Author: Ryan Shaw

Criticising contemporary worship music is often dismissed as unnecessary and snobbish—just the gripe of someone who prefers old things for the sake of being old. But that misses the point. While it is true that the concept of the modern worship service, if viewed on the timeline of Christianity, would be a tiny blip at the very tail end, just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. Still, we as the church body would be wise to pause and ask, if a practice has shaped Christian worship for nearly two millennia, why was it done that way, and why was it so effective?

It should be said that any sincere worship and praise of God is a good thing. I have no interest in engaging in any snobby, unnecessary critique of fellow Christians. I simply want the church to offer its very best, because God deserves nothing less.

One of the biggest issues with the modern worship service is that the formula often leans heavily on emotional experience. To look like you’re “really worshiping,” there is often an unspoken expectation to display your emotional engagement physically: hands raised, eyes closed, swaying in rhythm. For some, that emotional experience comes naturally and the physical display is an organic result, but for many others (I would argue men in particular) it feels forced or performative, like the music is trying to manufacture an emotional response. At its worst, it can come across as manipulative.

The reliance on emotion makes sense when you consider its roots. Modern worship music and contemporary Christian music as a whole came from the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The movement was a response to the debauchery and rampant drug use of the concurrent countercultural movement, and resulted in tens of thousands of young converts to Christianity. But, while the Jesus Movement was effective in bringing Baby Boomers out of the counterculture, it also carried baggage from the counterculture into the church. Chief among these was a rebellion against authority and institutions, which resulted in a casting aside of tradition and beauty. What had shaped Christian worship for centuries was seen as outdated or irrelevant, and in its place came something that looked and sounded more like the hippie movement than the historic church. That posture, however well-meaning, carried a certain arrogance—the assumption that the church needed to be reinvented to be real.

The historical and more traditional forms of Christian music came from a far more earnest place. Hymns and chants grew naturally out of the worshiping life of Christian communities over centuries, shaped by the spiritual emphases of their traditions. Lutheran hymns, for example, reflect the Reformation’s hunger for clarity in the gospel, embedding rich theology into melodies meant to be sung by the whole congregation. The Russian Orthodox tradition, with its deep sense of awe before the mystery of God, produced chants that are slow, reverent, and weighty—designed to lift the soul into silence and fear before the divine. In the Catholic Church, music was bound to the rhythm of the liturgy and the Church calendar, echoing prayers that had been sung for generations. By contrast, the music of the Jesus People was shaped less by centuries of worshiping tradition and more by the sensibilities of the counterculture. In their desire to reach a generation suspicious of authority and institutions, they reimagined worship in ways that reflected that spirit of distrust, leaving behind much of the depth and stability that older forms of church music had carried.

In many Christian circles, tradition is still considered a dirty word, but a tradition is simply “that which has been passed down.” Many of the cornerstones of the Christian faith are results of traditions that we as members of the modern church take for granted or do not credit to the patriarchs of the early church. Tradition gives you something bigger than yourself to belong to. When you sing a hymn or chant that has been passed down for centuries, you’re stepping into the stream of the Church’s history—you’re joining voices with saints who came long before you. That gives the music a weight and a sense of home. It’s recognisably Christian, and has its own sound and identity that sets it apart from the culture around it. When Christian music tries to emulate whatever style is currently popular in the secular world, it loses its distinctiveness, its sense of belonging, and the permanence that younger generations of Christians often long for.

According to many surveys and anecdotal reports, Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism have seen a large increase in Gen Z attendees. This phenomenon of young people flocking to more traditional expressions of Christianity reflects a deep desire for tradition and reverence—things our modern culture is so often deprived of. While the generations before us sought to reform the church to be less formal and structured—seeing tradition, reverence, and beautiful cathedrals as barriers between the people and Christ—the younger generation has had a very different experience. Having been raised in a world of rampant consumerism, pop-culture worship, irreverence, we now long for worship spaces that are beautiful, traditional, and utterly distinct from the outside world. In this way, Protestantism is largely failing us. Unless we return to the depth, beauty, and tradition of our Protestant roots we will continue to lose young believers to the Apostolic churches that still offer it.