Church music

OK, I want to start this particular set of rants by a simple and bland statement:

99% of music in church for worship is unmitigated crap.

Note that I do not mean that the musicians are not talented, at least some of the time. Or the worship-leaders and song-choosers are not doing the best they can. If all you have is crap, and everyone expects the same sort of crap, you have to provide crap.

I am at Sonar, and have all sorts of thoughts coming from it - Sonar is a music festival in Barcelona, mainly focusing on "modern" - generally electronically inspired music. Kraftwerk were headlining one night, the band who have inspired many of the other acts, I suspect.

I went to hear Elektro Guzzi the other day. They are not everyone's style, I would accept - 50 minutes of bass, drum and guitar playing, somewhat avant-garde.And pretty load - at the ear abuse loud level.

And yet I was there dancing away (and I have another post on dancing, so I will put my comments there), along with many others, and enjoying myself. That was, for me, a form of worship. It was engaging with the music to help me touch something of the Numinous - the divine that is other.

And yet I have heard - not specifically to that, but in general - "how can you worship to that?" to which I have two answers.

1. Watch the audience, the musicians. Get involved. And then reassess your definition of worship, if you still need to.

2. How can you actually worship to some anodyne 70's MoR music? Which is roughly the genre of most "contemporary" worship music. It is boring elevator music. The words are meaningless unless you are part of the "elite" who understands Christian-speak. And are therefore a theological exploration. How on earth can you worship to that?

Later that day - well moderately early the following morning, actually - I was listening to a Skrillex set. I think I was the oldest person there - probably by over a decade. I suspect that I was the only one there with a theological qualification. It was 4:15 in the morning, and theologians tend to spend that time finishing carefully worded arguments not listening to brostep at an insane volume.

Once again, it is not everyone's cup of tea. Not entirely mine either, in fact, but I was glad I went, glad I got a chance to hear him. This raised a different question for me, another interesting one. If this is what younger people listen to - and believe me, they do - how on earth can we expect them to come into church and sing to kum-by-yah sound-alikes? Why would they? Why should they?

Of course, a lot of the answers you get to this boil down to the fact that these are not really the sorts of young people we are reaching out to. We are really looking for nice, respectable, classical-music-liking youngsters. Or at least, MoR-liking youngsters. These are the ones we can possibly reach, and they are hard enough. We will leave the clubbing-Skrillex fans to the youth worker, who can mold them into the shape we like first.

I see some 20-30 thousand young people who God loves and cares for, whom he wants to reach, screaming and shouting and having a good time, and I wonder how on earth it is possible to reach them, to enable them to engage with a wonderful, loving God. A God who, I suspect, loves the banging beats rather more than we suspect.