The History of Praise and Worship Music with Dr. Lester Ruth

Most people are aware of Praise and Worship music, but most are unaware of its history. Dr. Lester Ruth walks through the two major streams that led to the phenomenon that we know as praise and worship. Check out his book co-authored with Lim Swee Hong at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/History-Contemporary-Praise-Worship-Understanding/dp/0801098289

Youtube - https://youtu.be/Xj1inqjJlM4

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Today’s episode is brought to you by these two sponsors:

Bill Roberts is a financial advisor, who has been serving the retirement planning and investment needs of individuals, families, non-profits, and churches for 25 years. He is a Certified Financial Planner and accredited investment fiduciary. Bill specializes in working with Salvation Army employees and officers by helping them realize their financial goals.  You can find out more about Bill’s business at www.WilliamHRoberts.com

AND

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Thanks too to Phil Laeger for the new podcast music. You can find out about Phil's music at https://www.laeger.net

Transcript

Transcript

Welcome to the more. To this story, Podcast. I hope this title caught your interest. Many of you are involved in worship situations you leave worship your pastors. Maybe you're involved with music. And so that brought your attention to this podcast. And so i'm excited to share with you, and I think you'll find this really interesting, and I hope it will drive you to go and find Dr. Lester Ruth's book, and he'll tell you about his Co. Author as well when we get him on. And But first I just want to make sure you know that this podcast is sponsored

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Andy Miller III: by Wesley Biblical Seminary, where we are training trusted leaders for faithful churches, and we do that through a variety of programs for people who are looking for academic degrees. Bachelors, masters, doctorate degrees, and also several lay initiatives. I just want to highlight one of those for you right now, and that is our Wesley Institute, which has two tracks. It's a nine month program that meets weekly, and then the Bible track of that program goes to every book of the Bible that is taught by similar investors for people who are in lay leadership position.

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Andy Miller III: And then we have a new theology track that just started, so you can still get in on that, and you can go to Wbs Edu to find out more about that program.

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Lester Ruth: Secondly, you just want to make sure you all know that we have a few things available to you. Coming from my website. A new tool that's available is called five Steps to deeper teaching and preaching. It walks people through the inductive Bible study method with the aim of helping them. Think about how they can preach in a creative way to connect with their congregation. So this is a forty five minute video teaching I have, and in addition to an eight-page document that's available for free for people who sign up

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Andy Miller III: for my web for my email list at Andy Miller the third. That's Andy Miller Iii. Dot com And finally, we're thankful to Wpo Development, who has helped make this podcast happen. Their Ceo Keith Waters has has this great line. He says, if you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there, and he comes along and helps people with strategic planning mission, planning studies and capital campaigns. He's done that for more than two hundred and fifty organizations around the country. So we'd love for you to check them out. They've been great supporters of this podcast, so you can

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Andy Miller III: find you. You can just Google Wpo Development, or you can find the link in the show notes. So today I am excited to invite into the podcast Dr. Lester Ruth, who serves as a research professor for Christian worship at Duke Divinity School. Lester. Welcome to the podcast!

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Lester Ruth: Thank you very much, Andy. It's good to be with you,

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Andy Miller III: you and I were in the same town for seven years together, and we never had a conversation till we just talked just for this call. So you you taught Asbury Seminary while I was a student there, and I'm really thankful for opportunity to get to engage you on your new book. But we started talking before this interview. I I thought we'd never get to the interview, because I was interested in your research into American Methodism as well. So tell us just a little bit about your work before we get to your other academic work and research

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Andy Miller III: before we get down to the praise and worship topic.

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Lester Ruth: Well, sure, simple way of putting it is to say that I was first of all a pastor who had an interest in merch of history.

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Lester Ruth: Okay? And then I became a worship historian who's maintained pastoral sensibilities. There you go. So. Ah, most of my work. My early work was in the early church first four centuries, or in early American Methodism.

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Lester Ruth: And then, more recently, the last ten to twelve years, I've shifted over to the last half-century to answer almost an autobiographical question for me, which is, Where did temporary worship come from, and what shaped it? And how did we get to where we are today?

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Andy Miller III: Right? And I like that you brought the autobiographical piece of this at the beginning of your book, and please forgive me for not, and mentioning your co-author. The The book is a history of contemporary praise of worship, music, understanding the ideas that reshape the Protestant Church and it's written by you and your co-author limbs zui hong am I saying that right,

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Lester Ruth: Lynn, sweetheart? So yes. So in good Chinese fashion. Lim is his family name? Okay, Okay. So he goes by swing Hong, and he's a Methodist from Singapore, lifelong Methodist, and is a music professor in one of the colleges at the University of Toronto.

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Andy Miller III: Okay, interesting.

