Was reading up on Max Lucado who is one of my favorite authors. He's pastoring a church called Oak Hills Church of Christ (now just called Oak Hills Church) and then I was reading about that denomination.
Apparently, they follow new testament conventions quite strictly, while old testament laws and practices are generally respected but not necessarily followed. One of the conventions that they follow is that instruments are not allowed in the worship service. According to them, there is no record of instruments being used in new testament worship, and therefore nothing is gained by the introduction of them in the worship service. Of course, for many of us musicians a worship service without any instruments would be unthinkable.
So! What do you think of this practice of banning instruments from the worship service? Would you agree with it? Do they actually have a point? Would instruments actually be distracting from the worship rather than adding to it?
3 comments:
Hi! I came over to this blog from your other blog, which I found because you wrote something about Quali at Giant mall :)
Musical instruments were being used since Old Testament times during the tabernacle worship in King Solomon's time. Musicians played a prominent role in leading Israels armies.
I have to disagree with the teaching that bans instruments because the new testament did not mention any of it.
I suspect the reason for that was more of a cultural thing rather than a theological thing.
I gather that you're a church musician (I play the bass, what instruments do you play?), so I'm sure you've seen how God's Spirit is able to move with the assistance of music.
Let me pause to note that there is a difference between music played properly and just noise...
Music ushers in God's presence. It's the language of our emotions. I believe God has built music into each of our beings.
In fact, God created the most beautiful archangel Lucifer, with a musical instrument (harp) in his body! It was rather unfortunate that Lucifer fell because of pride.
Oh well, this was just a scattered and unorganized response.
I think it would be nice to get to know you further. You sound like a nice guy and it looks like we have some things in common.
Please do continue writing posts for this blog!
hi Adino!
I had almost forgotten about this blog as I've been almost too busy to work on it!
I agree with your reasoning that it could be mainly a cultural thing. For that matter, how much of our Christianity is simply just a cultural thing rather than an actual theological matter?
Yes, I'm a church musician. I play the piano, keyboards, bass, percussion, violin, and I also sometimes do backup vocals, sound board and worship lead. I used to serve as the Creative Arts director at church but I'm on sabbatical at the moment :)
hmmm reading this post reminded me of what dr jeff told us all in history 1. In the baroque period the only instrument allowed in the church service was the organ n every other instrument was a work of the devil... those were boring times.. not sure how this relates to yr blogpost though...
Post a Comment