The Baptist Preference Problem

Irby Wallace

August 20, 2025

Baptists are no strangers to disagreements over music in our congregational worship. During our beginnings in the early seventeenth century, Baptists opposed singing and music in their worship and, when it was practiced, it was very limited with many restrictions.[1] This short period might have been one of the few moments of respite in our history around the use of music in worship. By the middle to late seventeenth century, the Baptist hymn singing controversy began as our forefathers debated on whether singing was appropriate in public worship. After the practice of singing was accepted, the next debate began around what type of songs we should sing. Eventually we would debate over whether to use instruments in worship only to be followed by disagreement over what type of instruments we should be using. Baptist worship has been evolving over the last four hundred years and each step of the way has been met by resistance.

Some will find these debates humorous as they see the ever-changing worship to be positive while rolling their eyes at the losers of each controversy for being “old fogeys.” While I am thankful that we sing and use instruments in our worship today, let us be cautious to ignore the thoughts of those “old fogeys” who resisted the musical changes in Baptist worship. In fact, it was not only the first Baptists who resisted the use of music in our worship, but most of Church history has had a negative view around music in worship. The arguments in early Baptist churches were not merely about preference and personality, but the heart of the debates were about biblical hermeneutics and a desire to worship God with reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28-29). We have lost this passion for centering our worship around the standards laid out in scripture. Instead, we base our modern worship models on what will draw in the largest crowds. We have bought wholesale into a consumeristic Christianity that constantly has to keep up with the modern trends and styles to stay relevant for the consumer.

There are many Baptist churches today divided over music and the struggle of appeasing the tastes of their congregants. Some churches have divided into several mini churches having multiple Sunday services each designed to give the consumer what they want. Some churches have maintained one service but now have a check-list ensuring they play appropriate amounts of traditional and contemporary stuff to avoid passionate outburst and give at least the illusion of unity. Groups of individuals have left their small churches for mega-churches or to start churches that have the style of music they want to sing every Sunday. If you ask the average Baptist congregant what they look for in a church, their answer will likely revolve around the style of music that church plays. While music is a wonderful gift for us to practice, it is also a major thorn in our flesh. Standing where we do now, those “old fogeys” might have been on to something, and we would do well to heed their caution.

Music dominates Baptist worship. Throughout our history, there have been periods of arid worship that have caused decline in our churches. In the Great Awakenings, one period of drought ended through the passionate preaching of men like George Whitefield and the “new measures” of Charles Finney. Baptist churches boomed from these revivals, which was wonderful, but the impact of these revivals on our theology has been detrimental to churches and their worship. We began to employ new methods of drawing people toward God, and our public worship began to shift from the worship of God by the Body toward the gathering of the Body as a time of evangelical outreach. Our mentality has become that we need to get sinners to God by getting them to church and the question that we asked was, “How do we get them to church?” There is no tool in our methodological arsenal that we have leaned on more than music because of the power that music has over the human psyche. Thus, we shape our worship around music.

The nineteenth century was a major time of growth for Baptist churches in America, even with the division of American Baptists after the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in May of 1845. Baptist music experienced significant change as hymnbooks were widely circulated causing new musical styles to be adopted. There was a shift from congregational singing to choirs, and music was beginning to be led by the professionals. Jeremiah Bell Jeter (1802-1880) was a Southern Baptist minister and missionary through the nineteenth century. In his book, The Recollections of a Long Life, he comments on this change in his chapter, “Changes for the Worse,”

“Now a great change has taken place. Music is conducted chiefly by choirs. These are composed largely of the young and volatile, and led by choristers, some of whom are not even professors of religion. The tendency is, more and more, to make church music a matter of taste and amusement rather than of devotion. The aim is, in many cases, to exalt the choir rather than the Redeemer, and the congregation are expected simply to hear and praise the music. The singing is an exhibition, not religious worship. Whether music has a tendency to make those who practice it irritable and perverse, I cannot say, but certainly, within the range of my knowledge, no class of persons is so frequently disturbed by jealousies, feuds, and incurable divisions as are church choirs. There are few churches which have not been annoyed by the bad temper and unpleasant jarring of their choirs. Meanwhile, church music, in what is commonly deemed its highest excellence, has lost its power to move the hearts and consciences of congregations. Many listen to it, and are pleased with it, as a matter of taste, but even in them it excites no devotional feelings, calls for no penitential tears, and it awakens no holy desire, while the masses hear it with as much unconcern and with as little profit as they would the pattering of the rain.”[2]

One could easily write off Jeter as an “old fogey” who did not want to see things change, but is everything he said wrong? While he clearly wishes for music to be used as an emotional method of drawing people to God, he also recognizes the shift from the united singing of the congregation to the entertainment of the congregation. This shift is very important for us Baptists as we reflect upon our history because our modern devotion to personal preference did not develop overnight.

