To be fair, congregational singing has been under assault for a century or more. The “contemporary” worship of 100 years ago in some P&R churches already suffered from invasive species propagated by Oxford Movement’s high-church, Anglo-Catholic tendencies. Low churches got high. Organs grew (and their volume increased) like the kudzu on a Georgia bank. Soloists and ensembles delighted upwardly mobile Protestant pew-sitters. Professionals sang at the people; choirs drowned them out under the pretense of leading them. Such was late 19th- and early 20th-century contemporary music in the respectable, tall-steepled P&R churches and many besides, including baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal. American religion became bland and predictable. The ministers’ and choirs’ and the liturgies performed were nearly interchangeable, except that the Episcopalians were always highest of all. Simplicity and psalms suffered together.
Concurrently, revivalism saw music as the great draw, and what was once normal for a protracted meeting became standard for Sundays: the first-half “song service” followed by preaching. The presbyterians, many subject to New School and revivalist influence, went for choir “specials” and soloists, ostensibly to set up the preaching or to draw crowds to hear that preaching. The singing suffered. Church became a theater where specialists on stage (or sometimes in balconies) took care of the music.
Brad Isbell | “The Casualties of Contemporary Worship” | July 23, 2025
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Brad Isbell
Brad Isbell is a ruling elder at Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Oak Ridge, TN, board member of More In The PCA, co-host of the Presbycast podcast, editorial member of Presbyterian Polity, and treasurer of the Heidelberg Reformation Association.
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