More on Liturgical Music Suckage

A reader writes:

The church my sister has belonged to all her life got a new pastor six or seven years ago. This is a traditional, small-town Protestant church, steeped in its own traditions. He threw them out. He tossed the old hymnal, and started making people sing praise choruses. He did away with the Apostles Creed, and wrote a creed of his own. People are very set in their ways in this town, so it took a while for folks to get enough of this guy, but it looks like they finally have done it. My sister says about two-thirds of the congregation has hemorrhaged away. She and her family joined the exodus three weeks ago. They now attend a church of the same denomination 35 miles away — and they are so relieved. My sister told me this week on the phone, “We sang ‘Amazing Grace’ in church this week! You wouldn’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve been able to do that.”

The first week they went to this new church, when the congregation said the Apostles Creed, my sister’s young daughter asked her, “Mama, what’s that? How do you know those words?” My sister told me her heart swelled over being able to use the Apostles Creed in worship again, and to be able to have that liturgical tradition passed on to her daughter. I think it took her aback that her daughter had gotten to be 11 years old, and had no idea what the Apostles Creed was. I’m thrilled that they’re back in a good church, one that honors musical and liturgical tradition. But it’s heartbreaking that the family’s connection to the old church has been severed by this modernist pastor who threw out the hymnal and the creed. Her children are the fifth successive generation of my family to have been members of that church — and, thanks to the destructive modernism of this arrogant pastor, probably the last. These ministers have no idea, no idea at all, the violence they do to people in their egotism.

That’s generally the case with all egotists, not just pastoral ones. There’s some sort of chromosomal linkage between one’s capacity to be cocksure and one’s capacity to be oblivious to the consequences of one’s actions.