I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.
(1 Corinthians 14:15)
I enjoy Western music, but only my native music can make me cry.
(Anonymous Choctaw woman, speaking to ethnomusicologist
Vida Chenoweth, circa 1970)
Just as there are many people in the world who have never heard the gospel in a language they understand, there are many people who have never heard Christian music that they can engage with emotionally. We have formed Verdimus to help local Christians reach their neighbors with the good news of God’s kingdom in the musical forms that reach their emotions.
Why?
Music, like language, is a part of our overall culture, which in turn is that intangible something that everyone recognizes as “what makes us us and them them.” We can love people of other cultures and adopt aspects of other cultures, but we usually feel the tension of being outsiders who do not entirely belong until we return to our own cultures, speak our native languages, and make and listen to our own music.
Music is a language, and music is universal, but music is not a universal language—or rather, just as there is no universal spoken language, there is no one universal musical language. Even “world music,” which seeks to combine elements of different systems (and often does so with pleasing results), begins with the premise that the two systems combined play by different rules. Though some such combinations endure, many, if not most, are short-lived and never lose the flavor of foreignness.
For example, Béla Fleck and Yo-Yo Ma have taken their respective American folk and European classical musical training to remote areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa and produced beautiful music with local musicians. But this is the self-conscious blending of two or more separate musical cultures. When banjoist Béla Fleck jammed with thumb pianist Ruth in Uganda, the result was obviously enjoyable to the musicians and audience alike, but there is no record that the result was an uptick in the sales of banjos in Uganda or thumb pianos in Fleck’s native New York. Was it worth doing? Absolutely. Was the result anyone’s “native” music? Did it spawn a new musical culture that will endure? No and probably not.
God wants to speak to people in the languages they know best. By the second century BC, most Jews did not speak Old Testament Hebrew at home, so he moved his people to translate it into Greek, which was spoken throughout the Roman Empire and became the Scriptures quoted in the New Testament. Portions of what is now the New Testament had been translated into Latin and some local languages at least as far back as the third century, and since the early twentieth century, many organizations are pursuing the goal of Scripture being available in everyone’s heart language.
All of this testifies to the desire of the church to fulfill the Great Commission by communicating the word of God in to people in their own spoken languages. But what about their own musical languages?
Deuteronomy 6:5 commands us to love God with our whole being (“soul”). This includes our mind (“heart”) and actions (“might” or “strength”) and, crucially, our emotions. The words emotion and motivation both contain the idea of motion, and for whatever reason, our actions tend to spring from our emotions and motivations. This is why athletes “psyche themselves up” before contests and soldiers shout battle cries before entering combat—or, in the case of the New Zealand haka, both. Discouragement is also an emotion, though it is one that puts people out of motion.
Music reaches our emotions like nothing else. We can hear an inspiring lecture or sermon that lays out facts that motivate us, but if we can put the ideas we’ve just heard into music, we are totally engaged and ready for action. However, just as the lecture has to be in a language we understand, so does the music.
If the trumpet produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare for battle?
(1 Corinthians 14:8)
Our goal is to help Christians look to the musical languages that they love for forms into which they can pour the gospel message (or that they can conform to the gospel) so they and those they disciple can “let the word of Christ dwell in [them] richly, teaching and exhorting [each other] with all wisdom, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, all with grace in [their] hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).
We do this by holding on-site workshops for Christians who have little access to their majority national culture. Using interpreters into their native languages, we begin with the gospel and lay a theological foundation for worship. We explain how music fits into all cultures, how it specifically fit into the culture and worship of ancient Israel and Judah, how it fits into the New Covenant church. We learn from the participants what different functions music performs in their culture and look for ways to determine what genres might be adapted for worship, testimony, and teaching songs and which need to be rejected. The highlight of every workshop is when the participants compose new songs with new melodies that “speak their musical language” and words that communicate the truths of Scripture.
Sing to the Lord a new song!
(Psalm 96:1; 98:1; 149:1)
Vernacular Discipleship through Music 