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Congregational Song Issues

I led music at a recent event in the northeast. We spent one hour out of the weekend in a group, raising and discussing problems and issues related to congregational singing. Several themes came out as general concerns or problems, mostly in three main areas. Here are the actual comments I wrote down during the discussion.

Generational Conflict and Change

  • "Our people only want to sing the old, familiar songs." "We want to sing the songs we know."
  • "When you change the music we sing in worship, you're changing the identity of the UMC."
  • "How much can we change without losing the ability to worship?"
  • "Some people are uncomfortable with silence; others with sound."
  • "People are resistant to using multimedia and technology."
  • "People enjoy being an audience more than they do active participants. How do we get the people to become the performers?"
  • "People are not open to new and different worship styles."
  • "For us it's the issue of variety vs. stability — we are resistant to innovation."
  • "Our people have no interest in singing ethnic and multicultural music, nor do they know how to sing black, Korean, Spanish, hip-hop."

Expense

  • "We can't afford to purchase new hymnals or songbooks."
  • "We can't afford to purchase projectors, computers, sound, and amplification equipment to make use of the latest technology and stay current with today's publishing."
  • "We can't afford the books. The music licenses are too expensive, confusing, and time-consuming. The copy machine looks better all the time."

Leadership

  • "We are limited in the music we can sing by the limitations of our organist."
  • "We can't find a trained musician to lead us."
  • "Our pastor only looks at the words and never considers the music in picking the hymns. The result is that we sing lots of awful hymns, usually badly."
  • "We have a new pastor and now all we sing are modern, strange songs that we don't like."

This all sounds pretty hopeless? Lots of problems and frustrations! Each one of these could probably be used as the subject of a separate article. How do these sound to you? Are these also your problems and frustrations? Do you have others? Do you have answers or suggestions? My guess is that many of these issues have been voiced by people of many generations, while some of them are clearly problems of our own time. We need to keep raising them and looking for answers and solutions.

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