I really identify with what mooh wrote (even down to the fact that I too play fingerstyle hymns for my own enjoyment).

I do feel like the music in the church is just symptomatic of changes that have made me feel like a stranger in church these days. I think that though church music has been moving toward a personal, relational Christianity, in the last few decades it's made a mad rush toward that exclusively.

A case in point -- if 50 years ago you had asked the typical conservative/fundamental/evangelical Christian if he was the "bride of Christ", he would have answered unequivocally that he was not. He would respond that the church is the "bride of Christ"

If you ask the same question in the same kind of church today you would almost certainly get an affirmative answer.

The music now is imitative of pop love songs because that is the kind of relationship the modern Christian is being told is true Christianity/the goal of Christianity.

If you listen to the individual voices in these praise services I think you'll find that it sounds like hundreds of solo singers singing the way they've heard their pop-christian music icons sing the song.

The beautiful (and very Christian) image of voices submitting to one another in harmony is missing. But then, the theology has moved toward the heightened importance of the individual.

It isn't that easy for both types of music to coexist. We use the arts to help us express our understanding of an invisible God and, though we know our imagery is imperfect, we take comfort in some sort of concrete picture of the God we envision in our imaginations.

With the modern praise expressing an image of a God so vastly different conceptually from the God of the hymn, it's no doubt going to cause a conflict.

I think that the new praise music is also not conceptually as related to the hymn as it is to chanting. This is a period in the protestant church where gnosticism is seeing a huge revival, and the praise music is filling the functional role of a chant -- that is, its intellectual content is secondary to its practical function of manipulating emotion.

Even when scripture is directly lifted for use in the music it is usually not becasue of the intellectual content of that scripture -- rather, it is used because it "sounds religious" and therefore is effective in manipulating the singers to "feel religious".