Musical Instruments in Worship

In the Old Testament, the temple worship included instrumental accompaniment. But now that we’re in the New Testament era, should Christians use musical instruments in worship?

In my opinion, there isn’t a right or wrong answer to this question. The New Testament doesn’t forbid musical instruments (I even play a few instruments myself). However, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that the New Testament church used musical instruments in their corporate worship.

Anabaptists tend to be very reluctant to use musical instruments in congregational worship, for two reasons. First, the use of musical instruments often goes along with less congregational participation. When Joe Christian can sit back and listen to a choir and organ that sound way better than he does, he’s less likely to sing. But God calls us to sing and praise. For Anabaptists, it’s always been important to us to have congregational participation in worship, because we believe that all Christians should be living the ultimate Christian life.

The second reason Anabaptists don’t tend to use musical instruments in church is that it doesn’t seem to have been the normative practice in the New Testament. One of our ideals is to live and worship as the first Christian church did, and if a practice is missing in the New Testament writings, we can usually safely assume that it’s something that developed later. Christians certainly did sing songs in worship, but we don’t know that they played instruments.

But instrumental music doesn’t seem to be an aspect of the Old Testament that is forbidden in the New Testament. Still, the temple worship of the Old Testament doesn’t carry over for us today. Jesus makes clear in John 4 that temple worship would be done away with, since he had something better to offer us. So it would make sense that, if temple worship is no longer happening, that Christians wouldn’t be using the forms of temple worship when they gathered to worship God.

Historically, it seems fairly clear that the early church didn’t use musical instruments (see this article and this article). Taken in conjunction with the silence of the New Testament on this issue, it probably indicates that the New Testament church also didn’t.

That being said, just because Christians should be slow to have musical instruments in congregational worship doesn’t mean that it’s never appropriate to use them at all. At our church, many of us play musical instruments at home or in other contexts. I’ve sung in concerts where we sang accompanied worship music. However, we wouldn’t include them in our Sunday worship.

God made the laws of physics by which the intricate vibrations of music can occur, and he gave us the aural and mental capacity to be able to experience these vibrations as beautiful sounds. What he made is good, so certainly making use of this in creating instrumental music is a good thing. However, not every good thing is appropriate to be used in every setting. As Christians, we need to ensure that we’re using God’s gifts properly and wisely.