Anybody who knows me personally will tell you I do not believe in old-fashioned traditions. I don't let guys pay for first dates, I don't expect men to hold doors open for me because it's chivalrous, I don't think women should feel obligated to have kids if they don't want to, etc.. I find a lot of societal expectations rooted in tradition to be limiting and often backwards-thinking.

So why then, am I so against modern worship music?

My opinion doesn't come from an inexperienced place. I grew up in a large church with two services: one "traditional service" (i.e. singing out of the hymnal, an organist or a small orchestra playing along) and one "modern service" (i.e. the twenty-somethings with electric instruments and a drumset). I would attend the traditional service when I wasn't in the kid's church, and when I was old enough to join the youth group I was only hearing the contemporary worship music.

My opinion also doesn't come from an uneducated place. As a kid I had a basic knowledge of most major composers (Beethoven, Mozart, etc.) and now I'm in my third semester of music history. As a very, very condensed rundown for those of you who are not musicians: The development of western music over the last 500 years has been fostered by the church, but also at odds with it. Pre-Renaissance composers were fighting with the catholic church to have any music in the service at all, and Renaissance-era composers fought to have harmony in their music. Some denominations don't allow women to sing in church. Some denominations still don't use instruments in their worship. And of course in the golden days of rock-n-roll, many christians found the electric guitar sound to be "satanic". But here we are, the twenty-first century, and churches across the country are getting out the electric instruments every sunday to praise the same God as we did with chant centuries ago.

I won't get into the entire history of "contemporary worship music", but. It's mostly young people trying to find new ways to praise God through music, and the older generations finding it annoying. Such is the natural order of things.

But... wait! I'm a young person! What's my problem?

So here's the actual opinion part: I find modern worship music to be repetative, ingenuine, and unnecessary.

As I'm sure anyone who's watched youtube in the last five years knows, most pop songs can be condensed into the same four chords. The reason is that these chords are easy to learn and crank out over and over again. The psychology of familiarity is also important in this: listeners like things that sound familiar. Modern worship music tries to appeal to the widest demographic possible (so as to encourage younger generations to think christianity is "cool", but I won't get into that) so you end up with songs that all sound about the same in harmony, melody, and instrumentation. If you play four or five of these in a row before the sermon, as is typically done, the congregation will get bored of the same C Major, F Major, A minor, G Major sequence.

The lyrics of these songs also separate this new genre apart from all other church music: the majority of these lyrics are written by singer-songwriters and aren't necessarily from anything. In "traditional" worship music, the text (or lyrics) is sacred, meaning it comes from a religious writing. That's the power behind the words in this song (Acts 26:14), this song (Psalm 81), or this song (Matthew 6:9). These absolutely beautiful works all have lyrics that come from the Bible, the central text of Christianity. While not every song from "traditional" worship music uses exact quotations, most non-contemporary songs are based off of passages from the Bible. The backing of scripture makes the song all the more meaningful. In contemporary worship music, the lyrics often come across as generic and void of any significant meaning. As one of my friends put it, "Christianity Lite".

This is another ocean of thoughts I won't dive too deep into, but I have found that the way people react to "God's spirit moving them" during contemporary worship services to be oddly similar to the way people react to the power of the music at rock concerts. So I encourage you to ask yourself: what is really making you put your hands in the air?

Also, at the risk of sounding stuffy and elitist, the training and practice you need to put in for "traditional" worship music greatly outnumbers the hours you'll spend clunking out four chords on an electric guitar. I know this because I learned four chords on a guitar in one night, but it took me weeks of rehearsals to play the fast passages from Handel's "Messiah" on the violin. And when it comes to singing, getting an entire choir to mesh well and learn words is infintitely more difficult than one guy slurring a string of "Jesus is the rock" over and over again.

Now I'm getting mean. My apologies.

As a musician I know there are more ways to improve or expand upon musical ideas than to just resort to the same overworked and now unimaginative setup. If you think that church music is boring, I encourage you to find new ways to build upon the traditions of old composers. Let's hear a dubstep version of the 23rd Psalm, or a rock opera version of the Christmas story. Perhaps I'm just one of those people who will be laughed at or considered old-fashioned in fifty years, or perhaps this new genre of unfortunately bland worship music is just a phase and won't be around for more than twenty years. Either way, I encourage you to get creative and don't let any traditions or expectations you dislike dictate your worship style.