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[Ep 10] Building the Future of Beautiful Church Music in America w/ Five Theopolis Institute leaders

• Magnus Gautestad, Peter Leitheart,Alastair Roberts,John Ahern,Paul Buckley,Jeff Meyers. • Season 1 • Episode 10

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In this special episode with in-person interviews with Peter Leithart, Alastair Roberts, John Ahern, Paul Buckley, and Jeff Meyers we'll discover the truth about the loss of the tradition of liturgical music and suggestions of how to recover historical music forms while creating new compositions.

Peter Leithart emphasizes music as a sacrifice of praise and an anticipation of eschatological glory, drawing parallels from biblical examples. Alastair Roberts discusses broader cultural changes affecting Christian music and suggests the church as a starting point for revitalizing musical culture.
Roberts advocates for congregational singing and creating a community of shared, glorified speech through music. John Ahern identifies the problem of alienation from musical voices and suggests fostering musical education within the church and community. Paul Buckley points out the absence of Psalms in worship and encourages their reintegration through chanting and singing entire Psalms.
Buckley also hints at the unifying potential of Psalms across different Christian traditions.
Jeff Meyers critiques the corporate production of Christian music and stresses the importance of pastors taking charge of liturgical music. Meyers envisions a future where beauty in liturgy, music, and church architecture plays a central role in the Kingdom of God.

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I'm grateful to welcome you to this special episode here from Birmingham, Alabama, where the Theopolis Institute is having a gathering of theologians and musicians, particularly with the Te Deum program. We have interviews here today in this episode from some of those voices where we want to find out how we can unify the church and glorify God more fully and how music and the Kingdom of God can be envisioned We together can have a movement of bringing church in the right direction when it comes to what let's say, Christian music. With no further ado, we will now have the different voices here in this episode, and I hope that you will find specific solutions and become aware of certain problems that can help you to go to the next level in your local context and your work globally to glorify the Lord more fully through music. This is SDG Music Radio. There's a war in our churches between modern and traditional music,

but the question is this:

can we creatively integrate the best of both worlds to unify the body of Christ and glorify the Lord more fully. Join us on this podcast as Christians from various stands share their voice and come together to develop new creative arrangements and compositions that will help us to worship the Lord more fully and to empower evangelism. I'm Magnus Gautestad, and welcome to SDG Music Radio. Hey, brother. We're so glad that you can come here today. Can you please introduce yourself? Yes, I'm Peter Leithart. I'm the President of the Theopolis Institute, which is a leadership training program and institute in Birmingham, Alabama. We have two main programs. One is a fellows program that teaches and trains church leaders in Bible and liturgical theology. And we have a music program called the Todayam Music program, which is particularly for liturgical music. Excellent. What is the problem with Christian music today? My focus is particularly on liturgical music and the music we use in worship. I think the problem is largely that we have lost the tradition of liturgical music as a distinct form of music. It's not the same as classical music tradition. A lot of people who want to recover Christian music and church music think back to classical sources, but that's not the same exactly the same tradition, certainly not popular music, and a lot of the current music today is coming out of the pop music. That's the model for the church music. I think what we need to, what we've lost and what causes the problems is a loss of that particular form of music that's specific to the liturgical tradition of the church. That's a long-standing, 1,500-year-plus tradition that we have largely lost contact with. I understand. And today, what are some solutions that we can implement to get into the right direction? Part of it is certainly recovering music of the past But I think we need to have a deep understanding of the history of Christian music and the history of liturgical music. Sometimes in the United States, at least when people talk about recovering traditional forms of church music, they're thinking about reaching Going back to the great hymns of the 19th century, which is not that long ago. Of course, 19th century is almost 2,000 years into church history, and there's a long tradition of church music before that. So going back to reformation-eerie Reformation era music and even pre-reformation music, getting some sense of how that music worked and what it was doing in the church. That's the beginning part of it. Our director of our TodayM program, John Ahearn, talks about radical contemporaneity. He wants to have contemporary music, but contemporary music that is in touch with that tradition. So eventually we want to outgrow dependence on the past and the old music and produce new music that's in continuity with that liturgical music tradition. It's very inspiring and specific. Thank you