Regarding Worship Music

A very dear friend whom I highly esteem asked me to write an article on worship music following another article on his blog site by Chuck Colson who sited Donald Williams, Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Toccoa Falls College in Georgia. ( http://samshaw.wordpress.com/ ) It was a good article but something about it bugged me: It sounded like rules with an angle. Consider the following I have lifted from the article:

Williams writes, we must know “those marks of excellence that made the best of the past stand out and survive so long.”

These marks of excellence “are not arbitrary.” They “are derived from biblical teaching about the nature of worship.”

In all honesty, not only does that not bother me, I agree with it. But one of the marks of excellence—"musical beauty"—became very subjective, showing Williams' own proclivity nourished by a classical music training. Again, I do not object to that but it is, none the less, subjective and not necessarily "derived from biblical teaching about the nature of worship." Although I may also agree with Williams' statement that "more recent praise choruses seem to ignore all the rules of good composition," I must also note that this is subjective. After all, as much as I love classical music and adhere to the aforementioned rules of good composition, I have never seen any evidence that those rules, and no others, came from scripture and that anything else can not be truly worshipful.

I can not say I disagree with Williams' tastes, put I do not think that having 75% of an assertion be inspired by scriptural principles justifies tucking in an additional 25% made up of personal conviction and placing it under the same label. Most teachers would give 75% a "C" or "D" and that's not exactly what we should be aiming for.

I do like Colson's conclusion:

Surely all sides of the music wars can agree that we want to praise God by singing hymns and spiritual songs that are biblically true, theologically profound, poetically rich, and, yes, musically beautiful.