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Lester Ruth: So you begin this book and it's your store, One of your stories at a start that highlights at a moment fifteen years ago, so I guess it's sixteen years ago now, because the book came out last December um of a student coming up to you, and this maybe triggered something in your mind about the way people might misunderstand um worship, so tell that story. So at the time I was teaching a worship history class in Asbury Seminary and Classmated Royal

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Auditorium.

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Lester Ruth: There it is, you remember royal Auditorium. I had my own classes in there when I was up as very student in the early eighties, and we were doing a case study approach, and I forgot which

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Lester Ruth: particular case from worship history we're looking at. But I had a student come up after class.

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Lester Ruth: You can almost see the light bulb above his head, and he and he just told me, he said, Dr. Reading, since I finally think I understand what you're talking about

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Lester Ruth: talking about this worship ancient worship, history. And I said, Well, what tell me what he says. You're telling me that the pastor is a kind of worship leader,

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Lester Ruth: and I think that's when I realized that there was a whole generation of Christians for whom the term worship leader was almost exclusively a musical term.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. Relationship term

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Lester Ruth: that they had very limited liturgical expectations from their pastors or preachers. Actually. And I wish i'd realized that from the Get-go, because I could have

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Lester Ruth: send that on the first day of class. That's what it helped him understand a lot of this historical material, but that's the

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Lester Ruth: uh. That was just one of several hooks that got into me over the years about this topic to try to help the

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Lester Ruth: to help people understand that worship broadly has a history.

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Lester Ruth: But

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Lester Ruth: this worship, too, has its own history.

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Andy Miller III: I don't want to jump ahead too much, but when when do you think that pivot happened? When was it? I mean it might have been. You know, the whole history of your book, I understand, like you're going to describe that. But did you notice that in teaching was this while after you started teaching that you noticed this change happen

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Lester Ruth: like What a strange! Oh, i'm sorry like a student student saying that thinking that worship bleeding was equated with music leadership.

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Lester Ruth: Well, let's say um!

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Lester Ruth: It was a young student. He would have been in his mid twenty, so not totally exceptional.

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Lester Ruth: Um, So he's been, for, you know. Let's say mid eighties. Sure.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. By the time he was a preteen teenager kind of becoming aware of things

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Lester Ruth: that switch had already taken place. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: and in fact, the term worship leader is arising as a technical term in the late seventies and becomes a really mainstream sort of term by the mid eighties, the late one thousand nine hundred and eighty. So

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Lester Ruth: yeah, So let's assume this was two thousand and five get rotten. I don't remember exactly.

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Lester Ruth: This student was born one thousand nine hundred and eighty, hey? Sounds like Andy Miller to you That's what it sounds like.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, Well, I I I want you, Amy. I'm

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Lester Ruth: um no, no, um, you know. He would never have known a world

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Lester Ruth: a worship world where he

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Lester Ruth: would have gone on Sunday morning, and the first voice and the first one. The

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Lester Ruth: facing salt was not the pastors right,

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Lester Ruth: but was a musician standing center stage.

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Lester Ruth: Interesting?

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, That that

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Lester Ruth: it's incredible to think about. But that's a change that really from

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Lester Ruth: one thousand nine hundred and sixtys to one thousand nine hundred and eightys really just

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Lester Ruth: Oh,

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Lester Ruth: like a tsunami, it just swept over everything interesting.

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Lester Ruth: And i'm i'm older than that. See so and plus i'm

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Lester Ruth: academically trained as a worship historian. So you know we I always thought the pastor was the primary worship leader,

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Lester Ruth: the interest now it's. Maybe it's because of the grump in Ah, the Salvation Army. So I have this military image that guides what we do. It wasn't a term that I was familiar with um at all, and then I ended up. But but I equipped. I would have been like that student. I would have. I would have thought of it

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Andy Miller III: as somebody, and probably even restricted it to you have to play guitar or piano

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Lester Ruth: like even that very specific, like the worship leader, is one of those two people. So even though I wasn't in a contemporary church that would have described that. So So yeah, that was I. So I think a lot of our my listeners. That's the context that they're coming into, so I think it'll be helpful for us if we're going to look at the history of praise and worship. It's not like saying Well, Matt red, then trained so and so, and taught him

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Andy Miller III: to play guitar. And then he went and trained zone. So we're talking about a bigger picture. So get us into this idea of what we're thinking when we how we can then understand what the contemporary prize worship movement was.

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Lester Ruth: Okay. The image we use in the book is of two parallel rivers.

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Andy Miller III: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: because what Dr. Lem and I discovered as we were working on the topic

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Lester Ruth: was that

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Lester Ruth: there wasn't any single source or explanation for the whole phenomenon

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Lester Ruth: by that. If you look at Pentecostals Evangelicals and mainline folks right? You've picked up some form of band-based

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Lester Ruth: pop music and formal form of worship. There's not a single source.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, but they're kind of two broad developments. We call them rivers. Okay. And the critical time is really the late one thousand nine hundred and fortys, right after World War Ii.

