Tim Hughes recently wrote a blog post about a American newspaper article bashing cutting edge(not Delirious) music. I’ll just paste the entire blog post here since it’s pretty short:

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Below is an extract from an American Newspaper objecting to new trends in church music.

“There are several reasons for opposing it. One, it’s too new. Two, it’s often worldly, even blasphemous. The new Christian music is not as pleasant as the more established style. Because there are so many new songs, you can’t learn them all. It puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances making people act indecently and disorderly. The preceding generation got along without it. It’s a money making scam and some of these new music upstarts are lewd and loose.”

Who were they attacking? It wasn’t Delirious? or Matt Redman. They were attacking the hymn writer Isaac Watts, famous for writing ‘When I survey,’ in 1723! The old hymns once upon a time were radical and cutting edge. Our music and our songs must also always be pushing new ground. Let’s go for it.

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We hear much the same throughout our culture today. Condemning anything new, anything that hasn’t been baptized by religion and tradition. I don’t understand how we as a people can grasp onto a particular cultural expression at some point in our history and say, “that is a perfected expression to God and nothing to follow can be so again”. But that’s precisely what the article above is doing. The only thing perfected is God and his word. We seek to honor, worship and praise God in every possible way, through every culture, through every style, through music, through art, through film, all creation will praise, and every angle of creativity should be meant to glorify God.

Our God is so big and so many people offer worship is so many unique ways, whether it’s drums in Africa, guitars in America, bagpipes in Scotland, or silence in China…all of it is perfected offering through Christ, and none of us can sit here and say, ‘because it doesn’t sound like an old hymn we already know, it’s ungodly’. And by the way, I don’t know a lot of old hymns, so does that make those hymns wrong? Dumb. If we have that arrogant attitude then we’ve missed the heart of God and have a truly distorted view of worship. I will always search my spirit and commune with God to see what new song he has implanted in me. I fear no man’s opinion of my sincerity in worship, only God’s rebuke of my tired, effortless, useless fire when I could have entered into God’s presence and worshipped him in spirit and truth and sung a new song, uniquely crafted to respond to his unique touch in my life.

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