for sharing that. Then to go even zoom out a little bit now with the Kingdom of God and Can you paint us a picture of how it will look like, ideally, with music in the Kingdom of God? How will that function and how will that look like and sound like? I think there are two things that I would emphasize there. One is the significance of music as an offering of praise, a sacrifice of praise, as the New Testament calls it. The work that I've done in a biblical theology of music has been primarily looking at the development of that idea of a sacrifice of praise in the Old Testament. You have, of course, animal sacrifices that begin and are developed during the time of Moses. But when you get to David in the temple, then there's a musical sacrifice that accompanies the animal sacrifices. David organizes a very large temple choir and a temple orchestra and hundreds of people involved. You can imagine if you're going up on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, going to a temple feast, and the Levitical choir and the Levitical orchestra are playing as you ascend toward Jerusalem, it's reverberating off the mountain surrounding. That vision of music that we have in the temple, that's a sacrifice of praise. The other thing that I think is significant, the other point I would make is the significance of music as an anticipation of eschatological glory. The portrait that we have of heaven, particularly in the Book of Revelation, is a place of continuous worship and particularly a continuous song. Revelation 5, when the Lamb appears in heaven, suddenly all of the residents of heaven, all the angels, have musical instruments. They're playing and they're singing. When the martyrs ascend in Revelation 14 and they're standing on the firmament sea, they're singing and praising the Lord. You have the prominent, the the climax of praise toward the end of Revelation. When we're singing in the church, we're anticipating the destiny of everything. Someday everything is going to join in a great cosmic praise, cosmic worship, cosmic song. We have the privilege of anticipating that and anticipating the world as it's going to be. If you have a congregation that's singing vigorously, that's singing a great music, that's already the germ of we hope for, not just in time, but what we hope for in eternity. That is where the world is going. What a hopeful vision. How can people get in contact with your work and help contributing to the fruition of this vision you have painted for us? Probably the easiest way for people to find out about the Theopolis Institute is to go to our website, theopolisinstitute.com If you're interested in music in particular, we have a page on the website that describes the Te Deum Music program. That will also links to an application if anybody's interested in coming to study with our faculty and learn more about the theology of music. Then also, there are countless articles about music that is on the website. The Theopolis Institute website is probably the best starting place for getting a handle of what we're doing. Wonderful. Thank you very much, brother, for coming. Thank you. Hey, brother. Can you introduce yourself? My name is Alastair Roberts. I work for the Theopolis and Davenant Institutes and also do my own work. I'm primarily concerned with introducing people to the reading of the Bible for all that it's worth, helping them to understand biblical symbolism and typology and to learn how that applies within the wider world. Fantastic. What is the problem with Christian music today? It's a good question. I think in many respects, we can't understand the problems with Christian music without understanding problems with music more generally within our culture. I think the last 100 years or so have witnessed incredible changes in the way that we approach music, the way that we listen to music, and the way that we make music. If we think about the development of recording technologies, the development of cultures and economies around music music and the ways in which we have various forms of amplification, it changes the way that music is made, the way that music is consumed and listened to, and forms of culture that were based around the production of music in more folk contexts have disappeared or significantly been reduced as a result of these new developments. So I think it's very hard to imagine a change in Christian music without first understanding how we might address the larger problems. And so I think the problems within the church are often downstream of these larger problems within society. And on the other hand, we might think, if we are going to address these larger problems within a culture of music within society, we probably need to start with the church, because the church is the place where a new form of culture could be inculcated. And through that, I think people could have a vision of what it would mean for us to make music in a different way, to listen to music in a different way, and to understand music differently, too. That makes sense. So practically, then, what are a solution that can be implemented now to move Christian music in the right direction and with it, the culture at large? Yes. One of the first things to consider is some of the ways in which the church is a unique place for music. The church is one of those places where there are still, in many quarters, a tradition of fantastic music, of music making. Think about the great choirs in many churches. Think about also the traditions of church music that still continue in many quarters. So there's a lot to