From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. Before getting into the subject of his essay, he’s talking about some of the things that can help keep the church pews empty on Sunday mornings. He has just finished talking about various ministers’ personality problems. He continues:
“But one’s full sympathy goes out to the minister who knows that he is not making a go of it – not failing for any of the reasons indicated above… but because he has never taking into account the importance of that supreme feature of Christian worship: the music of the church.
“He may be an able preacher, but he can’t preach past bad music. He may be a tactful and beloved pastor, but he can’t win and hold people to his Sunday services with that execrable choir! He may be no end of a statesman in his deft manipulation of his multitudinous auxiliary societies, boards, cabinets, bureaus, and whatnots; but the feeble organist will see to it that the SRO sign is never put out. Sometimes he is entirely unaware that this is so.
“Not infrequently one hears a preacher saying that he knows nothing about music at all – church music or any other kind – saying it nonchalantly, as he might admit ignorance of the tapestries peculiar to the Ming dynasty, apparently oblivious to the fact that his confession is equivalent to a carpenter’s casual remark that he never could saw a board straight or drive a nail without pounding his thumb. No more rarely one hears a preacher saying that he has ‘no ear for music’ – saying it with a smile that clearly means he is too much preoccupied with serious matters to give attention to anything so trivial. We are to understand that it is just a pleasant little joke that he has on himself. By no means is it a joke! It is exactly as if a painter should confess to color-blindness! For so large a place does music rightfully hold in Christian worship that whoever accepts responsibility for the religious education and devotional inspiration of a church can never hope to teach his congregation how to sense the Divine Presence unless he is not only in love with music but fairly conversant with its history, its functions, and the proper manner of its execution. ”
From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. Before getting into the subject of his essay, he’s talking about some of the things that can help keep the church pews empty on Sunday mornings. He has just finished talking about ministers with a sour attitude. He continues:
“Only slightly less unalluring are the sermons that reek of the vapid tosh known as Pollyannaism. The ‘just be glad’ preacher gets to be as great a public nuisance as his colleague in the next block who knows the city deserves to be blown to perdition – and now a worm has chewed up his gourd-vine. Again, the preacher’s sermons may be so profound as to be incomprehensible to all but the self-confessed intellectuals of the neighborhood, or as light as the chaff which the wind driveth away.
“It is just possible that something may be wrong with his pastoral activities. He may have acquired a trick of wearing a chip on his shoulder, precariously poised, and frequently being brushed off by careless passers-by, to his perpetual discomfort and irritation; or he may have been built, temperamentally, by the rules which obtain in plain and solid geometry, with right angles and the apexes of triangles sticking out all over him, upon which rugged corners and sharp spikes people keep bumping themselves and moving off rubbing their hurts and muttering that he is what – most unfortunately – he is. Or, again, he may have so poor a head for anything like organization or executive leadership that his board of deacons is as glum, in session, as a coroner’s inquest, and his board of trustees haggles with him over the suggested appropriation of four dollars and fifteen cents wherewith to buy the janitor some new brooms and a coal-shovel, while his Sunday School hasn’t half enough teachers, and his women’s society is up to its ears in a brawl. These are some of the reasons [why the pews are empty]. Without doubt, these brethren have a bad time of it, each in his own way.”
But this was all by way of introduction. What Douglas wants to talk about is the music of the church, and its problems. In my next post, he’ll share some candid thoughts on that subject.
The title page of “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, as published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. The photograph is taken from Douglas’s 1920-1923 Scrapbook. The green item in the upper left side of the picture is a cloth “snake” that the Bentley Library provides to help lay pages flat while being photographed.
Lloyd Douglas continued making controversial comments in The Christian Century in an article entitled, “The Music of the Church,” published in the January 13, 1921, issue. This time he took aim at church music.
