Valley News – By the Way: Music drew me to the Episcopal Church

Typically I’m requested how somebody who grew up evangelical—a fundamentalist, actually—turned an Episcopalian and ultimately an Episcopal priest. I usually reply with a semi-flippant reply: It was a response to the aesthetic deprivation of my childhood.

That’s not solely inaccurate.

I like and respect the outdated gospel hymns of my childhood: “Tell Me the Old, Old Story,” “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” “Blessed Assurance,” “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling,” or “Bringing In the Sheaves,” which for a few years I assumed was my mom’s laundry music from the clothesline in our rural southern Minnesota yard, “Bringing In the Sheets.”

However in regards to the time I graduated from faculty and headed to graduate faculty within the late Seventies, evangelical worship was transferring decisively away from these outdated requirements towards an embrace of one thing that has come to be referred to as reward music, which my good friend Tony Campolo characterizes as 4 notes, three phrases, two hours.

Evangelical congregations started discarding hymnals in favor of overhead projectors after which fancy PowerPoints with the lyrics magically showing onscreen in opposition to the background of amber waves of grain or shimmering sunsets. Now not anchored by hymnals, abruptly buoyant arms and arms might attain towards the sky.

Congregational singing, as soon as a staple of evangelical worship, turned incidental, particularly with the cult of amplification. “Praise bands” or “worship teams” moved in. The organ gave strategy to drums and guitars. The piano was changed by an digital keyboard.

Due to the persistent patriarchy in evangelicalism, these reward bands had been initially dominated by males, though they ultimately allowed ladies on stage, usually clutching a microphone in a single hand, head tilted upward with eyes closed, the opposite hand reaching towards the ceiling.

That is in regards to the time I found the Episcopal Church.

I used to be a graduate pupil in Princeton, and one Sunday I made a decision to go to Trinity Church, simply a few blocks from my residence. I entered the purple wood doorways considerably tentatively, for this was new territory and I used to be undecided what to anticipate.

Virtually instantly, I felt as if I’d come residence. The area itself, so in contrast to the warehouses then common amongst evangelicals, urged that one thing necessary occurred there, though I wasn’t positive again then what it may be.

In time, I acknowledged that the Eucharist lay on the heart of Episcopal worship, not the sermon. The altar was central, not the pulpit. As a historian, I liked the sense of reference to the previous. Evangelicals of their infinite pursuit of innovation, had been all the time experimenting: “Let’s try something new!” I had grown bored with this cult of novelty and was able to strive one thing outdated.

The prayers, many relationship again centuries, had been stately and poetic, not the “Lord, we just wanna’ ” that had turn into commonplace amongst evangelicals. I instantly turned enamored of the cadences of the E book of Widespread Prayer.

Most of all, nonetheless, I liked the music, particularly the hovering descants of the Anglican choral custom, which after all constructed upon the sooner musical types of each Catholicism and the Reformation. Music on this area was reverent and holy, extra worship than efficiency.

That, I got here to appreciate, was an idealized view. Once I turned a rector in my very own proper a few years later, I discovered that some musicians in Episcopal church buildings fancied themselves performers slightly than choristers. The manufacturing of transcendent music fairly often requires reining in some Montana-size egos.

However the effort pays off. Some years in the past, I sat in on the ultimate rehearsal for 9 Classes and Carols, the Christmas Eve efficiency of the King’s Faculty Choir in Cambridge.

The director on the time, Stephen Cleobury, labored tirelessly to mix these magnificent voices right into a coherent entire, an effort that required self-discipline and quite a lot of admonitions.

The end result, nonetheless, carried out earlier than a crowded chapel and broadcast world wide the next afternoon, was chic and unforgettable. “The Anglican choral tradition is one of the glories of Western civilization,” I wrote on the time, “and if there is a more heavenly sound than a soaring descant, I have no clue what it might be.”

St. Augustine as soon as mentioned that singing is praying twice. Sometimes, I’ve reminded congregations that, excluding the Eucharist, singing is the holiest factor we do as a result of it takes the air we breathe, which is life itself, and transforms it into music.

You possibly can name it magic, if you want, the alchemy of numerous voices. I believe it’s a type of grace.

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is the John Phillips Professor in Faith at Dartmouth.