work with that's positive. We can see all the problems, and there's no shortage of problems to see, but there's a lot of good things to work with as well. I think what we need to recover in part is congregational song and recognizing the way in which there can be a mix and a mutual strengthening of a wider congregational song and then the specialized music of musicians and choirs and other things like that. The church is a place where you can bring together, on the one hand, the more specialized music of trained musicians and a wider folk culture of music. The culture that would be created in a society where people learn how to play musical instruments from an early age, where families are singing together around the piano, where there is a more general literacy in music. And That alongside a long lasting tradition that goes all the way back to the very beginning of the church, and even before that, we might think about the importance of the Psalms, for instance. That tradition can be sustained and also It would be something that informs this wider culture that supports and strengthens that. Now, within the life of churches, I think that can be pursued in part by giving churches a greater sense of what it means to make music together. There is a tendency as moderns, to get into a habit of consuming music. That is our posture towards music. We listen to recorded music and CDs or other forms, our MP3 players, whatever it is. And we're not really used to the process of making music or listening to music, even with our full attention. You might think about the difference between the descriptions of people listening to an album in the 1960s, where you have the vinyl and you'd play it and give it your full attention with a group of people. The way that we listen to music now so often is just background for other things that we're doing. The art of listening carefully and attentively to music, the idea of making music together in the church, and you don't have to be a specialized musician or a member of a choir to do this. One of the things that I would like to see churches do is spend time with congregations learning how to sing particular songs. When we're singing, we're not just singing along with people who are singing at the front. It's not just a spectacle. It's an event in which we're all invited to a tribute to a corporate act of worship, and an act of worship. We're not consuming this music, we're creating this music together. Now, I think music has a particular potential to it. Within the life of the church. It's one of the means by which speech draws us together. There are many forms of speech, but it seems to me that music is the glorification of speech. It's taking something that's natural to speech itself. Speech has musical character, and it's elevating that, and it's attending it with all sorts of other things that are, in many respects, extensions of the potential of the human body, the rhythmic capacity of the human limbs to create some beat, or we can think about the breath and the way in which you can form sounds with breath. And all these different potentials and extensions of the body, coupled with the glorification of the voice and speech, enable us to create something that's glorious and incredible. And it seems to me that it has the potential to draw us together in ways that other forms of speech do not. We can speak in unison, but even the process of speaking in unison requires the discovery of a shared rhythm, and music allows for us to elevate that a level further. I think music is also one of those things that helps words to stick. We sing a song a number of times, and the words are memorized without any effort. We find ourselves being able to sing songs that we've not gone to the effort of learning, and yet we know them because they are familiar to us from hearing them. And in the the same way the song of the church is a way in which words get into us. It's a way in which words are glorified and made beautiful. It's a way in which the church is brought together in a community of shared, glorified speech. There's also something that stirs and elicits our deep affections and our interiority. If you think about those moments where you're most joyful. It's often there's a song within you that wants to get out, maybe in humming or in some sub-vocalised song, whatever it is. We have song somewhere deep within us. If we want to work together, often When singing together allows us to do something in unison. Think about the great sea shanties or the work songs that would give people the cue to heave at a particular point, something like that, or just the process of dance that enables the human body to move with a certain rhythm and fluidity. The church is a place where a large company of people can be brought together in a way that conscripts their emotions, in a way that brings them together in unison, in a way that glorifies speech and shows that this is not just regular speech. This is wonderful speech. You might think about the statement of St. Augustine, The Lever Sings, When we sing, we're expressing something that moves us that's good. It's not just true, it's not just good, but it's beautiful. When we are engaged in the act of worship, there's something of that relationship of love that should be expressed because we are the people of God coming towards the bridegroom. It's bride and bridegroom dynamics. One of the things that we do here at Theopolis is emphasize something of a responsive, song liturgy. The person who's leading at the front sings, and then we sing in response, and