My Most Beautiful Music Moments have been in a Church

C.S. Lewis wrote, "The case for abolishing all Church Music whatever thus seems to me far stronger that the case for abolishing the difficult work of the trained choir and retaining the lusty roar of the congregation. Whatever doubts I feel about the spiritual value of the first I feel at least equally about the spiritual value of the second. The first and most solid conclusion which (for me) emerges is that both musical parties, the High Brows and the Low, assume far too easily the spiritual value of the music they want. Neither the greatest excellence of a trained performance from the choir, not the heartiest and most enthusiastic bellowing from the pews, must be taken to signify that any specifically religious activity is going on. It may be SO, or it may NOT. Yet the main sense of Christendom, reformed and unreformed, would be against us if we tried to banish music from the Church. It remains to suggest, very tentatively, the ways in which it can really be PLEASING to GOD or to help to SAVE THE SOULS of men. There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself of trained and delicate taste, humbly and charitably sacrifices his own (aesthetically right) desires and gives the people humbler and coarser fare than he would wish, in belief (even, as it may be, the erroneous belief) that he can thus bring them to God. The other is where the stupid and unmusical layman humbly and patiently, and above all silently, listens to music which he cannot, or cannot fully, appreciate, in the belief that it somehow glorifies God, and that if it doesn't edify him this must be his own defect. Neither such a High Brow nor such a Low Brow can be far out of the way. To both, Church Music will have been a means of grace; not the music they have liked, but the music they have disliked. They have both offered, sacrificed, their taste in the fullest sense. But where the opposite situation arises, where the musician is filled with pride of skill or the virus of emulation and looks with contempt on the unappreciative congregation, or where the unmusical, complacently entrenched in their own ignorance and conservatism, look with the restless and resentful hostility of an inferiority complex on all who try to improve their taste-there, we may be sure, all that both offer is unblessed and the spirit that moves them is NOT the HOLY GHOST."

Two of the most beautiful musically blessed moments that I have heard took place in church. One was from my friend who is tone deaf. I was behind him one service and God graced me to hear his heart. It made me weep.

The other, was when a young man, who stuttered and was extremely shy, stood up in our church and sang the hymn "Less of Me and More of Thee" acappella while the kids in front of me heckled him.

I think C.S. Lewis said it perfectly, "For all our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like the intrinsically worthless present of a child, which a father values indeed, but he values only for the intention."