The reformation of worship happened in stages. The Reformation saw itself as recovering not only the biblical pattern of worship, but the praxis of the early post-apostolic church. Their reintroduction was highly controversial…the introduction of instruments in worship accompanied the rise of sacerdotalism in medieval worship. “Gradually, over the course of the thousand years before the Reformation, the medieval church reinstituted progressively aspects of the Mosaic ceremonial cultus including the introduction of musical instruments which had been suppressed in churches until the tenth century. Scott Clark writes that “ the early post-apostolic church sang only inspired songs without accompaniment…the patristic church, though in favor of the use of music in worship, was quite opposed to the use of instruments in worship.” While the Western Latin Church introduced instrumental music in the late medieval period, the Eastern Orthodox Churches continued to sing praise a capella as they do to this day. This fact is widely recognized by historians and evident in the fact that the term a capella comes from Latin by way of Italian, meaning “ in the style of the church. It is not an overstatement to say that the legacy of the Church is largely against musical instruments in corporate worship. The Christian Church rejected instrumental music in worship for most of church history except in two periods: the dark ages of Roman Catholicism in the 14th to the early 16th centuries (with a few isolated instances prior to that), and again in the 19th century to the present. The History of Instrumental Music in the Christian Church. In this post we will confirm this biblical interpretation by the overwhelming witness of church history.

We demonstrated how instrumental music-as part of the ceremonial worship of the old covenant-has been abrogated and is no longer part of public worship in the new covenant. In our last post we saw how the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW) is the standard by which we should approach the question of instrumental music in the corporate worship of the church. When the major western traditions picked their positions, they looked broadly like this. The Reformation kicked off large-scale worship wars. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches, by contrast, have their own musical traditions, which make use of ancient percussion instruments. (The organ had been used in processions and possibly as a call to worship centuries earlier, but it seems to have made its way only slowly into the actual liturgy.) By the 15th century, organ music was widely accepted in the Roman Catholic West, though it never caught on the Orthodox East. Then, in about the 10th or 12th century, Western Christians began to use the organ in the liturgy. Unaccompanied vocal music continued to be the norm in Christian worship for centuries. In pagan worship, instrumental music and debauchery were often linked, as this fourth-century manuscript suggests: 'n blowing on the tibia they puff out their cheeks … they lead obscene songs … they raise a great din with the clapping of scabella under the influence of which a multitude of other lascivious souls abandon themselves to bizarre movements of the body' (The Story of Christian Music, p.

Most church fathers saw the use of instruments in Jewish worship as a 'childish' weakness, less glorifying to God than words of praise.

Nearly all of the backgrounds from which early Christians came-Jewish, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and more-had instrumental traditions, but these traditions carried negative associations. Though we know that early Christians sang during worship, they probably used no instruments. When did churches start using instrumental music? Are there churches today that still only use a capella music?

Christian background music