there's a glorification of the speech, but there's also a transcription of our desires. We want to serve Christ, we love Christ, and we want to seek his coming. Wow. That is a lot of great ideals to aspire toward, and also, I think, very practical steps to implement. I really appreciate that. I wanted to end our short discussion on this today of you painting a vision for us about how this can come together in the Kingdom of God God. What is a vision that we all can start to move toward together when it comes to music? Now, we all find ourselves in different situations. Many of us find ourselves in churches where we feel a long way off from this. It's some way on the far distant horizon. We may never see it in our lifetimes, but we may see it in a generation or so's time. So wherever we are, I think we should take hope and think about what we can do to move towards this. One of the things that we need to do is recover something of song within our own lives. That will be an understanding of attention to music. I think also a concern to improve our own singing abilities and to become part of communities where song is important. This is something that can be practiced within a choir, but also, ideally, you want it to be enjoyed by a wider company of people. This is not just something that's the preserve of professionals or people who have set apart themselves for a specialized community. It's not experts or anything like that. This is for everyone. We used to have societies where song was more commonplace. There would be musical instruments and there would be people singing together around the fire, for instance, and we need to recover that. That's maybe something that requires, Perhaps we need to recognize that our generation has not been raised with these sorts of things, and we need to rectify that by raising the next generation with musical literacy as just a baseline expectation as you'd expect them to understand how to read, how to work with numbers. You expect them to learn how to sing and how to play a musical instrument. So there's that. And I think also, one of the things you find with music is the more that you participate, the more the rewards naturally come from that. And people, it can feel like a chore at first when you're learning a musical instrument. It was certainly my experience growing up. And yet, as you begin to play, it begins to become an extension of you. And so what once seemed to be an obstacle to your freedom, this instrument that I have to obey the rules of, I have to go through this burdensome process of learning scales, et cetera, it becomes an expression of my freedom and my expression and my becoming part of something greater than myself, perhaps an orchestra or a company of musicians who are playing together. So I think often the hardest parts are those initial steps where you feel the obstacles within yourself of your own limited ability, where you feel the restrictions of a community around you that doesn't really have the same vision for it. But often what I've found is if people see what it could be, if they have a vision, first of all, of a community where these things are practiced, or they have a vision given by some people within a community, a choir, let's say, producing beautiful music, they have something of an appetite produced in themselves to become part of that. Because the gifts that come with music naturally flow from that participation. In Theopolis, that's been one of our concerns, to develop this, even for people who are not naturally musically gifted. I'm not naturally musically gifted. But the more that you get involved in this thing, the more you realize there is something amazing here that the church has more generally lost. The church has had its song voice taken from it in many respects. Maybe it's been given to people with amplification at the front on the stage or maybe restricted to some individual performers or a choir. But everyone in the church should have some enjoyment of that song. That is something that maybe we are led by a choir or specific performers. But ideally, this is something to be returned to the church. So step by step, it might be recovering it within the context of your home, singing together in the morning in the context of family devotions. Or it may be thinking about what it would be like in your church to introduce times where where you're practicing a song together. And part, that might sound burdensome that you have to go through this rigmarole of learning how to sing a song. But it's enjoyable when you begin to realize, I'm not just singing along with some people who are playing this. But this is a true performance that I feel liberated within. And so I think when people do that, they'll find themselves drawn more together with other people who are doing it. They'll begin to enjoy the process. The words themselves will take on a more glorious character for them. I think they'll find that there is an unleashing of the conscripted emotions that music does call upon. That's beautiful. How can people get in contact with your work? Where do you want people to go? I'd recommend that people follow the work of Theopolis. Theopolis has an app. It has a website, and it's also available on Twitter and elsewhere. My own work, I write in various places. My main place to follow me is argosy.substack.com The Anchored Argosy is the Substack. I also have a series of chapter-by-chapter commentaries working through the whole of the Bible. Those are freely available on YouTube and also on SoundCloud. Thank you very much, brother. Thank