About Travis

11/01/2010: In response to my colleague's comment below, I'll begin by saying that my post mentions "traditional" and "contemporary" worship--both of which are very loaded terms that mean different things to different people. Here's how I'll be using them:"Traditional" refers to a worship service that makes primary use of the organ and limits its musical and liturgical repertoire to mostly hymns and liturgies found in the hymnal. "Contemporary" refers to a worship service that makes primary use of an ensemble of keyboard, guitars, bass, drums, and vocalists, and limits its musical repertoire to mostly pop/rock songs readily heard on Christian radio. Liturgically, it may or may not look identical to a "traditional" service.

I grew up attending an ELCA congregation in small town Iowa. I started taking piano lessons when I was seven years old, and by the time I was in high school, I was playing for “traditional” and “contemporary” services at my home congregation on a weekly basis. When I graduated high school, I already knew that God was calling me to be a church musician. I got my B.A. in Church Music from Wartburg College (Waverly, IA) and went on to get my Master of Sacred Music degree from Luther Seminary (St. Paul, MN). I currently serve as Worship & Music Director at an ELCA congregation in north-central Iowa.

My philosophy of church music has been shaped predominantly by my Lutheran heritage and my background in playing for both traditional and contemporary worship. When my home congregation added their contemporary service in the mid-nineties, I was convinced that it was the way of the future. Our membership grew, and our church felt more vibrant. I attended Willow Creek arts conferences to learn more about how congregations could do "contemporary" worship better.

But while I was at college, I had the opportunity to intern in a congregation in Denver, Colorado that did only traditional worship, and whose new member classes had an average age of 26. That’s when it became clear to me that the traditional/contemporary dichotomy was a false one, and that congregations were simply buying what the trendy megachurches were selling. Being simply a musician wasn’t going to be enough to sort out the mess; I needed to be a theologian as well. So I went to Luther Seminary, studied church history and liturgical theology, and have been wrestling with worship ever since.

So, greatly oversimplified and generalized, here’s my philosophy of worship and music:

• Music is a gift of God and part of the diversity of God’s creation. Our Christian freedom lets us use any and all music in worship. But danger lurks here: what is lawful is not always beneficial, and discernment is required to navigate the minefield.
• The congregation is the primary music maker in worship. Music in worship should be primarily that which is teachable, singable, memorable, and durable. Music which is soloistic and disposable is secondary.
• Worship is a dialogue: God speaks to us through Word & Sacrament and we respond in prayer and praise. Music’s role in worship is solely as a vehicle for these two actions; anything more or anything less is inappropriate.
• The church musician is a steward of the people’s song and has a duty to protect the congregation from injustices that would silence its voice.
• Worship is owned by the whole communion of saints throughout time and space. Worship’s content, therefore, is accountable not only to the Gospel but to the historical and ecumenical witness of the universal church, not personal taste.

I am also strongly opposed to having multiple styles of worship. Some reasons include:

• It robs us all of the fullest expression of God that our congregations are capable of encountering through the Church’s diverse musical vocabulary
• It is poor stewardship of the gifts of the people; if music is worth being sung by any subset of the congregation, it should be worth being sung by all
• It is bad hospitality; when “contemporary” worship is adopted in an attempt to reach 20- and 30-somethings, it by definition excludes anyone else
• It confuses worship with evangelism; they are not synonymous.
• It tells people what they should or shouldn’t like; old people are supposed to like “traditional” and young people are supposed to like “contemporary”. But that’s not the Gospel—that’s ageism.
• It stunts spiritual growth by allowing people to worship on their own terms and avoid having their biases and preconceptions challenged by the Gospel. We do not make the gospel relevant to us; the gospel makes us relevant to it.
• It superimposes the segregation of a broken and sinful world onto worship; in Christ there is no slave or free, male or female, traditional or contemporary.
• It alienates us from one another by highlighting differences of personal taste. When my personal tastes trump someone else’s, I’ve sinned against my neighbor.
• It allows political pandering to control the content of worship. Worship should be the last place where any one group’s special interests have control; otherwise, one group’s interests become an idol, and people wind up worshiping their own image, not God.
• When “tradition” is a choice over against “contemporary”, we teach people the false notion that the old and the new are incompatible and that one must either keep the tradition or adapt to the culture, when in reality both are necessary.
• Condoning the segregation created by multiple styles of worship by virtue of the fact that we’re all still “united in Christ” is simply an excuse to avoid manifesting visibly what we hold to be true invisibly. To maintain this position is to speak about unity while fostering division, and when we hold this up as a virtue, we baptize our hypocrisy and add sin to sin.
• I have a Christian obligation to sacrifice personal liberty for the sake of the Body. It is my responsibility to sing another person’s music for their edification. That’s what it means to worship in community.

This is the most concrete way I can articulate my own philosophy in a single blog post, and a longer-than-usual one at that. As you read my other posts, you might consider referring back to this and looking for evidence of these convictions at work.

How do my convictions harmonize or clash with your own?