About forty years after the death of Jeter, the Southern Baptist Convention increased their focus on music with the formation of the “Committee on Better Church Music” in 1925 (happy centennial anniversary?) whose task seems obvious by the committee’s name. At the committee’s first report, the 1926 Southern Baptist annual sums up how central music was to the SBC:

“In all Christian worship it occupies from one-third to one-half of the entire time allotted in the worship. No kind of religious meeting is complete without some sort of musical program. Music is the handmaid of religious worship in the greatest sense and adapts itself to the spirit of the occasion, it matters not whether it be of praise, adoration, joy, thanksgiving, exhortation, supplication or sorrow. Music begins where speech ends… It is absolutely indispensable in the Christian churches.”[3]

While I am personally not confident that music should hold this high of a place in our worship, this is still the standard of Southern Baptists today. This call for better music continued over the next thirty years.

With the growth of radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, the SBC increased their efforts to improve our music. In the 1939 report of the “Committee of Church Music” (appointed in 1937) there was great concern of the youth being led away from worship toward the secular world,

“With the increased emphasis being placed on better music by radio and in all our public and private schools, our young people must not find their churches either ignoring this vital subject or lagging behind the upward trend so favorably known to them during the week.”[4]

In a denomination focused on methods, the only thing we can do is to compete with the opposing side for the attention of our communities. Our methodology must be better than cultural methodology, or else we will lose them. It seems that we are always trying to play catch up with what is secular even though we have what is eternal, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Word of God. However, one cannot say that this committee was solely trying to match the culture because they were asking the right questions:

“Although we consider it would be worthwhile, we are not primarily concerned with the improvement of the hymn text and tune solely for cultural purposes. We are definitely concerned about the following question: Do the hymns we use and the manner in which we use them contribute to the spiritual development of our people?

We need to realize that there must be more of a vertical note in church music, and less of a horizontal tendency; that the music which aids worship is that which finds the heart and not the feet. As we place our best endeavors in the task of soul winning, it will be well to recall that John Wesley found his greatest ally next to the Bible, in the hymns of his brother Charles.”[5]

We still see the influence of revivalism in their report but they were asking if the songs we sing contribute to the spiritual development of our people and if our focus is on God in our singing; and these are good questions. It is important we understand the reasons that we sing together because putting things in their rightful place and purpose can help us to solve the divisive problems in our churches.

Sadly, these are not the kinds of questions we are asking today. Southern Baptist Churches tend to think that what will give our churches the boost we need is the right kind of music performed at the highest levels. The Committee of Church Music and Worship report in 1943 put it this way, “We have always been and still are, of the opinion that many of our problems in regard to worship will be solved when we have better Church Music.”[6] There is no doubt we have improved our music. The publishing of the first edition of the “Baptist Hymnal” in 1956 played a significant role in aiding Baptist churches in music. We have made great advancements in our churches around music ever since. I have never stepped foot in a Southern Baptist church that suffers from not having any of the following: hymnals, instruments, projectors, screens, televisions, a band, a choir, a stage, and more. No time in church history have we had more things at our disposal to “aid” us in our worship. Have we solved our “worship problems”? We may have solved some, but many more issues have been created that are causing great harm to our churches. As the music on the “radio” has changed, so has what people want to sing in church. This age-old debate of what we should sing constantly rears its ugly head into our churches and the battle wages on with no end in sight. We are now influenced by the mega-churches and what methods have been “successful” for them. We believe if we imitate these mega-churches, our churches too will be filled so that we break fire code each week. Instead of looking to the Lord for guidance, we look to popular and innovative strategies that will grow our churches because we fear that God’s Word is not enough. We are offering people the God of universe and His eternal truths, yet we still believe we have to make church look attractive to people.

