week 3 post church folk

Ok so in the first article I’m a little lost. Is the article discussing how low church worship and high church worship are not far of from each other in there way of worshipping. In the article he commented that “low folk church and worship are about people expressing there feelings for God.” Also it was said that for high church folk worship and church are about coming into God’s presence and giving him his dues in ways appropriate for him. To me that sounds like the same thing. Then in parts of the article I felt like the high church folks were being trashed like there way of worship wasn’t true worship it was just more of a show and they were singing for themselves. If that’s what this article was about then I fully disagree. How are we to know when someone is singing I worship what there heart is like. It’s not for us to judge. Anyways I might be totally off so could someone clarify what the author was getting at? I am lost and I read the article more than once.

Kempf

Conrad Kempf missed something.  The fact that worship should be centered on God, not us, does not mean that it will not reflect our contemporary culture.  God created culture, and I do not believe it is against His will that it is an ever-changing entity.  He said, “Sing to me a new song.”  When we bring to him in worship all that we have tried to make beautiful (which includes contemporary musical styles, rhythmic styles, lyric styles, dress, architecture, decor, etc), we are not focusing worship on ourselves, but are rather offering what we are to Him.  In this we should be very careful not to throw out that which is beautiful among the old (e.g. priceless hymns like “O, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”), but pretending that boring rituals and stale music is more pleasing to God because it is less focused on ourselves is a fallacy that Kempf is in danger of committing.  Are we, the modern church, in danger of taking the focus away from God by incorporating our modern culture into the everyday worship service?  Explain : )

Music Without Love

When I was getting near the end of the “A Church Snapshot and Ensuing Thoughts” article I started to realize something: The writer was going nowhere with the article. He simply wrote about what the church has looked like musically for the past some odd years. He was doing fairly well until he said “I am not saying that there is something wrong with how this music functioned, only that it was not the same as the music that its adherents are contrasting with it and finding less than worthy (paragraph 4, sentence 10).” What? Everything he said before that, from the story he shared at the beginning to just the language he used, said that he thought church should change how it does music. Then he says that he isn’t saying there is anything wrong with how churches do it. It seems to me that he just said that to save himself from getting alot of emails blaming him of heresy. If he thinks we’re doing wrong (which I think he does) he should just say it.

Anyway, having said that, I must say that the article as a whole was rather intriguing and enlightening. I liked what he said about singing one song that says “lets forget about ourselves and magnify His name, and worship Him” and then instead of singing a song that does that, we just sing another song that says the same thing. I think what he is hinting at is that our songs shouldn’t just be picked because we like them but rather because they are related to one another. This also branches into the idea of having the songs be linked to the sermon that will be taught. Could it be, even, that the music we play because we like it is actually played in vain, without thought or love, and in the end won’t profit us anything?