And
the band played on
When
I go to a Brown’s game I love to be exuberant.
I stand up, scream real loud, and bare my chest to reveal a big orange
and brown “R”. All of my
friends in Section C-240 think that I am normal, just a big fan. I’m also a
pretty big God fan, but most churches don’t have a section C-240, and so my
exuberant cheering is not always as welcome there. And that’s too bad, because
I’m pretty sure that God could use a cheering section in America right about
now. He might even find a use for a
band. Funerals, seventh inning stretches and church services are the last
remaining domains of the organ keyboard. It’s hard to imagine why some
churches limit their musical accompaniment to an instrument we only hear
otherwise in funeral homes and stadium men’s rooms. It perplexes me that the
same churches that won’t move past the tradition of the keyboard have organs
with key stops set to guitar, trumpet, bass and harmonica. If a band composed of
those four instruments ever showed up at their service, they would be summarily
stoned.
I
remember a rather heated discussion, which took place at a board meeting, while
I was serving a church in Summit County. We had just instituted a Wednesday
evening praise style service with music performed on guitar, keyboard and drums.
A good old elder of ours was emphatic that there was no place in the church for
rock and roll style instrumentation. “We just bought a new organ,” he
reminded us all. “Twenty thousand dollars!” and “What were we thinking?”
Now I don’t know what anybody else was thinking, but I was thinking
that perhaps a few younger and unchurched folks might show up to sing with us on
Wednesday evenings if they were given half a musical chance. The discussion,
which followed, was precious. We lobbed Bible verses back and forth as if they
were handgrenades. “Worship the Lord with the cymbal” I proffered.
“Decently, and in order”, he countered. And so it went, until another elder
who had left the meeting room when the matter first arose, returned with a
folder full of board minutes from the 1940’s. He sat silently thumbing through
that folder while we continued mounting our biblical defenses. Then he politely
interrupted, reading slowly from a dog-eared and yellow single sheet of paper.
The last echoes of our explosive dialogue drifted into the distance and we sat
like schoolchildren at story time, listening. He read an account of a postwar
meeting in which a philanthropic church family had offered to provide the church
with its first pump organ. The meeting minutes chronicled the debate word for
word. Amazingly, it was the same discussion we were having some fifty years
later. Yes, there was a time when the sacred organ itself was seen to be the
very instrument of Satan. In the end, the old church board tabled the organ
discussion, as good church boards often do, allowing time to mount their
backroom campaigns, and pew by pew lobbying efforts pro or con. In our present
case, the drums stayed up front and the Wednesday night praise services sailed
along nicely until years later when the board floated in the same old iceberg.
Damaged beyond repair, the service slipped quickly beneath the icy waters of
tradition, but I am pleased to say that, until the bitter end, the band played
on.