Not too long ago I ran across an internet video that talked about a church in Finland that hosted a “Metal Mass,” wherein worship was conducted alongside heavy metal instrumentation and style, like electric guitars, headbanging drummers, rapid melodies, and soaring solos. This maybe fits for Finland, which supposedly has the highest per capital metal bands of any country, but I can’t see it taking off in Tallahassee. Maybe we would pioneer “trap worship” or disappointing “pop country/CMA worship”.
But it does bring up the question about the music that we do use in worship. The music we use is sort of genre defying. I guess you could say it falls within the genre of hymns, but some of our liturgical music doesn’t fit well there. I’ve heard people say it’s “classical,” but I don’t really buy that either. It’s certainly not something you hear played on the radio, even Christian radio. In fact, when people started writing new Christian music, that was when it had to get a genre – “contemporary Christian music”. I guess if you ask a hardcore Lutheran, our different hymnals are genres in and of themselves, i.e. “I like most Lutheran stuff, but that LBW is the worst….”
So we get questions like, “why does your pastor chant”? Ok, we don’t get that question here, but other Lutherans get it. We get questions that have subtle judgmental intonations like “why don’t you use X hymnal, isn’t it just the best?” We get questions about why we can’t just sing the same five songs over and over again, or at least every Christmas and Easter so that everyone can follow along. We get questions about why we are so set in our ways and unwilling to allow guitars and drumsets into our worship when Psalm 150 clearly allows all that AND bagpipes.
In fact, I guess the closest thing that we have to worship music is, well, the Warchant….or the hymn to the Garnet and Gold…or the FSU Fight Song. You’re not going to hear those songs on the radio, but they have meaning. Everybody sings them together. It is a point of togetherness, not separateness. We can listen to whatever shoegaze pop (yes, that’s a music genre) we want to, but when we come together, we’ve got our songs. And those songs, like the Warchant, rally us around something that has meaning – and for us, that something that has meaning is God. I actually remember hearing stories that Pastor Tom, my predecessor here, would chant the psalm of the day according to the Warchant tune. There’s maybe something to that.