A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship Part 2 (Lim, Ruth)

Welcome to the Theology in Motion podcast. Join us for conversations about the Theology of worship, its practice, culture, and design. The Theology in Motion podcast is by the Center for Worship Leadership, Christ College, Concordia University Irvine in California.

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Welcome to Theology in Motion. My name is Steve Zank. On behalf of the Center for Worship Leadership, we're glad that you are here. Today's episode is a part two episode with Doctors Lester Ruth and Sweet Hong Lim regarding their new book, *A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshaped the Protestant Church*. I'd like to invite you to go back and listen to part one if you like, or stay here and start with part two. I think it'll work out that way as well. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Lester and Sweet Hong as much as I did. Thanks for joining us. Enjoy!

Hey, welcome to Theology in Motion. My name is Steve Zank. On behalf of the Center for Worship Leadership, we're glad that you are here today. We continue our two-part conversation with our distinguished guests, Doctors Lester Ruth and Sweet Hong Lim. Lester Ruth is a historian of Christian worship. He works as a research professor of Christian worship at Duke Divinity School. Before arriving at Duke in 2011, he taught at Robert E. Weber Institute for Worship Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity School. Dr. Sweet Hong Lim is a Deer Park Associate Professor of Sacred Music at Emmanuel College in Toronto, the director of the Master of Sacred Music program. Before joining Emmanuel in 2012, Sweet Hong served as an assistant professor of church music at Baylor University and lecturer of worship, liturgy, and music at Trinity Theological College in Singapore. Together, these two have researched the history of contemporary praise and worship, a term which we will probably again clarify here at the beginning of our podcast today. Their latest book is right here, *A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshape the Protestant Church*. It's what Baker calls a landmark volume, but Baker's the publisher, so, but I'll tell you what—they're biased—but this book is getting a lot of positive press. It's a fantastic book; it's a very important book, and so I'm excited to talk about the second half of it here today with these gentlemen. So, hey guys, it's a joy to be with you again today. Thank you for taking the time to join us here.

Thank you. Our pleasure. Good to be here.

Let's just start off this one, just for the listener, for a quick recap. When we're talking about a history of contemporary praise and worship, what are we getting at?

Well, it's a fusion of the two main terms that—excuse me—it's a fusion of the two main terms that the two large groups pursuing this new way of worship use. So, praise and worship tends to be the preferred term among some contemporary worship, particularly among evangelicals, or Mainline Christians, especially who are white and in North America, tend to use the term contemporary worship. And so, in order to come up with a term that was all-embracing and all-inclusive, rather than coin a completely new word or phrase that had no relationship to what came previously, we just fused the two together.

Yeah, and there's actually a really subtle thing in there. You'll notice that whenever we use it as a technical term, we put an ampersand rather than the word “and” between the words “praise” and “worship.” Um, and that's just a little subtle clue that praise and worship, in that respect, needs to be held together. So, we talked a long time about this, about what to call it, and that’s… yeah, you live together. It’s a great term; it’s technical.

So, join us if you're if you're hopping onto this conversation right now, just know there's a part one if you're interested in hearing more about the first stream that we identified in this history, which is around the biblical interpretation of Psalm 22:3, and the idea in that discussion is is that God comes and inhabits the praises of his people, the importance of music in that tradition, and a way of understanding what worship is and how God, in that tradition, is made manifest through the worshiping of the people and how that movement now impacts our worship today. But today, now in this conversation, we're focusing on the second part of this history, which is going to be about bridging the gap culturally. And let's let's kind of maybe identify that: if the if the problem in the first conversation identified as an absence of perceived absence of God in worship, what is the perceived problem now in this second history? Me home, no, Lester, over to you.

Okay. The problem with the first group is the perceived absence of God. Um, the problem in the second group is their fear of the absence of people—other, base-level people, just coming to worship services. And at a more fundamental level, the um the inclusion of new people into the Christian faith. Um, so that's where the gap is: the gaps between an inherited form of worship and the perception of where people are right now, and the idea that there's a gap or discrepancy, or the two are not in sync; in fact, that the worship can be off-putting to the people that you want to reach.

Now, let me jump in a little bit quickly here. Uh, we think that this is possibly a Protestant feel, that there's a gap missing, that the people are are not in church. But I think if we look back into church history—I love church history—Vatican II tried to address this particular issue as well. They are very concerned about the active participation and the presence of the people in worship, and so that it is not just sitting there but really actively engaged. And this goes back to the Liturgical Movement of the 18th, 19th century. So, it is not just a Protestant problem, but you can find that documented in the Roman Catholic tradition as well.

Yeah, so we talked about the history of this movement, and there's a way in which it's a very, very, very, very long history, uh, back to the beginning of the Church, of how we communicate this gospel to people and maybe more or less successfully throughout the history, corrective movements throughout. So, when we talk about the modern, uh, where this is lived out now in in your book, where do you start? Where was the gap being felt in our more recent history?

