Music in the Church

There is much controversy about music in the church. From my observations, it seems as though there is a disagreement mainly between the young and old in the church, about what kind of music should be sang. Many of the older people in the congregation would like to stick to the tradition hymns and do not enjoy singing small choruses, which I have heard called 7-11 songs (songs that have 7 lines and repeat 11 times.) They feel there is no debt, and if there is different or faster beat, that they are too "wordly."

The view that these new songs should be disregarded worries me alot. Many of the old hymns, were written to the tunes of old bar songs. The argument that the new choruses have a beat that resembles the rock music of today is hypocritical when looking back and knowing that when the hymns were first written, many of the songs' melodies would be recognizable by the town drunks or bar hoppers.

Many of the choruses are simply taken from the book of Psalms. Do the people who argue that these songs aren't deep enough, also think that David's psalms are just useless words that don't have a meaning? When they say we shouldn't sing them because they can't feel the Spirit with the words, or that they just aren't touched, they also must not get much out of reading their beloved Psalms.

I'm not saying that we should totally throw out the hymns either. I grew up with hymns and I love them, but I think their needs to a balance of some sort. It is not good for the church to be constantly fighting between the age groups. I believe that both hymns and choruses have their place in the church today. They both attract different groups of people in different ways. The hymns were new songs once, and the congregation became comfortable with them. It is dangerous to squelch the ideas and writers of today by saying that there music is unacceptable. The church needs to grow in every way to be attractive and adaptive to the communities needs, and this includes the music it allows.

Euthanasia

Some times known as assisted suicide, euthanasia was a topic my high school class discussed very heavily. Euthanasia by definition is the intentional killing of a dependant human for his own alleged benefit. There are many different categories that come in to play with discussing whether or not euthanasia is it ethically right or wrong. There is voluntary, where a person requests to be killed, and there is non-voluntary, when the person killed gave no request or consent and an outside party decides for them. Assisted suicide is when someone provides an individual with the information, guidance, and means to take his or her own life with the intention that they will be used for this purpose. When it is a doctor who helps another person to kill themselves it is called "physician assisted suicide." The most familiar form to me was lethal injection, where they put a fatal dose of drugs into a patients system thereby killing them.

Euthanasia is wrong for many reasons, however the first and foremost is that it rejects the importance of human life and dishonors God's sovereign will. God, the giver and taker of life, has a plan for everyone's life. When we take matters into our own hands and say that we should be able to decide when the best time for us to die is, or make that decision for someone else, we are playing God.

The rising of assisted suicide causes for another worry. There is an argument that soon euthanasia will become non-voluntary. This means that if a patient is coming near death or has some serious health issue that will never be cured, the doctor can decide whether or not to pull the plug.

We have heard story after story about miracles that have happened. People have been mysteriously cured, people have been pronounced dead and than somehow lived. Euthanasia, like I expressed before, is taking matters into our own hands, and could be messing with some wonderful miracle that God has planned for a life. I am not saying that God will miraculously cure everyone, but there is a time to die that He has set aside for us and we should not mess with His plan. He knows what's best for us, why shouldn't we trust him?