He began by describing the pastor who doesn’t feel it’s his responsibility to supervise the church’s music. And that, he says, explains why “his church treasurer is always blue over a bank balance that is always red.” Douglas continues:
“Nor need this good man [the pastor] quest an ampler reason for the habitual listlessness of his congregation on the first day of the week, if it is listless, or for the diminutive size thereof, if it is small. Of course, there may be other excellent reasons, but this one will do quite nicely.”
Douglas employed a number of writing techniques that were unusual for the time and especially for Christian magazines. Here’s an example: he pretends that he’s being interrupted by one of his readers.
“Our young brother in the second balcony heckles us to state a few of these other reasons [why the pastor’s congregation might be listless or small]. We dislike to be interrupted [Douglas jokes, since he’s actually interrupting himself], but the question is fair. Well – for instance – something may be wrong with the preacher’s sermons. Their dimensions may be at fault – too long, too deep, too narrow. They may be blighted with a chronic pessimism. Weekly information to the effect that the world is going, if not already gone, to the dogs, and that the whole of nature groaneth and travaileth to the exclusion of any other lawful pursuit gets to be an old and not very attractive theme after a while. And people get tired of hearing, constantly, that they are miserable sinners – a fact too obvious to demand such frequent repetition. When they have enough, they quit. That is one reason, and a mighty good one.”
[And there are others, which Douglas will mention in my next post. But he’s actually going to talk about church music. That’s all coming! To be continued…]
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas is describing the new order of worship that Blue is going to institute at his church:]
“This paean of praise sweeps into a great crescendo, closing on a ‘seventh’ which is immediately followed by the dominant chord – the first syllable of ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,’ in which everybody unites. Then the minister and the congregation sit down.
“Mr. Blue understands that his projected service of worship has now arrived at a very critical moment. Shall the doors be thrown open now, while the tardy tramp to their seats? It does not appear so. At this moment, the choir, without prelude or pause, bursts into its ‘praise anthem’ – ‘bursts’ because that is the way it must go into it! There must be no fussing for the place in the book, no tinkling introduction of a dozen measures; the choir must plunge into its praise anthem. And surely we have been richly endowed with such musical blessings! This should be one of the great events of the service – this anthem of praise. When it is done, the choir is seated. The service of worship – strictly speaking – is ended. Now let the tardy in, while the organist plays some incidental music, probably an improvisation of the score of the next hymn to be sung immediately before the sermon.
“Here follows the Scripture Reading, and after it the solo. Unless the solo is good, it should be left out. Until we can have inspiring solos, let us have none. Let us not permit our children to compare our church music with that of the moving-picture show, to our discredit. Then, the prayer.
“Blue has now arrived at the ‘announcements.’ Mentally he reviews the customary performance. Belated messages, turned in after the bulletin had gone to press, are now to be read: ‘The Ladies of Group Five have a very fine eggbeater for sale at the small price of Fifty Cents.’
“Here the preacher smiles foolishly and comments thereon. It is assumed, he says, that whenever Group Five – goodole Group Five – goes on the market with an eggbeater, it is some eggbeater – a veritable world-beater of an eggbeater, etc. (For shame!) He continues reading:
“‘These eggbeaters may be had from any member of Group Five or by telephoning Mrs. O. D. Liverus [Douglas means for us to pronounce this, “O deliver us!”] at her residence – number 9191-x.’
“It is this sort of drool from the pulpit that makes the intelligent and devout want to crawl under the seat, just through abject humiliation! But what is a man to do – Blue asks himself – when Mrs. O. D. Liverus comes down to the study before the service and hands me this note, saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t do this, but oh, Mr. Blue, Mr. Blue!’ Mr. Blue resolves that he will stand pat, hereafter, on his decision. ‘Positively no announcements will be read from the pulpit!’
“And suppose Mrs. Liverus gets angry! Well, it’s time the saints were getting over their touchiness. Christianity shouldn’t make people so edgy as all that. And when it does, there is something the matter with it.