Um, well, let me go back and pick up on something you just said, Steve, in terms of this being a very long history. The concern for reaching people is not a new Christian concern over the last 50 to 60 years. I mean, Matthew through Revelation—that is a concern within those 27 books—because um uh Christianity is a missionary movement, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, in terms of having a mission from God, a mission of God. So, the concern about people has always been there. Where we think this particular story arises, um, it's an outflow of the Enlightenment philosophical developments of the 18th century and some shifting cultural backdrops, particularly capitalism and the rise of democracy, where you don't necessarily perceive that authority is inherited; authority is granted um from the people. So, both capitalism and democracy are populist sort of sensibilities; um, they're both pragmatic sort of sensibilities. Um, you don't win elections by getting the least number of votes; you win elections by getting the most number of votes. Yeah. And so, figuring out how to be an appealing candidate, yeah, um, at least here in the United States, is is this mainstream sort of cultural thinking, politically, you know, for the better part of um almost 250 years now. Um, you know, and then capitalism, uh, you know, your business doesn't get profitable by being off-putting to people; your business gets profitable by being appealing to the people, um, and them desiring and wanting it, or your business produces or um can do. And so, um, even though it sounds crass when you start talking about taking those cultural sensibilities over to the church, um, I really think there's some um it's a porous line; it's it's kind of a cultural perspective, headwaters in the Enlightenment, some particular cultural expressions, and then bit by bit through the 19th and then especially into the 20th century, just really chomping on to certain aspects of the church and becoming um the main way that some people in the church and some leaders think about organizing church life.

Yeah, great. So, so then, as we have this Enlightenment and the rise of democracy in America, the use of these standards of finding a way to get more people involved or to reach more people, and like Sweet Hong was talking about, the idea of active participation, how do we get them involved in this process of church? Was there a point in which it uh wasn't just uh new techniques but almost a crisis, a felt crisis moment, or did it start off as a a crisis, or to start off as an attempt to use these new techniques?

Um, in the history, there's a recurring element of anxiety, angst, um, and usually the ones who are the groundbreakers are pushing for new innovations, or the ones who are feeling the angst the most and are most fearful that what we have been doing in worship or in church life is growing out of sync with people and therefore will increasingly be less and less effective. Um, and you—it's that anxiety is a recurring element in this history. Um, you, you know, there's some clear examples in the 19th century. My favorite one is Catherine Booth, one of the co-founders of the Salvation Army. And if and if you look at the Salvation Army, which most people just think of as kind of a charitable relief organization, but actually operates as a church, yeah, um, when I was in seminary, my field placement for two years was in the Salvation Army Corps, believe it or not. So, I got used to all their Sunday schools and worship services; I played in the brass band. Um, but anyway, you know, their approach was to appropriate Victorian-era military images, symbols, and ritual and to use those to reshape what church life looks like. And so, that's where all the uniforms came from and the distinctive terms and that sort of thing. Um, uh, there are examples of this in the early 20th century; there are examples of this in the mid-20th century. And the book, we really highlight Youth for Christ, this para-church youth organization doing some really kind of radical adaptation uh in order to meet youth. And again, it's all anxiety-driven because uh this saying that um uh the future resides with youth, and if you've lost your youth, you've lost your future, is a really dominant idea starting in the mid-20th century in the United States. And so, you get especially evangelicals concerned about, we've got to find ways to connect with these youth in order to preserve the faith, preserve the church. Um, and it just 1980s, 1990s, it was baby boomers, you know, um, uh, different versions of it. I, you know, they're—gosh, I'm gonna go out way out on a limb, and Sweet Hong, please jump in before I just completely jump off this limb—I even think feminist revision of liturgy in the last 40 years is a take on the same sort of approach: the inherited way of worship's out of sync; we have a group of people who no longer feel at home, can't connect, can't hear the truth from the inherited way; let's reshape the language, let's reshape the symbols, uh, let's reshape the ritual, and we'll—and that group of people will be able to connect with it again.

Right. And also the whole idea of reshaping the platform in which this the gospel is being delivered. So, I think if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s, we know the advent of radio, the advent of television, that was when they capitalized that as uh the media platform in which to really proclaim the gospel. So, you actually have gospel messages mimicking TV shows or mimicking radio shows. So that whenever they use—because that's who they are targeting—when they tune into the radio or when they watch the television, they actually will be fed with good stuff rather than the decadent stuff. So, there's again—all this actually means that the they were innovating ways of trying to reach out to the young people because, like Lester pointed out, the young people were so-called the generation that they must have in order to preserve Christian tradition. So, it was a kind of a strong gamble that they did; they really wanted to capitalize whatever avenues are possible, so long as the gospel message remains the same.

