Music and the Soul

We’re living in a time when there is a manifest crisis of worship in the church. It’s almost as if we’re in the midst of a rebellion among people who find church less than meaningful. They’re bored. They see the experience of Sunday morning as an exercise in irrelevance. As a reaction against that, it seems that almost any church we visit is experimenting with new forms and new patterns of worship. This experimentation has provoked many disputes over the nature of worship.” (R. C. Sproul. A Taste of Heaven: Worship in the Light of Eternity.” Orlando: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2006: 13, 14)

The second symposium of the newly formed Alliance of Christian Musicians’ Northwest Chapter opened with this quote, and an invitation to explore issues of a possible crisis of worship among America’s Protestant and evangelical churches.

Much of today’s argumentation regarding worship music center around genre: the tired debate of hymns versus CCM-style “praise” music. Dr. Overman, retired professor of religion at the University of Puget Sound, threatened to overturn the accepted dichotomy by moving the discussion from form to anthropology and ontology. He argued that,

…what has happened, especially in the last 400 years and more in the 20th century, is that human beings have generally lost the perception that we live in a hierarchical universe. All of what were formerly called the “higher levels of reality” have been brought down to one level. The loss of the hierarchy, when applied to the psychology of the Christian, (a hierarchy of the Holy Spirit, one’s own spirit, the mind [thinking, feeling, will], and the body) has been pressed downwards so that human beings today do not first respond by asking questions about their spirit or thinking, but mostly always about their emotions and states of will. The worship wars can be traced fundamentally to the fact that people, when they come to church, have lost the sense that there is such a thing as an extraordinary state of being, extraordinary space, time or manner of speaking. Everything is reduced to the level of the ordinary...defined principally in terms of states of feeling and will.”

Most intriguing about Overman’s remarks is that, if correct, they could fundamentally shift the discussion from an argument of forms and preference to a discussion of what it means to be a Christian human being and, in light of such a shift, might unearth more useful ways to break the stalemate.