Mennonite Weekly Review

Was the song sacred or secular? As always with the band U2, it was sacred if you wanted it to be. “I was born to sing for you,” sang Bono, U2’s frontman. The “you,” of course, was God.

And the “I” was not just Bono. On a cool evening last October in Oklahoma City — though it could have been any night on U2’s 2009 tour — more than 50,000 concertgoers in a football stadium sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” while the voices and instruments on stage fell silent. A rock band understood the power of unaccompanied singing.

Each of us was born to sing for God. Maybe that’s why music moves us — and never more so than when we raise a song with our voices alone, surrounded by the community of God’s people.

If a rock concert crowd enjoys singing a cappella, a worshiping congregation might love it even more. But some fear that is no longer true. The congregation’s voice is being lost.

It isn’t just that the a cappella tradition is fading. Today most of us listen to music but don’t make it. Music is something that goes into our ears, not out of our mouth. In church we are members of an audience rather than participants. And something precious — the voice of the people pouring out their hearts to God — is lost.

The culprit, some say, is the praise band. Drums, electric guitars and singers with microphones can turn worship into performance and drown out those who try to sing along.

But the problem is older than the praise band. Kenneth Naf­ziger, a music professor at Eastern Mennon­ite University in Har­risonburg, Va., said in a telephone interview that “the problem with amplified bands is not so different from when people complained about the organ.”

With any form of accompaniment, Nafziger said, the key is to “keep the technology from overwhelming the space that the human voice should occupy in worship.” Band members need to consider themselves accompanists and play accordingly, respecting the congregation’s voice.

Nafziger took part in a conference in May at Pepperdine University that celebrated a cappella music. The Malibu, Calif., school is affiliated with the Churches of Christ, a denomination that is trying to maintain its non-instrumental tradition. Pepperdine provost Darryl Tippens told Religion News Service: “With or without musical instruments, the loss of congregational singing is a huge question.”

For Nafziger, one answer is balanced worship, with diverse styles of music. He doesn’t like to call it “blended,” which sounds as if the music is mashed like vegetables in a blender. He laments a lack of appreciation for anything old. Failing to prize anything new is a blind spot just as large.

“We are the recipients of an enormous range of languages in music, and each of these languages needs to be treated with an appropriate respect,” Nafziger said.

Whether the music is time-tested or cutting-edge, the congregation must not lose its voice. “We who have grown up with our voices being heard in congregational singing have no idea what kind of a gift that is,” he said.

There are many musical gifts — the human voice, the organ, the electric guitar and drums — but one Spirit to inspire our praise. We were born to sing for God, and to be heard.