I want to I want to come back to—this is an important conversation about the generations and the marketing research—can we go back one level? I think it'd be helpful to talk about uh the biblical theology of this and where it comes from. That's one of the very strong uh points in your book is you take these movements and and point out the way that that the people that were pushing them forward were driven by a certain theological uh understanding or biblical passage. What would you say is the behind this movement from the Bible? What what theology is driving this movement?

Um, I think there are about two or three elements that are critical. One is a general one from the New Testament—well, for that matter, from the Old Testament, too—which is God's people, God calls God's people to a mission, you know, that uh when people are saved, redeemed, and reconciled with God and become part of the church, the there's the missio dei, there's the mission of God that they're called to participate in. The folks who who normally advocate this in terms of worship usually articulate that very evangelistically: is the proclamation and the carrying of the gospel to new people, calling them to faith and incorporating them in the church. So, if that is not a particular verse as much but a kind of a general sensibility that you see in all of the apostolic writings, uh, the other thing that they point out is that unlike the Old Testament, which at certain points in the Pentateuch gives excruciating detail about how to organize the worship space and the particular procedures and what the minister should wear—when you get—you get all that detail in the Old Testament, but you get a relative silence in the New Testament, right, which they interpret as freedom and liberty. Um, I—or if I can use a Lutheran term—much of everything’s adiaphora. Okay, it’s just—if it’s useful, okay, but it’s—there’s great great freedom.

Yeah, yeah. We might say this—much of their organization, much of the way we organized our worship is around humanly devised institutions for good order. Yep. Some of it we would say is divinely instituted, especially our opinion about word and sacrament, uh, but a lot of the stuff around that service order is stuff that humans at some point in our history developed.

Yeah, yeah. See, and even the more radical proponents would even question the sacrament part of word and sacrament is divinely instituted. Going back to the Salvation Army, for instance, Catherine Booth is quite clear, drawing upon a relatively overlooked passage in Paul in First Corinthians, that he was sent here to preach the gospel, not to baptize. Um, so the Salvation Army says their origins have spiritualized all New Testament references to baptism and communion, and there's some Quaker influence there, but that's a different history. So, you've got the general Apostolic impulse to evangelize; you have the relative absence of details of worship in the New Testament, which that translates as freedom; and then kind of icing on the cake, or the bow that wraps it all up, there’s usually a reference to a verse, First Corinthians 9:22, in which Paul says that he is willing to become all things to all people so that he might win them. And it’s part of a discussion about his own Apostolic willingness to adapt in order to reach both Jews and Greeks. And so, Paul becomes the great kind of exemplar of um radical adaptability in order to do what you need to do to get the gospel heard by the greatest number of people.

Mm-hmm. So, let me ask you, Sweet Hong, as you get into this methodology, what are some of the distinct practices you see certain people picking up to try to bridge this cultural gap? As I’ve said on earlier on day, we’re looking into radio broadcast and television shows. So, what you see is that everything is scripted. If it’s not by the—flying by the seat of your pants, right? It’s not spontaneous, but it is guided; it is scripted. Um, and this gave rise to a whole new world of things like, well, if you want music, then you need to script it; you need to arrange it. So, you find that in this particular uh trajectory, you will have people like Ralph Carmichael, uh, uh, and all other composers that will actually create musicals. Everything is scripted so that the point of the context is that the gospel is preached. So, you have orchestration that you’ve never seen before. I mean, if you were to say that the gift people were very uh captivated by uh spontaneous music-making or just a guitar, just a piano—if you turn over to the get people, they are very strategic in what they are wanting to do. So, you find that musicals would be the ending in the 1960s, 1970s, almost, and then churches just get into it. I mean, that’s how continental signals were organized; that’s how uh choirs organized. They were musical out there. John W. Peterson, which is very well known in in the church music world—well, I would consider him one of the get people because he would write *Miracles of Christmas* and things like that, and people would just get into it. Think of it as a Hollywood production but done in a local church. That was the idea of how they they made use of the musical ability of uh uh within the congregation or within the church to actually put up a production. Uh, so you see these mini-productions all over North America and even—and because I come from Singapore, I see that too in Singapore. Every year without fail, the churches that are that had the means will put up a Christmas musical, um, and it’s not just for fun; it’s actually meant to be an outreach to the people.

Yeah, yeah. That’s what we do.

Were there—can I ask you—I’m sorry, Steve, I interrupted you, but—no, you go ahead, go first.

Hey, Sweet Hong leads—youth musicals of the 60s and 70s—can you name some of the songs that came out of those that people still might know and sing?

