February (Web-only) 2000 News Music

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If your church has split over worship, you have plenty of company. And in those congregations that have not split, there is all too often a festering, unresolved conflict over the music used in worship, the choice of hymns or songs, the order of the service. These so-called worship wars have been extensively reported. But even as many congregations continue to fragment, others are experiencing revitalized worship that is scripturally grounded and Spirit-filled. Thiscounter-trend has not been widely noticed. It should be.

On January 14 and 15, more than 850 people gathered at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan for the annual Calvin Symposium on Worship and the Arts. The large turnout exceeded expectations, and the conference planners, led by John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, were stretched to the limit. They responded with ingenuity and good cheer, and the result was a program that lived up to this year's theme: Jubilee.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the symposium was the integration between theological reflection on worship and hands-on practical instruction. Jeremy Begbie of Cambridge University gave two extraordinary lectures supplemented by visual images and musical examples (Begbie himself is a skilled pianist and oboeist). The reality of the Trinity, he suggested, may be apprehended more fully via music than by our visual imagination—a vivid demonstration of why we need to see "theology and the arts" integrated, not treated as a preserve for dabblers whom we indulge now and then.

The same people who packed the auditorium for Begbie's lectures proceeded from thence to a wide variety of workshops, led by Horace Boyer, Marty Haugen, Mark Hayes, and other practitioners. There ...