“This brings us up to the church ‘offering.’ And, because the time is all gone, it brings us also to the close of this story. The writer hereby invites the editor to urge him to a chapter on ‘Church Finances’ – which is a live matter, and needs discussion.
“Oh, we’ll make a preacher out of this Blue fellow yet! For one thing, he is getting over his timidity. He has found out that he has a very important work to do and must not be influenced too much by traditions and customs, especially when said traditions and customs are bad.
“It is a red-letter day in the preacher’s experience when, after somebody has said, ‘Oh, but – Mis-ter B-loooo – we just nev-ver do it that way!’ he is able to reply, smilingly but confidently, ‘Oh, yes we do – from now on!’ There is excellent psychology in that. Instantly the preacher becomes worth more to that particular parishioner. Oh – there may be a little sulking; but it all comes out right in the end.
“It is a high spot in the discouraged preacher’s life when, after the choir director has looked over the projected order of worship and has remarked, ‘We simply cannot do it!’ – the minister is able to reply, ‘Well, we’re going to, nevertheless!'”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas is talking about the new order of worship that Blue is going to use in his church:]
“First, there was the invocation of God’s presence; then, the prayer that the people’s worship might be acceptable to Him. Now comes the minister’s ‘call to worship’ in the words:
“‘Seek ye the Lord while he may be found; call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, for he will have mercy; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.’
“During the reading of these words, the organ begins, with much feeling, but barely audible to the congregation, the beautiful score of Mendelssohn’s ‘If With All Your Hearts Ye Truly Seek Me.’
“And the congregation replies, reading from the printed order of worship on the bulletin, while the organ continues its accompaniment of the prayer for pardon, with slightly more volume:
“‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’
“Following this plea for forgiveness and acknowledgement of pardon, the minister is to introduce the praise element in the words:
“‘O magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together.’
“It is natural that the congregation should wish to reply:
“‘O come, let us sing unto the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.’
“By this time, the organ, suiting itself to the mood of praise, has been gaining in volume until the congregation is encouraged to read these words boldly, as becomes the text. And immediately the words are ended, the full choir breaks forth with a rendition of the passage:
“‘O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his kindness endureth forever. O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker: for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.’
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas is talking about the Order or Worship, and he says, in reference to a male quartet:]
“To render this effectively will require a great deal of patient rehearsal by the quartet; but Blue knows that when these four men begin to realize the inspirational possibilities of this part of the service, they will gladly spend the time.
“You and I have a great deal to say about the wickedness of the stage, and doubtless there is even more that might be said on the same subject; but we should be ashamed when we remember that the stage is able to grip the public’s imagination because of the indefatigable zeal and patience with which the actors school themselves in their parts. Why, before a performance is actually presented, and during the last few days of rehearsal, these people toil for uninterrupted hours, pausing neither for meals nor sleep, that they may work together to produce the desired effect at certain psychological moments! And, sometimes, preachers go into the pulpit and try to read a hymn on the spur of the moment and bungle and fumble and haggle at it until the sensitive want to cry out in mingled pain and disgust. No less often, they do not know what the Scripture Lesson is to be until the opening hymn is being sung; and they get up and read it without any advance preparation whatsoever. More frequently, they haven’t the vaguest notion what the pastoral prayer is going to consider, or how it is going to consider it – a terra incognito, both as to form and content!
“Any preacher who in his practice of ophthalmology tries to remove the mote from the eye of the actor, while himself guilty of such blunders of indolence and indifference, had better desist until he is able to extract the two-by-four which interferes with his own vision. But that isn’t get on very fast with Blue’s new order of service, is it?”
[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just described the kind of folksy praise hymn that a lot of churches were starting to adopt by 1920. He continues:]
“Well – this was the sort of ‘praise hymn’ with which Broad Street church had tuned itself up to worship for some weeks. It was a shame; and we do wrong to laugh. It is no laughing matter. When one considers the welfare of the honest stranger who may have gone into that place on such an occasion, almost frantically starving for something that would nourish his soul, and had sensed that surge of revulsion which sweeps over a sensitive spirit forced to witness glaring indecencies and blasphemies, one understands that this is too serious to be taken lightly.