Uh, well, some musicals are like, for example, um, *The Witness*, by—if I’m not wrong, it is by—by your goodness—is it like Camp Floria, or was it uh um what’s the name—our favorite couple that was that lived up in California—I don’t fall—moment—the name—sleep—my—sleep my mind. Um, and then there are other musicals that I know—what uh that I would be familiar—come alongside or something like that. Or—but I think if you just Google Christian musicals, you have a list of where they are from. What I was trying to bait you, Sweet Hong, to start singing—it only takes a spark—oh, that’s good, guys—which is one of the songs coming out of those musicals. Yeah, because uh I mean like even people like uh the the get—the Gators—yeah, when they have something beautiful, you know, that’s part of that particular trend. How about your friends uh Jimmy and Carol Owens?

Uh, yeah, they really freely—you ever see—yep, they did—they read it—I came out of one of the musicals. I think that’s right.

Yeah. So, a lot of the songs that somehow got—got into our hymnals came from this particular stream as well. Yeah, just like Amy Grant also had some stuff that went—that ended up in the hymnal as well. So, we call those traditional contemporary songs. So, yeah, it’s a mixed bag.

Yeah. So, at the end of these musicals, would there be an altar call, that kind of thing?

Yeah, there’ll be an altar call. So, it mimics a little bit of those Frontier meetings where there’ll be an evangelistic message and then there’ll be an altar call. Now, think about Billy Graham—that’s the kind of idea that you’re talking about. The the way that Josh Beverly Share words will put the songs together, there’ll be a big combined choir, they would sing, they would narrate, and then at the end of the musical, there will be Billy Graham preaching the message and then issuing an altar call. Yeah. So, what—that—that’s the way that you would function in in this particular River.

I’m glad you brought up Billy Graham because he’s not often associated with this uh liturgical phenomenon. But one of the interesting things I learned when we were researching this is I didn’t realize Billy Graham’s undergraduate degree at Wheaton was in anthropology. He learned how to read people and people groups and to figure out ways to reach them. And he actually—he’s behind the scenes—oh, yeah—and several of the groups advocating this um innovative, radical liturgical change for youth. You see, if if Billy Graham was alone by himself, he wouldn’t be as successful, but he had George Beverly Shea—that big baritone voice—I mean, who can ever ever forget *Just As I Am*? He would sing it like many, many times, and there is—there is a trigger in which bringing people—coming forward. I mean, I was trained as an evangelistic counselor when Billy Graham came to Singapore, right? We were always—so, okay, you listen for that voice; the moment he starts that particular song, then you need to be ready to go forward and usher people to the front. So, yeah, there’s this partnership, music and the preaching of the word, that comes together uh in in this particular stream.

Steve, we’re just kind of taking over this conversation; I hope you don’t mind, but everything that Sweet Hong says triggers something to me. The listeners will go back and listen to our prior podcast. Sweet Hong just mentioned a couple of things that both connect to the people developing praise and worship who are mainly Pentecostals, but is also simultaneously different. So, for instance, everyone in this history is concerned with flow, the good flow to the service, but the praise and worship people want to use flow in order to help the discernment of God’s presence. People in this—the Contemporary worship world, the gap-thinking people—want to avoid—they want good flow because bad flow is boring.

Yeah. Right. You know, who wants 20 seconds of dead time on the radio, or—right—or when you’re—when the commercial freezes up—is the dead time. Lack of good flow is boring. Similarly, everyone involved in this history brings an instrumental approach to worship that is—and it’s a very Western sensibility; it’s been around for a thousand years. Worship does something; it accomplishes something. The praise and worship people just think the instrument is affecting God. If we praise God, we’ll be moved to come and be present among us. The the Contemporary worship people also have an instrumental notion, but the hammer is hitting not God but people. If we worship the right way and offer them something that’s appealing to them, they will be moved by it. Um, so it’s very, very common sensibilities but applied very differently. It is as if you had one group using a paintbrush in order to take a shower in the morning and the other group using a paintbrush in order to eliminate weeds from your garden. Um, you—you can do the same task with the paintbrush, but you put it to different ends.

Yeah, yeah. That last thing you said, Lester, about about uh about the targeting uh in order to—that different people groups that haven’t experienced—that’s I think a very interesting part of the conversation in the book. You—you raise the the awareness uh after World War II, the the rise of generational thinking, and how there’s now something called a youth culture. And can you—can we speak about then that process of generational thinking and the need to meet uh the cultural needs of different groups and how that informed worship at this time?

