There is a unique quality to making music together, whether around a campfire or around the piano at home or in church, that other forms of interaction with music don’t quite match. Giving up these traditional musical practices wholesale would be a great loss, especially since church is one of the few places where people still make music together in this way. The church will always be weird in a secular culture, in far more ways than our music. In music – as in so many other parts of the church’s life – this is a weirdness worth embracing.

It is a common complaint that congregations don’t sing like they used to.