We have built churches where we worship our preferences. We survey our churches asking them what they would like to see on Sunday mornings, but it has been a long time since I have seen someone ask, “What does God want from our worship?” I often wonder if that question even matters to the general Southern Baptist Church. The Bible is a book of worship from beginning to end. God says a lot about how His people are to worship Him and He takes it very seriously. Perish the thought that this is an Old Testament idea, for the New Testament is filled with instructions around worship. Take for instance the book of Revelation. See the awe, wonder, and reverence with which worship is given in the heavenly visions. Should our worship here and now not have some semblance of what we see in heaven around the throne of God?

It is time for Baptist churches to recover a strong theology of worship and step back from a methodology of worship. Methods rely on our wisdom but fail to trust in God’s sovereignty and power. If we want our churches to grow, we should seek God first and let Him do the rest. Let us start by asking the right questions. Why does music hold such a dominant place in our churches? Do we seek entertainment or worship? What does God’s Word say about our worship? Why do we sing and how should our singing be done? Should we have a congregational focus or should the only voices we hear be the choir or the “praise team”? Is our music too loud? What place do the Psalms have in our services? Is there more to Christian worship than just music and preaching? What type of sermons should we be hearing? Do we pray enough? Do we read enough scripture? What place does the Lord’s Supper have in our weekly gatherings? Are there other elements of worship in scripture we should implement in our gatherings? When we ask these questions, we do not seek the answer from our own opinions. We find the answers to our questions in the Bible. It is true that we will never be completely rid of human preference, but if we worship from scriptural truths those preferences will become secondary to us.

I do hope that this essay is not taken as a plea for what we call “traditional worship.” Traditional and contemporary worship are two sides of the exact same changing coin. While both look different from each other in style, what drives traditional and contemporary worship is the same. Both change with the times and adapt to effective methods. When I turn on the “classic” radio station, I hear music from the early 2000’s and wonder when music from that era became considered classics. In the same manner, when the contemporary ceases to be new, it becomes traditional. Even the most traditional of our traditional worship only goes back a little over two hundred years to the Great Awakenings. I grew up with the song, “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” and only recently realized what that song referenced was not old at all compared to the age of the Christian Church. It is neither traditional nor contemporary worship which will solve our problems.

Personally, I am weary of the ever-changing worship and long for something rooted in what is eternal, worship that is in Spirit and in Truth. I desire for our worship to not be centered around my fleeting emotions, but to be anchored in the truly unshakable foundation of God’s Word. We have lost the richness of historical Christian worship over the last two hundred years due to our obsessions with methods and music. When we gather as the Body, we should experience God as He is from the revelation that He has given us and not from the emotional rises and falls from the musical notes. I want to hear my neighbor sing and not just the talent up front. We in the congregation should not be bystanders who sit and watch but have active participation in the worship of God. We need to confess our sins and to be assured from God’s Word that our sins have been forgiven. We need to bow before our God in prayer. We need to read the Bible as a congregation. We need solid, biblical doctrine from the pulpit that pierces our hearts with the glory of God. While we offer up our worship to God before His throne, our worship should be the type of worship through which the Spirit of God sanctifies us a little more every Sunday.

The worship of God is central to who we are as human beings. What then should shape our worship? Why do we look to what is popular, innovative, and cultural to grow our churches? Is it that we do not trust God to grow His church through His means? We must start developing our churches through biblical worship. When Christians taste the meat of God’s Word, the milk of methodology will no longer suffice. Our churches will be transformed and filled with mature believers and what happens on Sunday morning will spill out into the surrounding community through those worshippers. When a local church has been transformed by biblical worship, you will watch the community around it be transformed as well. How we worship matters. Let us seek to worship God in Spirit and in Truth.

[1] McBeth, H. Leon, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1987), 93.

[2] Jeter, Jeremiah Bell, The Recollections of a Long Life (Richmond, VA: The Religious Herald Co., 1891), 317.

[3] Southern Baptist Convention, Annual Report of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1926, 41, https://sbhla.org/digital-resources/sbc-annuals/.

[4] Southern Baptist Convention, Annual Report of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1939, 124, https://sbhla.org/digital-resources/sbc-annuals/.

[5] SBC, Annual, 1939, 124-125.

[6] Southern Baptist Convention, Annual Report of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1943, 51, https://sbhla.org/digital-resources/sbc-annuals/.