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It can be difficult with people and churches who are engaged in sort of worship wars (traditional music vs. contemporary music). These kind of issues can be very controversial. I think what we need to keep in mind is that we are called to be a church who is a church family. You don’t get to pick your family, you are kind of born into it. And we are born into our church families.
The author, Marva Dawn, talks about how if the church is going to be the church in its diversity of being a family rather than a demographically separate entity, then we are all going to sing songs that we don’t necessarily like (stylistically). And I think that is true. If we hold on so tightly to our own musical preferences it distorts what worship is even supposed to be. Worship is somewhere that I come to have my own preference met, sounds like the influence of the culture saying that things need to be your way.
I always tell people, if you have an iPod you can listen to whatever music you want anytime of the week. But for an hour on Sunday, we all need to set aside our musical preferences to some extent to serve the person in the pew next to us. That doesn’t mean that anything goes or that we shouldn’t take care to choose music that serves people well and they can engage with. But the first thing is to realize that worship should not be about our preferences but how we can come together as a family to worship together and praise God.
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