolutes in our culture and had mentioned the impact this had on Christianity. I said something about the need for better music and he challenged me by saying that “music is just a matter of taste”. He had agreed with my teaching about the need to combat the world’s relativism. So I pointed out that what he was saying was an example of that very thing. If there are absolutes, all music cannot be equally good. For aesthetics, as in other areas, some music will be better that other music both in itself and for what we are trying to accomplish with it.
I am not saying that it is always easy to know what music is better. We need the help of our musicians here. But if we have nothing else to go on, one helpful test is whether a specific piece or style of music has withstood the test of time, just as we might ask what literature is best by determining which of the older authors are still cherished…
This applies to the words we sing. The compositions of Martin Luther… John and Charles Wesley, or Isaac Watt are clearly better than the repetitious babble of so many writers of today’s ubiquitous praise choruses. Why should we commit our selves so tenaciously to what is manifestly poor?
Is the use of pragmatic methods including contemporary music necessary to build a large church and reach the 21st century culture for Christ? Evidently not. We have seen examples of very large churches in both ends of the U.S. that are bringing people to Christ, (in large numbers), without pragmatism and these are just two illustrations. These can be multiplied many times on many different scales in churches all across the country. I want to contend, and will in a future post, that evangelism is simply an excuse, a smoke screen, for an ulterior and far less honorable motive, for the insistence in many modern churches that contemporary music be used almost exclusively.
In my next post we will begin to look at the biblical principles that should characterize the kind of music that we use in worship.
I addressed in that post my past association with this philosophy of ministry, and I ended it with information about a book by Dr. John MacArthur that drew me away from pragmatism, and directed me toward a biblical understanding of ministry. Finally I mentioned Dr. MacArthur’s Church and ministry in Southern, California as an example of a very large Church that has been built on the consistent biblical exposition of scripture and entirely without the superfluities of the pragmatic model of church growth.
In this post I want to give another example on the opposite side of the country. The Church is the Tenth Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, PA. The pastor for the last 9 years has been Dr. Phillip Ryken. Before him the pastor was Dr. James Montgomery Boice. Dr. Boice led the church from 1968 until his death in 2000. One of their predecessors was the celebrated Presbyterian preacher and theologian Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse who was pastor from 1927 until his death in 1960.
Tenth Presbyterian is an inner city church and under Dr. Boice’s strong conservative leadership, it became a model for ministry in America’s northeastern inner cities. When he assumed the pastorate of Tenth Church there were 350 people in regular attendance. At his death the church had grown to a regular Sunday attendance in three services of more than 1,200. Also under his leadership, the church established a pre-school, a high school known as City Center Academy, a full range of adult fellowship groups and classes, and specialized outreach ministries to international students, women with crisis pregnancies, homosexual and HIV-positive clients, and the homeless. Since Dr. Ryken assumed leadership, the church has continued on the same course established by Dr. Boice. It has grown to an average Sunday Morning attendance of 1500 with additional ministries in place.
I mention numbers again only because that seems to be the driving force in the western church and the motivation behind the pragmatic ministry. And I want to share with you what Dr. Boice who pastored a growing church, has written about one aspect or pragmatism in particular, contemporary music in the church.
Let me first mention that Dr. Boice held degrees from Harvard University (A.B.), Princeton Theological Seminary (B.D.), and the University of Basel, Switzerland (D. Theol.) Also a prolific author, Dr. Boice wrote nearly forty books on a wide variety of Bible related themes. Most are in the form of expositional commentaries, growing out of his preaching: Psalms, Romans, Genesis, Daniel, The Minor Prophets, The Sermon on the Mount, John, Ephesians, Philippians and The Epistles of John. Many more popular volumes: Hearing God When You Hurt, Mind Renewal in a Mindless Christian Life, Standing on the Rock, The Parables of Jesus, The Christ of Christmas, The Christ of the Open Tomb and Christ’s Call to Discipleship. He also authored Foundations of the Christian Faith a 740-page book of theology for laypersons.
In his book, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace, Dr Boice writes the following paragraphs.
"We need to talk again about music. For the fact that worship must be an actual meeting with and adoration of God must have bearing on how we use music in our churches. This is a divisive subject, because music establishes emotional holds on people and we find it hard to give up anything with which we are ‘in love”. Yet we need to think about the role of music carefully, if only because it is so engaging and influential. Can we use contemporary as well as traditional music? The answer is similar to deciding whether we will use extemporaneous or recited prayers: It depends entirely on what these elements actually accomplish in the service.
If the chief end of the service is to turn the attention of the worshiper away from himself (and even from the service itself) to God, then the first question we have to ask is whether this is what our music does. Does it direct our thoughts to God? Does it remind us of something about God and encourage us to praise him for being like this? Does it recall the great acts of god in our salvation and evoke a sense of gratitude for what God has done? Or, on the other hand, does it evoke merely and emotional, claphappy feeling of euphoria? I am afraid that much of our music falls in to this latter category, with the result that people leave our services having laughed and shouted and sung, saying, “Wasn’t that a wonderful worship service?” when all they really mean is that they had a good time. They may not have had even one serious thought about God.
There is a second question we need to ask about our music, though it is harder to answer than the first question: We are told in Philippians… “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, what ever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Phil. 4:8). That is a clear instruction to pursue the best in many categories. And if that is true generally, it is certainly true of music. We should use the best music we can find.
God is worthy of the best. We must not offer him blemished sacrifices. Part of a minister’s responsibility is to point his congregation to the best in every area. Ministers should be lifting their people up to the best music as well as art, literature, and other things, rather than allowing them to slip downward to increasingly lower levels of the surrounding secular culture.
Sometimes we are told that music is merely a matter of taste. I heard that one summer from a pastor in whose church I had been speaking. I had been talking about a loss of absolutes in our culture and had mentioned the impact this had on Christianity. I said something about the need for better music and he challenged me by saying that “music is just a matter of taste”. He had agreed with my teaching about the need to combat the world’s relativism. So I pointed out that what he was saying was an example of that very thing. If there are absolutes, all music cannot be equally good. For aesthetics, as in other areas, some music will be better that other music both in itself and for what we are trying to accomplish with it.
I am not saying that it is always easy to know what music is better. We need the help of our musicians here. But if we have nothing else to go on, one helpful test is whether a specific piece or style of music has withstood the test of time, just as we might ask what literature is best by determining which of the older authors are still cherished…
This applies to the words we sing. The compositions of Martin Luther… John and Charles Wesley, or Isaac Watt are clearly better than the repetitious babble of so many writers of today’s ubiquitous praise choruses. Why should we commit our selves so tenaciously to what is manifestly poor?
Is the use of pragmatic methods including contemporary music necessary to build a large church and reach the 21st century culture for Christ? Evidently not. We have seen examples of very large churches in both ends of the U.S. that are bringing people to Christ, (in large numbers), without pragmatism and these are just two illustrations. These can be multiplied many times on many different scales in churches all across the country. I want to contend, and will in a future post, that evangelism is simply an excuse, a smoke screen, for an ulterior and far less honorable motive, for the insistence in many modern churches that contemporary music be used almost exclusively.
In my next post we will begin to look at the biblical principles that should characterize the kind of music that we use in worship.
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