These colleagues face situations for which they are not prepared. Even many people who had formal education in sacred music, who knew the major corpus of Western religious music, and who were skilled organists and choral conductors were not ready for the complexity of the situation as it developed over the last thirty years. The less the congregation participates in worship, the more passive congregants become. 8 Sheldon Sorge, in a recent article in this journal, has emphasized the Reformed belief in public worship as essentially a participatory event. 10 Worship is less likely to be considered performance when the congregation participates actively in the liturgy and in the music.
Passivity breeds a performance attitude.
Worship leaders and church musicians might need to put ego concerns aside in order to enable congregational participation. Even when not making music, members of the congregation are co-participants with those making the music. On a Sunday morning the organist offers the prelude. The persons in the pew, at worship before they have taken their places there, make an offering of what they hear, whether the offering is loud or soft, simple or complex, familiar or strange, liked or disliked. The issue is not whether the music has merit or power, but whether the worshipers are making an offering.