Well, thanks, Steve, because I—I think we found it a fascinating part of the story, too. Um, you know, it’s interesting when you discover something about your own way of thinking, you know, and Sweet Hong and I—I’m a little bit older, but we’re about the same age, and you’re—I mean, all of us today tend to organize society in terms of generational people groups, you know, and I even know—I’m a baby boomer; I know who the Millennials are and the Gen X. I mean, I know—we just do it automatically now. If you’re in the United States, it was fascinating to see that that wasn’t always the case, uh, that it’s really a 20th-century development. And in terms of a youth, it’s really a post-World War II development, um, in which there is just widespread consciousness that the people who are beyond childhood but are not yet in full adulthood, who are in this transitional period…

That teenagers, um, into the early 20s, they have their own kind of, uh, world, um, and after World War II, with the relative peace, uh, the financial prosperity, uh, increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques, you know, so part of our worldview is shaped by the commercials and the advertisements that we see, um, and and you start seeing, you know, things targeted and marketed for particular age groups—music in particular. But I was rereading the section of the book, um, uh, you know, I I've got to forget the numbers; I I think youth were spending 75 million dollars on records and 25 million dollars on deodorant, you know, in the late 50s, early 60s. You know, but that's all targeted marketing. Yeah, um, and and so there's a sense that somebody between the ages of 13 and 22-ish, you need a specialized church ministry, and you need specialized worship services, and you need specialized worship music, um, for them. And that if you will do it, it's almost like the Field of Dreams movie: if you will design it and build it, they will come. Yeah.

Is there a sense that as our awareness of generational differences, you know, increases—because, you know, World War II created a certain cultural experience, but that now you have television creating a different cultural experience, you have the internet creating a different cultural experience, you have social media creating a different cultural experience—it's almost as if in today's world the stratification of generational cultural differences would require five different services that target five different groups, at the least. And that's probably just a simplistic way of viewing culture, especially in our, uh, day and age. You know, here in California, we have so many different cultures beyond just age group differences. Uh, does it does this way of thinking lead, you know, was there a correction at some point? Did they realize this way of thinking was going to result in so many different services? You know, how did that function and move forward into our reality? How do we deal with that? Well, and and some churches, they actually designed four or five or six different services. Um, one congregation we review fairly extensively in the book—a Lutheran congregation in Glendale, Arizona, Community Church of Joy—they have they had what I call a, um, cinematic approach, um, you know, just just like you go to a modern movie theater that has six screens, you don't expect the same movie to be appearing on all six screens; you expect at least five different movies, and perhaps the most popular one on two screens on alternating times. So a Community Church of Joy and other congregations did the same sort of thing.

Hey, there's pushback, um, in terms of how how small do you keep slicing that pie in terms to come up with a definable age group, um, you know, so I I think it's probably still pretty commonplace in medium to even large churches to have a service that's geared for the adults, to have a service that's geared for the children, and perhaps to have a third service geared for the youth. Um, Sweet Hong and I visited a church once in Toronto; I think we were together. Yep. Um, oh, I forget the name of the church, but uh, Richmond Hill, you know exactly which church I was talking about. So it's this—well, they do have a youth service there, but there are other, um, division of services are by different dialects of Chinese. Ah, amazing. Oh, there's a in their Cantonese, a Mandarin, a youth service, and an English service. Right. Yep. But everybody in the church is ethnic Chinese, though, right? Yes. And and this is because of the the generational gap. So, for example, the first generation that moved to North America, they will hold strongly to the Cantonese—we just did come from Hong Kong—and then they want to do an outreach to Mainland Chinese, and they would have to use Mandarin because Mainland Chinese don't speak Cantonese. So they would then have a separate Mandarin service for the Mainland Chinese. Then their kids, generation 2.0, will all be schooled in Canada; they all speak English, so they would want to have a youth service but purely in English, and they will be the group that will be singing Hillsongs, uh, Elevation, and all, uh, all Vessel music—that would be that particular generation. So when you go to this church, you will hear three different types of repertoire in the church, but there's—they're all, like, lesser said, they're all ethnic Chinese, but they have a very different cultural sound for each group of people. Do they have an English service too? Uh, no, they don't do English service; they only do it for the you—the young adults and the youth—would be in English. But when they all put—well, they try to have at least three or three or four combined services; that's when they will have to do multiple cancellations at the same time. It's quite complicated.

You said the United Nations. What's up? To go back to your original question, Steve, about pushback, the the problematic thing, both pastorally, scripturally, and theologically, is that the church is one, and we expect the church's unity to be able to be expressed and worshiped, too. There's one Lord, one faith, one baptism. And so as soon as you bring the one baptism into it all of a sudden you're talking about—well, the church is essentially unity needs to be expressed liturgically. So there's a tension here. And so if you if you just start subdividing and you don't ever worry about the unity, I mean, not only do you eventually hit the boundaries of your own creativity and, yeah, um, you come down to a fundamental problem: how how can you actually express the theological unity of the church if all you're doing is subdividing a congregation? And what's interesting to me in the conversation is this this method privileges large congregations. So you have the local small, rural congregation that has resources for a single service; it seems like there's a way in which some of these movements left them behind because because besides, like, for example, in in the late 60s, there was some development of, like, uh, traditional style resources that maybe a small church would use because it's less creative, more just using what they have here that were very experimental, and even in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which I'm a part of, very experimental, uh, liturgy is written, but then what? After that, they seem to disappear—in Mainline, at least in my experience. Uh, I don't know, can you talk about the late 60s maybe and talk about the explosion of of experimentation?