you. Brother, thank you for coming. Of course. Can you please introduce yourself? Sure. I'm John Ahern. I just finished my PhD at Princeton University in Musicology. I now teach Latin and Humanities at a classical Christian school in New Jersey. Excellent. What's the problem with Christian music? I'd say that problems, particularly with American Christian music right now, it originates, I think, fundamentally from the alienation of people from their own musical voice. I think that God created humans musical. He created them to sing. He created them with a desire to sing his praises. And there are two ways in which that musical voice can be alienated from them. One way is through highly professionalized music of the classical sort. So perhaps a church in which all the music is done through professional choirs or professional ensembles or whatever. But the far One more common problem, I think, in American churches is actually professionalization through what we might call contemporary Christian music, which does not feel professionalized. It does not feel as if... It feels very accessible It is attempting to come off that way. I think it is felt to be that way by the people who make contemporary Christian music. But I think that the problem is that it is not designed for congregational singing, and it's not really something which a congregation of amateur singers could themselves produce without any outside propping up. What I think we need to do is to find some model of singing where the primary instrument of the music making is the human voice as it normally and naturally is for human beings. And so there you just touched on it, the solution to that specific problem you you laid out for us, and I think it was very clear. Thank you for that. Is there any other solutions of areas that needs to be prioritized for the churches, let's say, in America? I think that it's not just a problem within the church. I think that this is a social problem, downstream of technological changes that happened in the '40s, '50s, '60s of recording technologies, which made it so that people think the normal thing to do with music is to listen to it passively rather than themselves take up the task of making music. I think part of what our solution is, is not just to cultivate music in the church, but for the church to encourage people to cultivate music outside the church. In their own social context. The church also to be centers of musical education, particularly for young people. This is something that churches have done in the past always, and I think in some places it continues to do it where there are singing schools, places that really teach musical literacy, basics of vocal pedagogy, so that Christians are people who sing, and they sing beautifully, and they love singing in the Kingdom of God. Wonderful. So zooming out a little bit for the Kingdom of God, do you have any description for us so we can unite and move towards such a vision that can inspire us? What is a vision that inspire you relating to the Kingdom of God and music? Like a vision from a historical past? Yeah. How would it look and sound like when the church comes together and glorify God at his full, it's through music? What would we do then together as a church? I think that it will have aspects that are both global and local, both maybe Catholic, universal, and also very local. I think that one of the beauties and glories of the church is that we are one in Christ. There are all sorts of ones, famously in the New Testament, that are emphasized, one baptism, one faith, one Lord, and so on and so forth. There is a oneness to how we worship God. There are certain, I think, fundamentals, biblically speaking, to worship. That a Christian, regardless of language and people and culture, can go worship in a place, and there is a familiarity in how that worship is happening. At the same time, I think I look forward to a time that I can't even conceive of quite what the music will be like, perhaps in the future, because it's local, it's interested in addressing the concerns of particular congregations, particular pastoral concerns, particular spiritual concerns in particular congregational settings, and that music can speak into that, and that the music that composers compose for the church, music that people sing for the church reflects a vernacular concern and is expressed in vernacular musical terms that are appropriate to the specific time and place that they're in. That makes a lot of sense. These two aspects we need to keep in mind the universal and the local. How can people get in contact with you and your work? I do a lot of work with the Theopolis Institute, which is where you're finding me right now. I run their Te Deum program for liturgical music. That's training for liturgical musicians and for pastors and rectors and priests who are interested in liturgical music. So one way to get in touch with me would be through that. And I try to make myself a little bit hard to be in touch with. So I'm not really on social media, but I'm always happy to be emailed through Theopolis and get in touch with people that way. Very good. Thank you, brother, for coming. Yeah, my pleasure. Hey, brothers, thanks for coming. Can you make a quick introduction to our audience of who you are? My name is Paul Buckley. I am the music guy and choir director at Colleyville Presbyterian Church, conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church in the Dallas, Fortworth, Texas area. I do some part-time work for the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham. Okay. What