Sacred Music Foundation
by David P. Goldman
November, 2009 “First Things”
What is sacred music? If we simply mean music that assists liturgy or prayer, the category includes Protestant hymns, Christian rock, church chant, musical aids for the memorization of sacred texts, and countless other kinds of music. Much music provides indispensable assistance to divine service, but so do the pastor’s trousers, which cannot be called sacred, indispensable though they may be.
Worship 101
by Bruce H. Leafblad
December 1998, p. 25 - Worship Leader Magazine
"In church history, no major renewal has ever come from forms and formats, and so it is today. The great need of the church today is neither to cling to the old or to create the new forms and formats. Our greatest need today is to recover the priority of God in our music and in the whole of life. The crisis in worship today is not a crisis of form but of spirituality.”
Paying Church Musicians Their Due
A letter from a young music student to a young professional tenor
September, 2009
The musician is free to be a musician or a farmer. In both vocations, he needs to earn his living. When he sings or plays music, his job is to reach deep in to peoples’ hearts and change them. Music reaches the soul like nothing else (you know this very well). People are brought to tears by music, roused to battle, lulled to sleep, convicted by the Gospel, etc. The effect of music is real and powerful.
The Pursuit of Knowledge - Music and Morality
by Roger Scruton host of the weekly TV show "Vineline"
February 2010 issue of "The American Spectator" magazine
“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.” So wrote Plato in the Republic (4.424c). Music, for Plato, was not a neutral amusement. It could express and encourage virtue -- nobility, dignity, temperance and chastity. It could also express and encourage vice -- sensuality, belligerence and indiscipline.”
Articles of Note
Books & Quotes of Note
How Shall We Worship by Marva Dawn
A Royal Waste of Time by Marva Dawn
Unceasing Worship by Harold Best
Heart of the Artist by Rory Noland
The Bible by God (with help)
Desire by John Eldredge
The only way to describe this [God’s] ongoing creative activity is extravagant. Thunderclouds gather over the prairies, and afterward He scatters wildflowers as far as the eye can see. He fills the oceans with orcas and urchins and who knows what. A single maple leaf is woven with greater intricacy than the finest French lace - even though it will fall with the winds of autumn. New stars are born every day; a new sunset painted and swept away each night. Such magnificent generosity. No composer ever gave so many free concerts. George MacDonald got it right when he said "Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art thou!"
And it is this life, with all its joyful creativity and power and unending happiness that He says He is going to share with us. This is "the joy of your master" that we are to be welcomed into. This is why we long to find our place in the world, caring for and developing creation in all its diverse potential. It is this for which we were made. In His image. This image implies a capacity, and the capacity assumes a wonderful creative legacy we shall carry on."
Unceasing Worship by Harold Best
"If we are to be a biblical church, not just a culturally relevant church, we must discount such heavy dependence on our limited and provincialized inventory or works and get down to the business of depending on the power of the Word and the force of the Gospel, looking to the Spirit, not to our humanly contrived proxies, as the only Paraclete. As I have said before, then, but only then, and by all means, let the music come. Traditional, contemporary, avant-garde, ethnic, jazz, rock and chant - name it and pour your heart and mind into it. Rejoice in it. Dance with David in it. Let Taize ring the changes on the glory of God, and let "Jesus Loves Me," done in a thousand styles, become everybody's invocation and benediction. Let the emotions roll and the endorphins break their dikes. But for Jesus Christ's sake, let's get music back where it belongs - as a lisping sign and not a glittering cause, as the response to a commandment and not just a set of tools for influencing people."
More from Harold Best
"One question haunts me continually; what shades of beauty and nuances of spirit have we taken from our children, our young people, our fellow outpourers in the name of the idiocies of mass culture and easy Christianity? What are they missing that the art to which they have naively grown accustomed claims to offer but cannot grant? It is our forced ignorance, not their present choices, that grieves me so. We may have many reasons for fussing over this or that monstrosity or lapse in some artistic diets, but fussing can in no way compare to the reconstructive teaching we must do to bring them to fuller aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual measure of understanding and worship..."
More from Harold Best
"So let the music come. Let art break in on us. Let all of it break its boundaries and in Godward action speak powerful things. Let a thousand tongues say a million things. Let is all come in corrected and rightful newness. Let is all come, not to alert God to make his presence with us, but because he is already here from the eternities, before we can ever tune our instruments or pitch our songs. Let it all come deep from within our outpouring, impatiently pressing into the next time and then the next, as if we cannot wait to lift our art to the One who is Author and Finisher, Alpha and Omega, Sin-bearer, Redeemer and Lord.