Oh, sure. Um, do you want me to do this way home, or do you want to go ahead? Okay, thanks. Um, those who know the term contemporary worship and and think of this phenomenon in terms of contemporary worship need to realize that there have been two big waves on it, and the first one came about in the late 60s, early 70s. One one of the more fascinating things you can do is to use an underutilized Google function called Ngram—so that's N as in Nancy, g-r-a-m—uh, it's a Google tool, and you can type in words or phrases and set the time parameters and see the frequency of publication of those words and phrases. And if you do that for contemporary worship, you can just see, um, a major increase in the frequency of that term in publications in the late 60s and 70s. And and you know what you're looking at is a surge of resources, descriptions of advocacy of this experimentation in order to make connection with—their term at the time would have been modern man, um, and by that they mean modern humanity, um, people are familiar with TV, people who have a global consciousness, people who expect visualization of truth, not just verbal articulation of it, um, uh, persons overwhelmed by entertainment ritual forms and persons deeply shaped by the anxieties of a nuclear-driven Cold War and racial and economic conflict of the time, not to mention the Vietnam War, which was deeply disruptive. So, um, so you get in the late 60s into the 70s the surge of materials, experimental worships—a term they use sometimes—but contemporary worship is the main term that's used at the time. And then by the mid-70s, late 70s, early 80s, the aspects of that that have staying power have kind of, um, it's like yeast; they've there they have seeped through the whole church, whether the surface is a surface is contemporary or not. And so you kind of have a backing off of direct widespread advocacy of contemporary worship, yeah, but there are there are certain things that stuck with us from that first period, um, the use, widespread use of lay readers, lay prayers, um, lay liturgy—so it's not just the pastor and the church staff leading the service, but we're bringing lay people up—that was one of the things, um, the updated English language, yeah, which we mentioned, yeah. You know, it's I'm still surprised there's no dissertation on this; it it took less than a generation to completely overhaul the type of English English-speaking Protestants were using in worship, um, something that had taken 300 years to develop got over 300 years got overturned in less than 20. Yeah.

I I have two I have two follow-up questions about this and I after that one as Sweet Hong about some instrumentation of this movement, but the first question is, do you guys know of any traditional style, no hymnal-based resources that offer different services for different generations? Or that movement of official hymnal resources never enter into the division of services by generation? Um, I I think the mainline denominations tickle that itch without ever—and they develop those resources without ever putting them into their official denominational book. Well, the the glow says that I can think of is the publication by Word, um, that attempts to have within the signal—of course, it's not denominational, but this publishing company puts in both contemporary worship music as well as hymns and creates introductions or medley linkage, so that is the only publication that I'm aware of. Uh, back in the 1970s and 1980s, the United Methodist resources, for instance, are denominational agencies are creating these and publishing them and distributing them and encouraging their use, but they're never brought to our large legislative body for a vote to become official resources like the liturgies that you see in our hymnal and our book of worship. Lutherans are going to do the same things, and Missouri Synod Presbyterians, I'm sure, are doing the same thing. Uh, Baptists just do this anyway because they're congregational, um, and then the independent publishers will do be doing the same thing. Another feature—this one I'll bring up—is when the the English language used the thees and the thous—we've got to start to say it's archaic language; you need to update this language. And if it's my understanding that these hymnals used to, when they're written, communicate an informality, is that right? Those those words used to communicate a closeness, and what's ironic today, I think in many of today's churches, people perceive the thees and the thous to to produce a distance or an honoring. And so it's almost like, uh, there's a movement sometimes in my experience where they say, well, I want I want to maintain those these and thous because because worship needs to be, uh, very majestic, and it helps me experience that, but is that is that a missed contemporarization? In other words, it's like, uh, if you really want to translate it from the way it used to be, you'd you would need to use informal language. I'm not a historical linguist, but I do think that these and thous, um, were an informal sort of approach. So I mean, oh goodness, and I'm oh, I'm deeply fearful some actual historical linguist is listening right now, so if I get this wrong, you can email me, and I'll issue a public—yeah. But it—English used to be more complicated in terms of the personal pronouns that we used for the for the second person personal pronoun—you—um, and so thee and thou, uh, were for addressing a single individual—you—not a collective—y'all—um, and if I'm remembering correctly, then thou were the forms that you used when you had a relationship with the person that you were talking to. I think if if I remember in crackling, I may be wrong on this, um, if you were trying to address someone just an individual that you didn't have a relationship with, I think you went to you as well as you use you for a group. Gosh, I hope that's right. If it's not, it's a lot of caveats there. It's all right; it's just a curiosity of mine. But over time, English simplified so that you became the go-to term for everyone, and just at a popular level, it's interesting how different regions try to substitute in collective multi-person yous. You know, in Texas where I grew up, it was y'all or all y'all or all y'all, which is the really inclusive you. And then where my daughter now lives in Western Pennsylvania, it's yinz for humans, and that's the collective you. I think it's spelled y-i-n-z. Amazing.

