The “Music Wars” are raging across the land. Those who love and insist on contemporary worship music and a more relaxed approach are pitted against those who hold with determined, unflinching devotion to the hymns, creeds, and liturgy. The fight is fierce. 

Music Wars describes how churches fight and some of them are destroyed over the battle of what kind of music and how loud is it to be played. But it is not just the style of music that is at the center of this war. Something much more important is at stake:  The Content of Worship and the Way we offer Praise to God are what matter.

Music Wars really boils down to much more than a battle over about musical taste or the casual approach to worship, with un-tucked shirts and jeans versus tradition hymns with coats and ties; dresses not shorts for the ladies, button-down shirts and not tee-shirts for the men.

The issue is not about the kind of music so much as about the content of the music and the quality of the music that is selected. It is not about the casual approach to the worship experience. It is about being focused on the Biblical content of God’s commands for his people in worship. That is where the battle lies.

God-honoring worship could contain any “style” of music, contemporary, country, bluegrass, classical, barbershop, you name it. But that music must be filled with Biblical content. That is what matters. But the music must also be melodic: it must be singable, regardless whether it was written by Chris Tomlin or J. S. Bach.

So much of contemporary music and many of the old hymns are, frankly, vapid. Their content is meaningless or silly, or in some cases, they are unbiblical in content or doctrinally imbalanced. In addition, some contemporary songs and many of the old hymns are either so simple as to be infantile or their melody or rhythm is so complex as to be utterly unsingable.  

Music for worship should meet a few tests if it is to benefit God’s people as we seek to praise and worship God together:

• Are the words of the songs consistent with the Biblical Gospel? This would be fairly easy to test. Just line up some passages from Scripture that support the aspiration contained in the hymn.
• Is the music beautiful? Here again the matter should be fairly easy to figure out. Is the music melodic? Does the meter and timing of the song lend itself to congregational singing?

Bad contemporary music and poor hymns fail in the content of the words they use. Or they fail by being too difficult to sing. Some of the old hymns have odd timings and very difficult melodies; contemporary worship often fails when it uses “jazz” style timing and a cadence that is really impossible for a congregation to sing. You can tell whether a song is singable simply by looking around the congregation when the music is being sung. If most of the people are not singing, the music fails the test.

• Does the music inform, or teach the content and impact of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Those who have sung the old hymns know that some of those songs are just “bad poetry sung to worse music” (something like a comment that C.S. Lewis quipped after a particularly distressing worship experience in the Church of England). 

A song that is selected must pass the test that it is melodic. A key to this is the ease with which the congregation can learn the song, and the ability that people have to find harmonies within the melody. This test of harmonies is a good one. If the congregation has trouble simply singing the melody and cannot rise to harmonies, there is something missing. 

Worship should be the center of our Christian lives. It should be filled with gloriously beautiful music and these songs should be sung by an engaged and focused congregation that loves the songs and benefits from them. Other parts of the traditional worship experience have been ejected as being irrelevant or arcane to the modern worshiper. But confession of sins, assurance of pardon, even reciting a creed, can all be done with freshness and they can result in the encouragement of the worshipers. Even in a strenuously contemporary service, things can get stale if they are done the same way over and over again. 

Worship is for God, not us. But when God is glorified we are transformed by his presence and by the glory of his Person, his Word, and his Redemption. 

There really is not a “Music War.” There is a content and purpose war that those who love the Word of God and who have been changed by the Gospel desire to win for the Glory of God when his people gather to worship.