“Blue is to have no more of this. His first hymn will be a hymn of praise, in fact as well as in name, and conditions are going to be created to make the congregation sing. Then comes silence – after the ‘amen’ with which the hymn closes – and Blue means to see to it that the ‘amen’ is sung with vigor and volume, remembering that most of the ‘amens’ sung in his church are rendered as if two-thirds the congregation and half the choir understood that there were to be no ‘amens’ that day. Either do it or quit it! What must be the thought of the keen-witted man who sees the church committing exactly the same blunders and running amuck in precisely the same places in the service, Sunday after Sunday? Perhaps he thinks the manager of the institution is too stupid to have noticed or too lazy to have mended.
“The new order of service for Broad Street church begins, properly, with that impressive silence following the first hymn – not a long pause, but one full of meaning. And then the minister is to say:
“‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.’
“Immediately following the reading of these words, a male quartet is to sing, unaccompanied and very softly, a beautiful setting of the sentence:
“‘Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.'”
[Douglas’s essay will be continued in my next post…]
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas says:]
“Readers of these articles will have noticed that whenever the writer would ease his mind of something a bit too rough and radical to be fathered with the first personal pronoun singular, he solemnly imputes the burden to one hypothetical D. Preston Blue, who serves in the capacity of official goat, and sends him forth into the wilderness. How do you like that ‘wilderness’ idea? Well – that’s where the goat went, did he not? But, we’re getting derailed here. Lend a hand, won’t you, and let us jack this thing up on the track again.
“D. Preston Blue, on vacation, has been suffering of severe misgivings over his ‘order of service.’ He has resolved to plan a brief ritual with some inspirational possibilities. After much careful and prayerful study, he has made a service which proceeds somewhat as follows. It will be recalled that Blue proposes to have the opening hymn sung without other announcement than is to be found on the printed bulletin. There is a great deal to be said about the bulletin for which no time or space is provided here – how it ought to be made, what purposes it should serve, and the excellent service it may render as an advertising medium.
“This opening hymn is frankly announced on the bulletin as ‘The Hymn of Praise’ – and it must be exactly as advertised. Blue reflects upon the time when a peripatetic tent-preacher had taken all Centerville by the ears, and a great (as to numbers) chorus nightly sang at the top of its lungs such doggerel as distinguished the singing evangelist’s own hymnbook (which was to be had at the opening of the meeting and during several impressive intervals thereafter, for the absurdly low price of forty cents) – that he, Blue, had temporarily adopted the book in his own services, at the request of a warmed-over brother who, in the tent, had found again something he declared he had lost (and never missed). So – for several weeks Broad Street began its worship on Sundays by singing ‘Brighten the Corner Where You Are’ or ‘You in Your Corner and I in Mine’ and several other ‘corner’ hymns which appear to have been produced, as to libretto, by Mr. Uriah Heep in collaboration with Pollyanna; the music brought forth by somebody who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to compose the score for a jazz opera, and had marketed his rejected offspring for the purpose indicated above. (If any blame attaches to these remarks, see Blue.)”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just claimed that “non-conformist” churches have gotten too far away from beauty in their worship services, and he acknowledges that any attempt at making worship beautiful again might lead to the accusation of being “mystical.” He continues:]
“Yet this problem must be solved somehow. ‘Evolutionary momentum’ has been at work again. The service became so ornate that it met disaster and made an open bid for gross paganism four hundred years ago. Now it has become so denuded of its beauty that its stark ugliness repels. We preachers have become dreadfully poor psychologists. There is an instinctive heart-hunger for the mystical in worship that we have been unable to satisfy with our crude, bungling attempts at ritual and the rasping dissonances of the alleged music rendered by our untrained choirs. There has been entirely too much extemporaneous and ill-considered matter introduced into our ‘services of worship.’ Our ‘free’ pulpit prayers, for example, have been so very free that they jar unpleasantly on the sensitive ear of the naturally devout. Indeed, our public prayers are filled with impertinences that are only saved from being blasphemous by the fact that we know not what we do. We pick up disgusting tricks of addressing The Absolute in terms of a contemptuous familiarity. How often one hears preachers mouthing that raucous phrase whose vogue the reverential fail to comprehend, ‘Now, Lord, just send us’ – whatever-it-is – in the same inflection one uses when telephoning the butcher, ‘Now, Sam, just send us a few lean pork chops, this time, can’t you? No; no sausage today, thank you. Yes, that will be all, Sam. Thanks very much!’
