If You Are Easily Offended, Skip This One

Part of it is personal. By the time I turned 17, I’d had enough of egomaniacs and tyrants using the service as a means to bludgeon people with their style preference. Anything that even smells like that, even if it isn’t that, turns me off and turns me away.

A huge part of it is theological. There is no way to do “praise band” without turning the service into a “show.” Disagree? Find me one praise band that plays from a loft behind the congregation, where no one can see them except the pastor. A core purpose of a pop-rock performance is draw attention to the performers. I have watched and played in praise bands. I’ve never seen one that didn’t want, no, need to be seen. A guy with a guitar does not have the liturgical significance that an altar, a Bible, a crucifix, a font, or even a simple pulpit does. And I find it ironic that evangelicals tend to label as “idolatry” any and all significance attached to physical objects, yet their service is completely fixated on the power of the personality of the performer.

And as I see it, the praise band movement is an act of aggression against tradition. The argument about praise bands vs liturgy isn’t about whether music should be fast or slow, it’s about whether or not the Church should even have tradition at all. It’s certainly not about old vs new, as new hymns are written all the time. The difference is that a good hymn writer seeks to build, renew, and repair. Both musically and lyrically, a new hymn is intended to integrate organically into a church’s existing liturgical tradition. By contrast, the overt intent of “praise and worship” music is to tear down, replace, and destroy. Both musically and lyrically, praise choruses are intended to completely displace a church’s entire liturgical tradition by virtue of their incompatibility. The author of a praise chorus could not care less what the cant of his local liturgical tradition sounds like, because that stuff is for old people.

Don’t believe me? What exactly has the rock ‘n’ roll service not thrown in the garbage? When the praise band comes to town, anything is fair game, doesn’t matter if it was already old when your great-grandpa was a dapper fellow with a straw hat and striped jacket, showing off his Model A to the ladies. The last rock ‘n’ roll church I had the misfortune to be a part of had even taken to writing new creeds every few Sundays. They’ll occasionally throw the old fogeys a bone and sing “Take My Life and Let it Be” to a jaunty new tune, but that’s about all you get.

I guess it doesn’t really bother me as much when evangelicals do it. As evangelicalism has no concrete definition, a conduct of service with no foundation other than the whim of the worship leader is in a way quite fitting. I’ve been dragged along to a rock ‘n’ roll evangelical service within recent memory, and it didn’t make me recoil. I felt zero religious connection to what was going on and had the same feeling of interested detachment I get when watching a traditional dance in Mexico. When Lutherans throw out the hymnals and bring in the rock bands, though, it’s a betrayal of who we are. And I literally can’t sit through it. If you want to piss on our liturgy, you can do it without me.