is the problem with the Christian music scene, either in America or at a larger your extent? What do you see? There's certainly lots of problems that could be looked at from various perspectives. The answer I'm going to offer is that one big problem is the almost complete loss of the Psalms in American Christian worship. We are used to Psalm-less worship in a way that I don't think any previous generation of Christians, whether East or West, Protestant or Catholic, would have been used to, that it would strike them as beyond odd that our worship is so psalm-like. What do you suggest as the solution then to that issue? It's something that we can start implementing today. Well, Well, the Psalms are clearly not there primarily to be read by the individual Christian devotionally, although that's a good idea to do. They are not there primarily to be preached on by a preacher, although, of course, the Psalms are fair game for preaching material. But first and foremost, they are songs. They are meant to be sung. So this is something that American churches, and particularly American evangelicals, need to pick up again. By sing the Psalms, I mean something pretty specific. There are other things I don't mean. I don't between singing just a snippet of a Psalm, such as a little chorus that might say, be still and know that I am God, or this is the day that the Lord has made, I will joyce and be glad of it. There's nothing wrong with singing single lines of scripture, but that's not the same thing as singing Psalm 46 in its entirety or Psalm 118 in its entirety. I also think that what we need to learn to do, this is a tall order for American evangelicals, we need to learn to chant the Psalms straight from a real translation. That is, when I say we should sing the Psalms, return to the the Psalms, I don't mean we should go to the Psalms and start rewriting them according to our own sensibilities so that they would have meter, a regular meter, a rhyme scheme, Most of the music we listen to, whether it's pop music or church music or whatever, does that. But the Psalms and other biblical canticles such as the Magnificat, the Benedictus in Luke 1, don't do that. To sing them as is, you have to have a music that completely submits itself to the text. That's what chant is. One of the hurdles for us is that most of us, not having grown up with that music, find it alien, at least at the beginning. Many of us have not heard good models. We haven't heard it done well. My own experience is that even with people who say they don't like chant, when they hear a really good model, begin to change their minds. Okay. So That's one specific aspect then to add on, to bring us in the right direction is to sing the Psalms in its entirety. Can you help us to extend a bit now, looking forward, a unifying vision for the church, either at the local level or and at the more universal Catholic level for the church? How should music be in the Kingdom of God? In what I call my previous incarnation, I was a journalist. I worked at the Dallas Morning News. When I graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary and landed my first gig as a church musician, I went to a church musician friend who had already been on the job for years and said, Tell me how to do my job. I'm a church musician Well. One of the things he said to me was that people like what they like, and that's not going to change overnight. This is an evangelical music director. He said, One thing that we should be all able to agree on is that the Psalms are the measure of all of our church music. The Psalms set the standard. But, he said, you can't even get evangelicals to agree on that much. But if we could agree on that, if we could agree that the Psalms ought to be centered spiritual. They ought to be part of our bread, our liturgical bread and butter, that actually would be a very unifying thing with the church Catholic. Again, both East and West, Protestant and Catholic. I mean, this is the inheritance of the whole church. American evangelicals need to be humble enough to say that there are other traditions that are not American evangelical that have preserved this tradition of singing the Psalms better than we have. So this is an area where we can humble ourselves and treat others within the body of Christ as better than ourselves and learn from them. I'm not the first to say this as a congregationalist minister in in London in the 19th century, a congregationalist minister who taught his congregation to chant. In the introduction to a collection of Psalms that he published, He said that this would be an incredibly unifying thing if all of us in the body of Christ would embrace the Salter and sing it. But it's not going to solve every problem, every doctrional problem, every division that we have. But it would go a long way to uniting us in prayer and song. Wonderful. Specific. Something we can definitely think about, discuss, and I think an important piece of the puzzle in our discussion of how we can glorify God more fully by bringing the church together and learning from both the variety we have today, but also everything we've had in the past. Of course, looking forward to how we can have new music that reflects these values. I'm very grateful that you have shared your perspective today. Do you have anything you would like to add? Well, many of us are not in a position to make a change like this in church to suddenly say, Okay, next week we're going to begin chanting Psalms. Here's where I think we can take a lesson from Dietrich Bonhoffer, who was