A Question Of Taste

The story goes that acclaimed writer Flannery O’Connor once received a letter of despair from a college English teacher, bemoaning her students’ lack of interest in literature. Young people, the teacher sighed, just didn’t care much for Shakespeare or The Scarlet Letter, Edgar Allan Poe or Mark Twain.

If they absolutely had to read, her students preferred to pore over more modern writers with smaller vocabularies and less complicated characters. Desperate to keep the kids engaged, the teacher felt she had to accommodate those preferences. She was hoping Ms. O’Connor could recommend some volumes for her all-contemporary syllabus.

Instead, Ms. O’Connor offered a different perspective.

“The students’ taste is not to be consulted,” she said. “It is being formed.”

I’ve been thinking about that counsel, in the wake of a recent decision by the leadership of our church to bisect our congregation along musical lines. It’s our turn, apparently, to embrace the split-personality that has become de rigueur for churches across the country – and indeed, all over the world. Henceforth, one service will be “traditional,” the other more “contemporary.”

Our leaders asked for input on this, but it soon became clear that their minds were made up. Their urgency is based on the one argument they believe trumps all others, and which they clearly expect to bring all nay-sayers into shrugging agreement with the plan:

This is what the young people want.

The young people are our future, we’re reminded. The up-and-coming leaders of our church. All that stands between dynamic growth and social obsolescence. So, it’s up to the rest of us to bow to what the leaders assure us are this generation’s worship whims – and youthful tastes, we’re told, don’t really allow for hymns or choruses or songs older than the milk in your refrigerator.

Funny thing. I never hear this from young people themselves. And, rarely, from adults who work with young people. I only hear it from church leaders who assure us they “know” young people, despite having little visible interaction with them in the highways and byways of workaday church life. Apparently, you have to ignore young people to really get a feel for how they think.

Still, there’s no doubt that the enthusiasm of youth, college students, and even young single and married adults for church attendance and participation is on the downhill slide. Has been, in fact, for two or three decades. About the same length of time, actually, that adults who don’t interact with young people have been working frantically to make worship more appealing to them.

You’d think that, after 30 years or so, this ongoing investment in church-as-musical-entertainment would be showing a more promising return. But, no: we keep cranking up the amplifiers, fading out the hymns, burning through the new songs and choruses … while a couple of generations keep staying away in droves.

Seems reasonable to assume, then, that either a) we’re still not getting the music quite right, or b) the music’s not what they’re coming (or not coming) for. After all, if it’s thoroughly modern music they want, young people can get that anywhere: Spotify, iTunes, local concerts, Christian radio. And probably more cutting edge stuff, of its kind, than what the local church is offering.

But if it’s not really newer music they want in the services – what is missing, to keep the young folks away?

The whole fuss is rather curious to me. From early childhood, I was immersed in youth culture. My father was a youth minister, and I came of age and passed into adulthood knowing that:

1) my friends and I liked to sing lots of newer songs that those many years our senior did not;

2) we had plenty of opportunities to sing those songs – at youth camps, fellowships, and in Bible study classes, surrounded by other young people who liked them, too;

3) Sunday morning worship was designed to accommodate a wider variety of music – the classics, if you will. Familiar hymns, less familiar hymns, a few choruses, here and there, and newer songs that weren’t what the old folks thrived on, maybe … but weren’t “out there” beyond their aesthetic reach, either.

The diversity of music in our services was something that bound us together across great gaps of age and experience. Something we could share, like congregational prayers and Scripture readings and the quiet passing of the Lord’s supper plate. We sat together, stood together, bowed our heads together … experiencing harmony, at least, if not always perfect unison.

We didn’t have “music leaders,” who studied the trends and repeated, endlessly, their own personal favorites. We had “ministers of music,” who knew and understood the different ages, backgrounds, needs, and maturities represented in their congregation. Who sensed the changing moods and preferences of the people – the evolving styles of popular music – but also recognized that not everything we wanted unified us. And that not everything we liked magnified God more than the rhythm section, or was truly worshipful for those around us.