So let's go back now to the instrumentation; that's one major change in this contemporary movement. Uh, Sweet Hong, what what happened as we got into the, you know, throughout the 20th century and the 21st century, uh, you know, into our our experience today? What was the instrumentation like through this movement as it progressed? Well, the gay people stuck mainly to piano and organ for a very long time. I think it's only in the late seven—late 80s, I think that's when other instruments begin to creep into the church, like drum set, bass guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, uh, particularly drum set was a no-no for many churches. For me, I speak from Asia; we still associate the drum set whereas with Elvis and with secular music, with hip twisting and gyrating, and we should not be having the instrument in the church. So I think we began the piano—piano, organ—and then guitar—acoustic guitar among you, not electric—began to have its play, and subsequently then you begin to bring in, um, possibly drum set, and some churches will avoid the Johnson and say, well, we have a percussionist, and so they will play tambourine or shakers or things like that. Uh, I think that's where you begin to move, and what you will begin to see, I think early on you mentioned that contemporary worship used to have in different services, but churches are smaller will actually carve out a time within the order and plug in a segment of praise and worship or contemporary worship music, and when that happens, then you find that this assembly of musicians will come up and basically anchor that particular set, and that's just to engage the people that are there who wants to sing this particular type of song, but their main purpose is not so much to to experience the Divine, you know, but their experience was to engage the people on the ground. Yeah, so the focus is different, even though the songs are the same. I think I've heard I've heard a lot the phrase like a to sing in your heart language; is that something that that's in this tradition? Yeah, this yeah, that would be in this particular tradition. Yeah, you know, I and I'm a case in point actually, um, um, I mean, I grew up in a church home, but I've got two older brothers, an older sister, uh, who all came of age in the late 60s, early 70s, and so my house was just completely saturated in pop music and rock and roll of the 60s and 70s, you know, so I could sing along with a Beatles song; I knew how it worked; I knew how it felt; I know what the vibe and the rhythmic groove was much more than I knew anything about hymnody, um, and so that was my heart music, um, in fact, it it still tends to be—I I'm attracted to music that has strong, uh, rhythm sections in the instrumentation, um, if there's a bass guitar, I'm completely at home because I know what to do with that, um, learning to appreciate the organ, which I do, um, was like learning a second language to me, um, I can speak it; I can live in that world, but it will never be my first language. Yeah. I think that's that's the interesting rub of this experience of contemporarization—like you said, if you if you just allow every generational group or cultural group to have its own expressions, you start to take divide the church in a way that maybe it wasn't meant to be divided, but uh, are there other resources out there that are trying to help different, uh, folks from different cultural experiences to have the same service together? Is that—I've kind of experienced as a modern movement, maybe maybe a return movement to challenge some of these hyper Seeker-focused models to say, how do we get everyone back in the same service? Is that the blend? Is that the blended movement? I mean, what's that—what is that counter movement? Yeah, go ahead, Sweet Hong.

I I think right now in the music world, uh, Kevin Twit out in Nashville, Tennessee, uh, has this particular what we call the retune movement where he's seeking to recover, uh, Victorian hymn texts and setting it to new tunes; that's one particular approach. Is Stephen—Sandra McCracken has also done something similar with the Psalms; that's the latest album. So there are efforts by individual musicians and composers, uh, they are looking to say, can we put the the different styles with ancient texts together? Uh, that's one way in which it might be able to work, uh, of course with Kevin Twit or Sandra McClurkin, you're not gonna have a heavy rock band sound like Hillsong; I mean, that's not where they are; they they are much more folk-based kind of approach. Uh, Wendell Kimbrell is another one that's taking this particular approach—more laid-back, folk-based, uh, music making—in this way, uh, they are retuning of—I I used to do that back in the 19—1993, 96 when I was working with SC Canberra in the Methodist Church to try to engage Charles Wesley with new settings, uh, in which I—we try to have child strategy being sung in different kind of cultural contexts. So there are movements. So I think one thing that we don't really talk about in our book is how it's for churches; if they find difficulty in embracing the Contemporary worship package, the alternative that they had was a global song package. So rather than singing something from North America backyard, they want to sing something outside of North America. So I think if you hold those two intentions, then you can see what they are trying to do, um, in terms of having expression or their people that might somehow unify the people. So the one thing that unified people is nobody knows the song, so everybody has to learn the song at the same time; they grow it together, right? And that is the solution of global song. Actually interesting—I the listeners could also go and just—you can search easily, and you can come up with two bodies of literature that are also trying to push back here. There's a body of literature on, um, uh, cross-generational worship, you know, so how do you get people of different ages? And then the whole body of literature—a multicultural worship—um, but just the fact that you have two bodies of literature saying this is how you do this points to the fact that it's difficult to do, and many things lead us away from doing it. And and to be quite Frank, we live in a period of history where fracture and disunity are much easier to achieve than commonality and unity. Yeah.

