Tex Sample Tells Communicators About Soul Music

by Ray Waddle

What's your soul music?

What music tells the story of your life, as if written just for you? Is it classic rock, country, R & B, hip-hop, bluegrass, big band, classical, pop, opera, salsa?

Churches better ask the question, or else drive away rhythm-hungry young people whose soul music clashes with the "easy-listening" world of traditional church-going, says theologian Tex Sample.

"Young people are constructed so differently," Sample told a national session of the Religion Communicators Council, which met in April in Nashville.

"They're turned off by the music of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. ... What all this means is not, How can I take God's story and stick it in the new music, but, How can those musics serve God's story?"

Churches underestimate the new "soul music" of youth -- often hip-hop, or, increasingly, the intricate rhythms of Latin world music.

A massive shift is jolting the culture -- the drenching power of rhythm to shape the identities of young people. The iPod makes it possible to take music anywhere. Are churches ready?

"If we don't take music seriously, I doubt we take the Holy Spirit seriously," he said flatly.

Sample is an author, theologian, trend-spotter, United Methodist minister and free-lance consultant to a wide range of denominations and businesses. He's a boundarycrosser -- a Mississippi-born laborer-turned-Ph.D who quotes St. Augustine and Hank Williams Sr. with equal conviction, a scholarly workshop leader whose own soul music is country music.

But Sample grew up in the World War II era. Popular music -- specifically rhythm -- has drastically mutated since Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, he said.

After the Elvis and the Beatles and Motown, baby boomers and their heirs associated music with soulful exuberance. Elaborate rock concerts created new expectations -- a sensory ecstasy of sound, beat, image, light and dance. Audiences no longer just listen; they "perform" -- dance, sing along and respond to the performer, he said.

During his presentation, Sample included music clips and concert video scenes (Tina Turner, U2) to dramatize how thoroughly sound, image and movement combine to create a celebratory musical cosmos.

When he played a sample of a polyrhythmic Latin beat, the audience started swaying to the beat. "Notice I'm not moving," he said. "If I did, I'd rip out my gears and pull out my oil pan. I'm not encoded for Latin music -- and neither is my church."

The challenge to churches, he said, is to engage the "sonic logic" of young people -- the sounds they embrace as authentic and true. The problem is, every generation has its own sonic logic and favorite music: The tension between them is the most persistent issue of worship today.

"What do you do when there are so many soul musics, so many beats?" he said.

Many churches do separate services as a solution -- traditional and contemporary. Sample suggested such congregations plan larger festivals from time to time that bring everybody back together. Churches should periodically honor everyone's soul music at worship -- elders as well as youngsters.

Nevertheless, he worries that middle-class churches refuse to grasp a basic fact of 21st century culture -- the influence of music in kids' lives.

"In the mainline church, there's a fear of sensation," he said.

"If people moved, the end of the world would occur."

But history teaches that church life is always changing, he suggested. Early Christianity adjusted to the oral culture around it. The Reformation adapted to the new technology of printing. He urged churches to face the new music: Experiment with "ecologies of sound," see the potential of electronic rhythm and dance movement.

As a benediction he concluded, "Let's go from this place ... to sing, love and dance. Amen?"