The Daily Record - NEWS - WE'RE FED-UP WITH ALMIGHTY RACKET

Well might the neighbors be fed up with a spectacle--or an "audicle"--like this. The neighbors aren't objecting to any ringing of church bells. We're talking about rock music, played so loud that it makes the buildings shake. (And think of what it's doing to the eardrums of the congregants, not to mention the members of that "Worship Team"!)

This goes to one of my main objections to current trends in church music. "Contemporary Christian Music" is neither Christian nor musical. Most CCM artists, in fact, look no different from American Top Forty artists.

The pastor of this church is doing everything wrong:

1. Catering to the worst worldly impulses in the youth, instead of training them to be adults.
2. Promulgating a style of music that cannot possibly be pleasing to God.
3. Violating every rule of good neighborliness, and thus violating Scripture--for Scripture tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
4. Flying in the face of Scripture. For it is plainly written that proper worship of Christ includes psalms (songs that are themselves a part of Scripture, and specifically The Book of Psalms), hymns (songs quoting Scripture other than from the Psalms), and spiritual odes (which are inspired by Scripture).

With regard to this last: Rock music today, including CCM, hardly qualifies as spiritual odes. Typical rock songs, if they are odes at all, are odes to the flesh, not the spirit.

This whole dust-up reminds me of the Strange Fire Incident, in which the two elder sons of Aaron got zapped after they got drunk, took coals from a fire other than the brass altar in the Tabernacle enclosure, filled their censers (incense burners) with them, and--capping audacity and impudence--entered the Holy of Holies and sprinkled incense on the hot coals in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. God doesn't answer this kind of thing with a zapping today, but that's only because God does not show Himself in all His glory to any but the dead. But that does not mean that we ought ever to be remotely as disrespectful to Him as were Nadab and Abihu, the foolish sons of Aaron who were turned to ashes for their tom-foolery. Think about it--does "Christian rock" rise to the level of strange fire? I think it does. And yes, that makes it worse than the specific trespass of disturbing the neighbors.