Music used in Worship of Great Consequence

“Text and music should match each other well. If the text is trite and meaningless, it has no place in worship. Yet at times profound texts are wed to music with inferior structure or harmony, so that, as Leonard Payton put it, ‘the aesthetic form communicates fun and good times to most people rather than the woreship of Almighty God…’ This does not mean that light or popular music is ‘bad’; rather it suggests that not all music is appropriate to worship or to particular thoughts and ideas about God.”

Dr. Paul S. Jones, Singing and Making Music

One Response to “Music used in Worship of Great Consequence”

  1. hmmm… I wonder how Jones would fit African Drums and Dancing for worship into his list of appropriate worship music. Maybe he should visit the morocan house churches where their music looks dramarically different from anything you would hear in America.

    If I may stir the pot a bit, it is an incredibly ethnocentric thing to say that certain types of music are appropriate for worship. Because what Jones has done is to look at the spectrum of Western classically structured music, and then created a personal category for appropriateness. Talk about man-centered theology. This one takes the cake.

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