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T. David Gordon makes the case for traditional worship in an interview with Christianity Today that springs off his book Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns.

Gordon, among other points, argues that Christians should cultivate tastes contrary to the trends of popular culture. He says,

Unless an individual chooses to listen to different kinds of music, the only thing that individual will hear (most of the time) is pop. Sure, one’s sensibilities can be shaped deliberately, and many of us have developed tastes that we once did not have. (I spent years cultivating a taste for Brahms, whom I now love, and I spent about two years cultivating my appreciation for jazz.) If I did not believe that sensibilities could be cultivated, I wouldn’t have written the book; it is, in some senses, a plea to shape them differently from the way commercial pop culture shapes them. But for people who do not take ownership of the cultivation of their sensibilities, other cultural gatekeepers will shape them for them—and in this case, they will shape them to prefer pop.

One more gem is at the end when Gordon is asked about the virtue of blended services:

I approve blended approaches only when the alternative is a split church. It’s better to blend than to split. But better yet to be entirely unconcerned about whether a hymn sounds contemporary. No other generation was so concerned, and there is no good reason for ours to be so. The commercial forces that shape pop culture should not be the arbiters of how we worship God.

HT: Michael Riley