A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshaped the Protestant Church
 Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong
Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021

Reading this book was like listening to the soundtrack of my earliest years as a Christian in the 1970s. It tells the story of the rise and development of contemporary praise and worship – some of it much earlier than the decade of my conversion! – with lots of quotations from songs, and references to their composers or publishers. But recounting this story is not just about listing choruses. In the hands of Ruth and Hong, we discover the social and the theological pressures which generated a twentieth-century revolution in both musical performance and song-writing. Their focus is on the United States, but their analysis holds good for Australia as well. The authors are professors in the field of Christian worship, so this book was the result of painstaking research – mainly through personal interviews – over many years. Contemporary Christian music has deep and complicated roots.

Their basic argument is that the movement away from traditional worship with organs and hymnbooks was not the result of the Jesus movement among hippies in California in the 1970s – though they might have sped things up. The recent movie The Jesus Revolution gives this impression too. Rather, the move to develop new models of musical worship began much earlier in fundamentalist circles in the 1940s, first in Canada, spreading later to the US and beyond, appealing to a Biblicist model of interpretation, in which Psalm 22:3 outlines precisely how praise works: God promises to make himself present to us when we praise him, for God is enthroned on the praises of Israel. He is not present to us intimately until we praise. Whether we feel like it or not, we must praise God to create the conditions by which he visits us. Only then can we worship him. Praise is the prelude to worship. They are not the same. Indeed there are many words in Hebrew for the notion of raising our voices to exalt God, with different and for the most part non-overlapping meanings according to those earliest circles of music leaders. We praise God to make him present, and we worship to enjoy him intimately. Hebrews 13:15 was the text used to explain how intimacy through the name of God constituted our worship subsequent to our praise. For some of those teachers, the model of David praising God in the temple, or Moses approaching God in the tabernacle, added further Old Testament nuance, both assuming a movement towards greater intimacy as one drew closer to the Holy of Holies. They called themselves the movement of praise and worship, but they did not use the word “contemporary.”

A second stream emerged around the time of WWII, which was not so concerned for precise definitions of words and didn’t use the OT for models of spirituality. They did want to make church services more contemporary to appeal to those Christians who no longer attended church because it appeared to them boring or stuffy. The musical vernacular had changed in the supercharged cultural vicissitudes of the middle of the century, so a new musical language had to be spoken. Like any decent missionary, you had to learn the local language – albeit musical – to reach a generation whose heart language had changed. Ruth and Hong dig a bit deeper in evangelical history to show how reformers and revivalists in the Protestant tradition had frequently made the same appeal to linguistic and cultural adaptation to make their message heard. Charles Wesley, Charles Finney, or Aimee Semple Macpherson were notable agitators for liturgical change in their own day. Their issue was not to change the content but the form of communication in this new musical revolution. What began in midweek Bible studies, was transposed to Sunday services. They made 1 Corinthians 9:22 their slogan, in which the apostle highlighted flexibility as his ministry priority to reach the world.

Traditionally, Christians have spoken of the regulative and the normative principle to describe the practice of worship. The former establishes a rule from the Scriptures which dictates not just the content but the form of worship, and the latter establishes a norm which coheres with the theology of the Bible though is not commanded anywhere in it. However, despite the authors being academics, they do not pick up these categories to present their overview of the twentieth century, though this is exactly the shape of their argument. But they do make abundantly clear that the two streams merge in around the 1960s to create musical exaltation now called “contemporary praise and worship.” They characterise the two streams with the language of “gift” theory and “gap” theory, the former highlighting God’s desire to give his presence as a gift, and the latter highlighting the need to close the gap as Christians engage more intentionally with contemporary culture to win some for Christ. The Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War had radically ruptured traditional approaches to Western culture, so not surprisingly congregational singing underwent radical changes too. New technologies further reshaped expectations and possibilities as well, though they were not the root cause of the change.

Unpicking the threads of the story proves so helpful in isolating theological challenges to congregational singing today. In the “gift” strand, the focus for meeting God in the Sunday service moves from the pastor to the band leader. The traditional means of grace, sermon and sacraments, are no longer the primary strategy for meeting with the Lord. Instead, singing takes on this role. The leader who has been theologically trained gives ground to the musician who in all likelihood has not. The music leader now has a priestly role. This is evident not just in more charismatic churches, but in many Anglican ones as well, where the platform or the sanctuary is dominated by musical instruments, with font or communion table nowhere to be seen. The Lord’s Supper is marginalised in the life of the congregation, and gives ground to the priestly work of the musician or band leader.

In the “gap” strand, we have come to imagine that the way to draw unbelievers back to church or into the believing community is to recreate an aesthetic or style of worship which is attuned to contemporary cultural (read: musical) vernacular. Personally, I love contemporary music-making in church, but it can easily be assumed that it is the music that bears the weight of evangelism in church, not the sermon, or the prayers, or the testimonies, or the love and welcome of the people. Renewal in the church will take a whole lot more than the choice of songs. But this must also be said: contemporary musicians who arrange a longer set of songs well have understood something which is profoundly liturgical about church. These band leaders have excellent skills in how to sequence the songs to shape a spiritual journey from God-focused high tempo songs, to more mellow reflections on obedience for example. Traditionally, however, this was done with all the elements of a church service, taking worshippers on a journey through the storyline of the Bible, beginning with praise of the Creator, moving on to trust in the Saviour, then commitment to the Spirit’s mission and power. Elements and their relationship to each other build suspense, or relieve tension, or to create focus and theme.

This is a great book, though it does contain lots of details about church leaders and musicians whose names don’t normally appear in the historical record. But that is perhaps why it is refreshing too: our own small contributions to Sunday worship can merge to create a flow which impacts vast numbers. As the song from 1969 says, “It only takes a spark to get a fire going.”

Rhys Bezzant | Ridley College