Unceasing Worship (part 2)

Here’s an intersting thought from Unceasing Worship.

If we took music out of worship, would we have the same problem and the same set of solutions?  I do not think so.  It is not pleasant to realize how much of a burden is placed on ministers of music and worship because of the dependence on style change as the core of the solution.  Ironically enough, while a music minister is expected to make distinct style jumps from one service to the next, the preaching pastor my do nothing more from one service to another than to take off his or her robe or move from the pulpit to the chancel floor.  How out of proportion!  How perplexing to think of the burden we have placed on music, this fleeting human construct!  The problem is not with any one style but with the reluctance of people to rub up against a multiplicity of styles, for it is the rubbing - the creative friction - that could bring about the stylistic syntheses that the body of Christ so desperately needs.

Traditionalists have much to answer fro in their reluctance to understand that tradition does not mean stasis but change.  In their reaction against contemporary styles, they fail to understand that what they have gotten used to was once contemporary and often objectionable.  Contemporists likewise fail to understand how blunted their tastes are when only "their music" seems to do the trick and when what they are doing has, ever so quickly, frozen itself into a tradition.  So we end up with two kinds of shorsightedness, one supposedly old, the other supposedly new, and both wish fulfilling.  The separation of worhsip into preference groups is everyone’s fault, in that narrow musical satisfaction has turned out to be more important that style-proof outpouring.  I encourage people of all practices to become intently and intensely curious about each other’s ways.

Hard hitting to both sides I think. My question is, how do you change what is?  We will never experience perfect worship on this side of heaven, but yet we are called to be a Body of Christ.  How do you do that when the Body tears itself apart in the process?  No answers here, just more questions.