The focus was on unity: children and grandparents, young people and middle-agers, parents and single adults, all worshiping together. We learned, subconsciously perhaps, that worship and fellowship can transcend personal preferences. That’s a rare understanding – but a practical one, for people planning to spend eternity together.

Back then, the music of our churches offered a weekly reminder that God can accomplish tremendous things in the hearts of those who love Him, whatever their entrenched sensibilities.

In its own subtle way, the musical diversity also underscored the fact that our faith is grounded in personal sacrifice. We take up our crosses. We go the extra mile. We do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. If self-denial can’t begin – for young and old alike – with adjusting our worship expectations to allow for some forms and content we wouldn’t personally have chosen … then it’s never going to get out of the gate at all.

Sad to say, these are no longer the messages our services are communicating. Now, young people are learning that, yes, God can make us “one in the bond of love.” Teach us to “bear one another’s burdens.” “Unite our hearts to fear His name.” Show us, by His grace, how to serve each other, pray for each other, encourage each other.

He just can’t get us to sing together. Even the Almighty, it seems, has His limitations.

Some questions.

One: where do the accommodations stop? Will we soon have to reconfigure worship so that people who don’t “get” the Old Testament don’t have to hear it preached? Will we need to offer “whole-Bible” and “Gospels-only” services? Or “dress up” and “dress down” options, so that people in shorts don’t have to look at people in ties (and vice versa)?

For that matter – having established that musical choices dictate policy – how long will young lovers of country music be content to worship to a pop-rock beat? Won’t we need different services to shield the Top 40 types from the fiddle and banjo enthusiasts?

Two: why is the faith of young people valued so much more by our leaders than that of the middle-aged-and-older set?

That distinction doesn’t come from the Bible. The apostles, the prophets, the psalmists – all recognized key places of leadership in the family of God for old folks, as well as young. Where did we get the idea that God wearily tolerates the praises and prayers of the aging, waiting impatiently for the electric guitars to warm up and the real worship to start?

No, no, no, the ministers will say. Yet our choirs – for centuries a cherished fixture of church worship, and one of the few that allows a wide variety of members to participate – have been disbanded. People are dismissed from our praise teams at the first signs of gray on their temples.

When one of my church's laity, during a recent town hall gathering, breathlessly quoted a worship conference speaker who said no church will grow today with anyone on the platform older than 30, our ministers (all older than that) nodded in solemn agreement. I wonder: do they count themselves “the exceptions that prove the rule?”

Three: what exactly do we want our young folks to do with all of these ecclesiastical indulgences we’re giving them? Grow in their faith? Learn the Scriptures? Come to a fuller experience of what it means to live in Christ, and the wisdom to share that experience with others? So that, when they’re older, they can step up into leadership?

Only, when they’re older, we’ll have to ask them to … step aside. Keep all that maturity and wisdom to themselves. You know, for the sake of those who are younger.

“No, no, no,” the ministers insist. “We’re not trying to silence anyone’s testimony. Just …”

Just the music and traditions and styles of worship that nourished those testimonies.

We’re left, really, with only two options: a), we’ve raised a generation of young people who won’t worship God with the rest of us unless they choose the style and content of that worship. But myopic self-centeredness is not the stuff shepherds are made of; it effectively disqualifies them from taking on the mantle of church leadership.

By indulging them, our leaders are doing nothing to change that.

Or, b) our young people are not hung up on getting their own exclusive way. In which case, they’re leaving our churches for wholly different reasons. Reasons our leaders – preoccupied with the music issue – are either unable or unwilling to see.

I have no certain knowledge of what young people want from church today … but I wonder.

I wonder if, growing up in the angry din of increasingly vicious politics … in the harsh atmosphere of Cancel Culture and woke society … in a world made even more lonely by the isolations of social media … if any part of them yearns for harmony. For a love that flows freely across generations. For a faith in which worship is about Who God is – not what we want to hear.

A taste of heaven, some might call that. What a wonderful opportunity our churches are offered, in the words of Ms. O’Connor, to “form that taste” in the souls of our youth and young adults.

They will need it, in a world increasingly starved for flavor – and increasingly hostile to our faith.