Well, we're getting short on time. You could tell from these conversations—these two conversations, if you heard them both—that there's so much more in this book to talk about. So I really recommend that if you find any part of this conversation engaging to grab the book to read it; there's so much important stuff in here, and you use the analogy of a a river that's really throughout—it's very helpful, and you can see there's a lot of tributaries that we didn't go down today that are worthy. And so I really recommend that book to continue the conversation amongst your own teams—maybe your church or your pastoral staff. To close out our time, then I also ask you guys: is there anything important about this conversation that we haven't gotten to yet that we want to make sure we talk about before we we stop talking about this topic? I I guess for me it's a reflection on both of the rivers, yeah, um, and it's something that Sweet Hong and I learned from one of our common professors—James White, renowned worship historian—and that he taught us to respect and appreciate every way of worship on its own terms. Mm-hmm. That internally there's some sort of logic there, and so we worked really hard at trying to do that and to represent that fairly. And I think what that allows a reader—someone who might not be part of this history—to do is to actually ask and try to answer some important questions. In terms of the one River, it comes down to where and how do we expect to experience the presence of God in worship? That's a classic, yeah, yeah, CR Christian question, liturgical question, and it's one that the praise and worship people helped raise for us, um, the Contemporary worship Gap people helped raise the question of, you know, how do we will how do we meld, um, our call to worship with the other aspects of the mission that God has given us to be a presence and witness in the world, um, and you might want to come up with a different answer than what the Contemporary worship people do, but at least they're useful in raising that question for us. Yes, so that we don't essentially turn worship into the private ritual of a privatized clique that's unconcerned with the world that Christ has died for. And I I'll jump in a little bit and say though the the worship war is a misnomer. I think when you talk about worship war, you're actually pivoting to two different, uh, uh, aspect of the common worship that exists, because as Lester points out, right, the fundamental purpose of worship is to experience God, and just as an elephant being felt by blind people can be like a long trunk or a flat rough wall—same thing with worship. And I think we need to have this conciliatory approach and an open approach—be open-minded—and then when we read, then you can see where they are stemming from and look at the theological foundation that the people laid down for what they are expressing, and there's no right or wrong. I think that's important thing to keep in mind. So worship—worship war—where one side must win, the other side must lose—now we need to get away from that; that's past. I think we need to look at how can we synthesize so that so that God's people can truly engage in the worship of almighty God. I think that's the most important thing. Um, but I've got one last thought, uh, again triggered by something that Sweet Hong said, um, in terms of the worship Wars, I I can remember when we were in the midst and the heaviest fighting of those Wars, there were people—Mainline people—who kept just hoping and wishing that if we fought hard enough, contemporary worship would go away or that it's so shallow that it it is going to go away over time, right? They're wrong. Worship has changed and shifted, and so I think both Sweet Hong and I would want the church and for individual leaders and worshipers in the church to use our book not only to learn about the past but to be able to have an informed opinion about addressing the future. Yeah, these shifts are not going away, and if that's the case, we need to understand where they came from better so that we can be more faithful in the future. Yeah, and if an individual or a church body disagrees with something, they at least have the ability, capacity to know what it is that they disagree—why they disagree with it—and the sympathy to understand the people who they disagree with and where they're coming from. Yeah, and I think that's a very important part of this book—of the sympathetic history.

Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for this time to discuss this important research and the history. There's so much more we could have talked about. One of the things that maybe go find in one of your other podcast interviews with another, uh, interviewer—some of the amazing stories of the actual research you've done, uh, contacting different authors and look at the bibliography at the back—the extensive nature of that, the personal nature of those of those research opportunities. Anyway, uh, thank you both for this time, uh, and I really appreciate it, and have a great rest of your day. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Steve. [Music] Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Theology in Motion with Dr. Sweet Hong Lim and Lester Ruth. If you're listening to this episode when it comes out—September 2022—and you're going to the Wally Summit in October in Chandler, Arizona, we'll look forward to seeing you there. Some of

Our episodes that are to come after this are going to be captured at the plan areas at the summit. So look forward to that. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. [Music] [Music]