September 6 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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another—and come back tonight if you want hamburgers! Whatever happened to fellowship? What happened to taking an interest in the joys and cares of others? "Equal but separate" musical apartheid is a temporary fix for a deeper spiritual problem.

Gregory R. Moore
Rainier, Oreg.

* I am not sure Michael Hamilton and I were living in the same era. Why does he waste half the article on the "reformers" who write songs no one sings? Why does he not even mention the charismatic movement, which is the birthing room of the praise and worship phenomenon?

Bill Fitzgerrel
Copeland, Kans.

It would have been fun to sit in on the editorial sessions that determined that Michael Hamilton's cover story would be surreptitiously compromised by following it with Mark Noll's "We Are What We Sing." Perhaps many readers missed the connection, though the artwork gave it away—the "sad organ" with Hamilton's story of "How guitars beat out the organ in the worship wars," and the "glad organ" with Noll's article (subtitle: "Our classic hymns reveal evangelicalism at its best").

Despite his insistence that praise songs and guitars of the "revolutionaries" have already won the war, Hamilton is still trying to silence us objecting "reformers," including probably Marva Dawn and Mark Noll. He joins the church-growth pragmatists by insisting that church music quality should be judged "only by the lives of the people singing the songs." Hopefully, he will read Noll's historical evaluation that begins: "Evangelicalism at its best is the religion displayed in its classic hymns." In the long run, the church also must be considered.

Noll might have mentioned that evangelicals have not always lived up to their best in singing. In the early 20th century, ...