This continues a series of posts from an extensive interview conducted by Leadership Journal with young worship songwriters Keith & Kristyn Getty who hail from Northern Ireland. The complete text is available here.
LJ: So are modern hymns the solution to the "worship wars"?
Keith: Church music fights did not begin twelve months after The Beatles started and the church realized that there was new music. These arguments about what Christians should sing have gone on all of time, from rival monasteries to rival cathedrals. They're not going to end. And so anybody who prescribes a musical solution is blowing smoke.
LJ: Well put.
Keith: There's a reason why the Lord made the church a multigenerational, multiclass, multiethnic, diverse group of people. I doubt that everybody in Acts had the same musical tastes, if they were Jews and Greek and slave and free and Sabean and different things.
LJ: If modern hymns won't end the conflict over musical styles, what makes them relevant?
Kristyn: Well, the truth is always relevant. If the songs are full of truth, they will never be out of date.
Keith: Good art is good art. There's no such thing as good Christian art or good contemporary art. If you can create something that's good, it has lasting value.
I think part of the reason contemporary worship has been so successful is that it has put truth in the current idiom and melodies most can sing. But it's important we don't lose the point. The point isn't to be contemporary for contemporary's sake. If you try to create something that's contemporary, it's got a very limited shelf life because it only lasts as long as those things are considered contemporary. I think that's why everybody's rushing to go backwards to try and find something from the past—because they've totally lost context of where they're at.
LJ: Do modern hymns help re-connect the church with the past?
Keith: Sure. For instance, the hymn "O Church Arise" was a study of Lutheran hymnody. Luther's vision of the church was that it was the only hope for the world we live in, for the lonely person with the lonely eyes we walk past in the street. That's quite relevant today. "Speak, O Lord" was a study of old hymns of illumination that prepare the church for the preaching of the Word.
Kristyn: In America, "new" is a positive word. The positive energy and desire to do new things in America is certainly wonderful. But the truth is life isn't always just a blank page. The Christian life is about remembering, not just all that God has taught us through the Scriptures but also from church history. Every generation must find new expression, new color. But we're the worse off when we disconnect ourselves from the past and are always in pursuit of a blank page. That's true in the church and in society as a whole.
C. S. Lewis says that learning is not so much like a train going from one station to the next, so that we leave something and go on to another. Instead, in the way that a tree grows, you add rings to your understanding without leaving the old behind. We can harness all that is good and should never be forgotten from the past as we move on. We're still moving and ebbing and trying new things, without becoming disconnected from the root.
Keith: The contemporary generation talks a lot about songs having to sound contemporary for the unchurched to listen to. In my experience of having non-Christian friends attend Christian events or church, they're much more warmed when everyone is singing passionately and confidently, rather than somewhere somebody's trying to do something half as well as it might be done on MTV, or where everybody in the congregation is standing around and staring. Nine times out of ten, they're actually quite embarrassed by that.
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