Music As Entertainment

A few things popped out in my mind when I was reading this first article. The major thing that I want to address was when Capps said ‘Art can easily become decoration, and music can become mere entertainment’ (p.41 line 11). It’s true that one of the things that attract a person to a church is the worship music that is being played. I mean one of the questions that are usually asked is whether it is contemporary or a traditional style of worship at the church. And more recently I hear people leaning more towards a contemporary church because of the style of the music that is being played.

However, I understand what Capps’ is saying because honestly I a lot of times have difficulties picking out I guess you would call it ‘praise’ songs rather then ‘worship’ songs. One of the people I was interning under this summer separated the type of songs that you would pick in a set as ‘praise’ and then the ‘worship’. The praise was more of the beginning up beat set of the service where everyone is up and clapping their hands where as the worship is where people would be lifting there hands in worship. I am not saying that I agree with this separation but I am just using it to get to my point about the music becoming a form of entertainment. It seems that the upbeat beginning songs a lot of time reflect that entertainment side of things, because that is almost the first impression that a new person visiting a church get’s when they come in. But the reason why I have a hard time picking these songs is that it’s a lot harder to find up beat songs (that aren’t always being played) that actually have some sort of meaningful message in the song. It’s challenging for me personally to find up beat songs that will both please the standard order of service (where you start with a couple fast songs to get things rolling (entertainment almost) and then going on with the more worship set) and then also go along with the theme of what the whole service is about. How do we deal with that?

We are almost stuck in trying to accomplish the task of getting people to come to the church music-wise with I guess an entertainment type of music to start, but then having to totally change directions with the whole set to fit the actual message or theme of the service. Is this where we need to start bringing out some sort of a unity between secular and sacred songs? Like T.S Eliot was saying: ‘religion and culture are aspects of one unity, and also two different and contrasting things’ (p.40 line 2, 3). True this secular and sacred music have contrasting things dealt within the song but at the same time aren’t they also similar in the basic fact that it is music? ‘…beautiful music existed to remind us of the divine and perfect beauty’ (p.38 line 17). This doesn’t say that only beautiful sacred music reminded us of the divine and perfect beauty but just music in general. So with this said would it be the right idea to start incorporating secular music as well as sacred music within liturgy? Or would this be completely out of the question?