“Now, this will not do! Some of us have been wondering what is the matter with our churches, and some of us have been berating the generation for its godlessness. Many of us may find, upon investigation, that we have disgusted our potential constituency with our unwitting want of reverence. Many a sensitive man would greatly prefer to take a book of essays with him to a shady bend in the river on Sunday morning than attend our church, whereas his whole soul cries out for a much closer contact with the divine than he can achieve by his communion with nature. But – it is a great deal better for that man’s spiritual welfare that he should go out Sunday morning and watch the river than to go to some church where the music is so ugly it positively frightens one, and the preacher talks to the Great Unseen as if he were chaffing with his next-door neighbor over the back fence. Let it be repeated: This will not do! We who have been committing these serious blunders must mend our ways!”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just said that the problem with most churches is that they ignored “the ‘incurably’ religious passion in men’s hearts for a beautiful, reverential, dignified and consistent means of church worship.” He goes on to explain:]
“There is a curious phenomenon in nature known to biology as ‘evolutionary momentum.’ A certain animal develops a tusk or a horn or a set of spines, for purpose of defense. By natural selection, only such members of the species survive as are best equipped with the peculiar protection. But, after an interminable length of time, this thing upon which the animal’s ancestors had relied for defense has so increased in length and weight that it becomes a serious menace. After that – Nemesis! By a process of ‘evolutionary momentum,’ the weapon becomes the machinery of his defeat who carries it. What was once a safeguard becomes a shackle. The virtue becomes a vice.
“When our forefathers repudiated the Vatican, they decided to pitch out of the church everything that was loose at both ends. True, many a dingy old tenet which might have been more honored by the breach than the observance was permitted to remain – but everything that had any color, form, or beauty was enrolled on Protestantism’s index expurgatorius. Gradually, the service of worship was denuded of its vestments, its historic symbolism, its awesome solemnities, its majestic music, its stately grandeur, its subtle appeal to the mystical quality of the human mind.
“Doubtless the whole business of ceremonialism and symbolism had been grossly exaggerated. One suspects that it was this overdevelopment of the ritual that had as much as anything to do with the great protest which sent such a flock of awkward fledglings fluttering out of the old nest. It was a typical case of ‘evolutionary momentum.’ Generation after generation, these embellishments had been added to the service of worship until the accretion of ornate rites toppled of its own weight. Thereupon, new tendencies arose, pledged to have no more of such nonsense. They kept the faith. At this point, they kept the faith!
“Our so-called ‘service of worship,’ in such churches as employ you and me to serve as their pastors, surely ought to satisfy the most exacting of our colonial fathers who had come to hate the sights, sounds, and scents of ritualistic worship. It is only rarely that the service of worship in a ‘non-conformist’ church excites a feeling of reverence. To be sure, many churches have not failed here. I am just talking about your church and mine. We know very well that our ‘service of worship’ needs the breath of life put into it! But how are we going to manage it without being accused of ‘mysticism’ or something else a very great deal worse?”
[Douglas’s essay will be continued in my next post…]
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 