impressed when he went to England, when he heard Anglican chant. He took some of that music back to Germany, and they sang the Psalms in German, chanted them in his underground seminary. Bonhoffer, who has a wonderful little book on the Psalms called the Psalms, the Prayer Book of the Bible, says that churches that have preserved daily emersion in the singing of the Psalms have a priceless treasure. If the rest of us are not in a position to enjoy that publicly with the church, then we'll have to devote ourselves all the more to it at home. So I would say for people, I don't want to offer a council of despair. So if we're not in a position to make a change in our local congregation, we could at least at home, if we live by ourselves or if we have a family, begin to sing the Psalms there. Good point. A stepping stone, and of course, also part of the overall Christian life. How can people get in contact with your work? I don't have a website myself. Some of what I have written is on the Theopolis Institute website. I will say that my Theopolis colleague, Brian Motz and I, are available to do weekend seminars at churches that are interested in chant and would like to get their feet with it. There are details about that on the Theopolis site, about how to invite us to come do a seminar at a church. Wonderful. That will be within America. Is there any boundaries for how far you would travel to offer such a service? No, I don't think so. We haven't had an international invitation yet, but I'm sure we could do it. Okay, very encouraging. Good to see that there are resources that can help implement these ideas. Thank you very much, brother, for coming. Thank you. Brother, thank you for coming. Can you introduce yourself to your audience? Sure. I'm Jeff Meyers. I'm pastor at Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. I've been there for 30 years. Been married for 46 years, have four kids and six grandkids. Okay, wonderful. What's the problem or problems we see with Christian music today? Okay. Well, Well, mostly that it is produced and distributed by corporations, by companies, and not so much in the church. I am not an expert on music. I know you interviewed John Hearn earlier, but my vision is for good music, appropriate music that glorifies the liturgy in the church in particular. So great hymns, Psalm chanting, and music like that. Do you have a solution for something we can implement now to glorify that liturgy or in general, to improve the beauty or the quality of music? Right. Well, there are a lot of resources available to pastors. One of the problems is that pastors often don't take charge of the liturgy. It's given to committees, worship committees or other musicians. But one of the solutions is for pastors to study up on liturgical theology and practical matters in liturgy and how the music ought to be woven into a biblically grounded liturgy. Lots of times what happens is music is just pregame ceremonies for the sermon, emotionally get people ready for a sermon. But it needs to be more than that. It really even shouldn't be that if it's incorporated into the sequence of events through which God draws us near to himself in the worship service. Yes, that makes sense and something we can use to point others and ourselves in the right direction. If we zoom out a little bit with the Kingdom of God and look at ideals, what is something that inspire you toward where we will end up when the Kingdom of God more and more is seen, so to speak? Right. Well, we need to have a beautiful liturgy, a beautiful music a beautiful congregation, a beautiful building, and beauty has its own attraction to people. I think more and more these days, in America anyway, the uglification of a lot of our art and architecture has led people to more traditional forms of worship and more traditional buildings, church buildings. I think that's a good thing. I don't think we want to just do historical reenactment worship or architecture, but we need to learn from the past. The spirit moves us to say things in beautiful ways, to sing things, and to create beautiful environments for Christians. As the Kingdom of God advances, I would hope that we see more and more emphasis on that. Wonderful. Where can people get in contact with your work, or where do you recommend people go to contribute to this vision that you have just shared with us? Well, in terms of my work with Theopolis, the Theopolis website is a good one. I also have a couple of books that have been pretty well received on worship, one called The Lord's Service, The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship. You can get that on Canon Press. Athanasius Press has a shorter version of that geared more towards lay people than pastors. So there's that. Was there a second part of that question? Is there any other resources you want to point people to so they can start getting equipped and contribute to that vision of beauty? Yeah. Besides books, really, if you're a pastor, if you're in charge of a church, you ought to just do some research on liturgical theology liturgy, you ought to get for yourself a Book of Common Prayer, Lutheran liturgies, and look at the history of liturgical theology. When guys do that, they learn a lot. Now, you might not just do everything that you read about in any particular liturgical book or hymnal, but you'll get help there. You'll get a rich and well-growned, biblically-grounded form of prayer and responsive readings and things like that. Thank you very much, brother, for coming here and sharing this with us. You're welcome.