I was meeting with my leadership team prayer partner on Monday night and the topic of preferred worship styles came up. Some people assume that I'm all for drums and distortion guitar in worship, some think that I'm suppressing my love of hymns for the sake of making worship accessible to people who didn't grow up in church. Both are right.
Sure, I was noodling around on the guitar with the worship team on Sunday. I really do love the satisfying roar of power chords or the ringing notes of a clean single coil Strat. I think it's a great way to worship and I'm sure there will be a section of heaven that's a big jam session. But I have more classical music in my CD collection than rock or pop or jazz. I've sung bass in Verdi's Requiem with the Stanford Chorus and even led a choir myself for 5 years.
The point is that music is NOT a universal language: it's a learned language. To Winnie's chagrin, I understand very little Cantonese. So I miss out on the puns and the slang that she and her siblings throw around at family gatherings (most of what I understand has to do with food). In the same way, there are musical languages that we have to learn in order to appreciate and then utilize the many ways that God can be praised.
I may never (this side of eternity) learn to worship utilizing the quarter tones of Indian ragas. But I know that God can be praised with both hymns and rock & roll (although I have my doubts about country music).
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