Young music attracts young people. . .

For a very long time that sentence was not only conventional wisdom but sacred wisdom.  It was the ground and foundation on which a whole industry of contemporary worship music was made.  It was the rationale for new publishers of congregational song and for the rise of now familiar but then new names in Christian music -- from the Joncas to the Haas to the Getty and everywhere in between.  It created powerful identities (think here of the music of Hillsong) and forged new paths when everyone thought there was nothing new left under the sun.  It brought guitars into places where pipe organs had reigned and it brought the praise band to churches which had been slow to adopt any song but Scripture.  We are doing it for the young people.

The problem is that there is no real definition of young music.  What ended up staying in churches is not really young in the sense of a cutting edge sound like the radio might define it.  The style of this young music was much older -- more like Peter, Paul, and Mary than the new stuff just hitting Apple playlists.  The thing that passes for young music in most congregations today is edging toward middle age and older and, guess what, those are the people who clamor for it.  What is often proclaimed as something tolerated for youth ministry is, in reality, what is demanded by those who want to be young again.  We all know this.  We allow ourselves a corporate memory lapse because the reality is that the mythology has deeper roots in our churches than we dare admit.

It was never the age of the music that attracted anyone.  Everyone's church attendance patterns were and are more rooted in family practice growing up than just about anything else.  Even those who come to the faith as adults were never attracted by the beat or how easy the music is to dance to -- the Word brings people in and the Word keeps them in.  People come and go in the pews for a lot of reasons but we are surely fooling ourselves if we think it is the kind of music that brings them in or keeps them out.  The Gospel is far too offensive to allow the music to be the issue -- unless, of course, the Gospel is stripped of its backbone and emptied of its content.  But that is not how the real Church operates.

I will admit that I have always found it strangest that liturgical churches seemed to jump on the young music bandwagon.  Changing the sound people hear in church is not the thing that brings them in the door or shows them the way out.  The content of the preaching and teaching is what offends and attracts at the same time.  What confounds people is when the soundtrack inside the church does not match the script.  That is what confuses those already in the pews as much as it confuses those not yet in them.  Mixed messages are never helpful.  Bait and switch is not simply dishonest but turns people away.   No, it is time that we all distanced ourselves from a truism that is not true at all -- that young music brings in a young crowd.  

Strange that old myths are so hard to kill.  There are still congregations with worship committees still trying to figure out how to use music as the attraction for the illusive Christian under the age of 25.  What fools we are.  What fools we must thing those under 25 are.  If you entice them in with a song, you can drive them away with another song.  Preaching and teaching and authentic liturgical worship that reflects this doctrine in practice is what brings people in and keeps them there.  The rest of it we do to target age groups or ethnicities is not only dishonest and alien to our faith, it is about as effective as selling Jesus as an accessory to designer coffee.