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Lester Ruth: Um! And one of the head waters is thoroughly ped of Costal.

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Lester Ruth: Excuse me,

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Lester Ruth: and the other one is thoroughly evangelical. Okay, Para Church. It's a youth organization for Christ. The motivations are different. There are theologizes different. Even the outward expression is different,

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Lester Ruth: but

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Lester Ruth: both of those head waters of both of those rivers let loose in the late one thousand nine hundred and fortys, one thousand nine hundred and fiftys continues to grow and swell,

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Lester Ruth: and by the one thousand nine hundred and eightys it's sweeping up lots of people, and then in the one thousand nine hundred and Ninetys. We say that these two rivers actually kind of converge.

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Lester Ruth: And so, if you for the listeners, if you, if you have grown up in a world you

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Lester Ruth: where you've only known, C Cli

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Lester Ruth: um. You only know the post confluence work interesting. This is so helpful. So tell me a little bit more about this. The the first river that you describe the Pentagon. I know you have a different name for it the Pentecostal River. But it had a different emphasis.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, our our our simple names for them are the Gift River and the Gap River. Okay, Gift and Gap.

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Lester Ruth: Now that you, the gap is connected to the idea that there's a gap between the Church and the world. And so we need to fulfill that gap where the Gift river is. The emphasizing spiritual gifts, the gift of God. Interesting. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: that God has revealed some important scriptural truths,

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Lester Ruth: and that if you will reshape your practices to fifty scriptural truths. God will renew your worship and renew your church and bring revival. Gotcha. Wow! So what happened in one thousand nine hundred and forty, six or when

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Lester Ruth: yeah, forty, six is where um the Gift River? It has a really clear origins. It's. Ah, it's one pentecostal creature, Raj Laselle is his name. He's actually a retired businessman from the Toronto area, and he's out near east of Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, Um. Leading one of the first meetings he's ever led and it's going terrible. I mean, this is pentiful, and there's no move of God. And so if you're pentecostal and you're leading meetings, and there's no move of God.

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Lester Ruth: Something's wrong. It's your problem.

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Lester Ruth: So he sets aside a whole day. He goes to the church, and he begins to fast and pray. And there's a Psalm verse that comes to mind, Psalm twenty, two, three,

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Lester Ruth: which in the King James version i'm not going to remember this precisely, but it says essentially, Thou art the Holy One who inhabit the praises of Israel.

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Lester Ruth: Hmm. And what that does for Lizell is it connects in his mind

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Lester Ruth: the praising of God

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Lester Ruth: and the manifesting of God's presence. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: he spends the rest of the day walking around the church,

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Lester Ruth: praising every literally everywhere he goes in the bathroom,

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Lester Ruth: and there. The funniest part is he describes staying at the piano for the longest time, because the pianist seems sort of cold and dead.

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Lester Ruth: That ninth meeting a little revival breaks out midway through the first verse of the first hymn.

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Lester Ruth: Why that solidifies in his mind that

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Lester Ruth: praising God is the key to experiencing the manifest presence of God that might have stayed kind of an esoteric

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Lester Ruth: theology of a single Pentecostal pastor. Except

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Lester Ruth: couple of years later he gets connected with a major revival that breaks out in one thousand nine hundred and forty eight in Saskatchewan. Okay, and that revival, and everyone who gets involved in that becomes the platform For the dissemination

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Lester Ruth: of this.

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Lester Ruth: You praise God. You will experience God's presence, the all the the gift, theology. And so they're all convinced that this is God's restoration

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Lester Ruth: of a long-forgotten Biblical truth

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Lester Ruth: that we just need to be obedient to And it's It's that Biblical idea that's really the headwaters for that branch of development.

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Andy Miller III: So what would, if what would the worshipping context have been like for him before he started this? Would it have been just revivalistic with spiritual gifts and that type of thing.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, somewhat. Um, I think. Really intense. Baptist: Okay,

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Lester Ruth: Um.

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Lester Ruth: And you know,

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Lester Ruth: I would almost think I know it kind of been that different? What they were developing and what they were developing were long extended periods of praising God. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: spoken, and song that might last an hour or longer so was this. Was it connected to music like I mean There was musical aspect to it. But did it have a liturgical emphasis?

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Lester Ruth: It wasn't immediately connected to music.

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Lester Ruth: Okay. So Lazelle's emphasis and the first generation emphasize praising any way that you can.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, So it could be praising and your own spoken vernacular language. It could be praising in tongues. It could be singing in tons, or it could be singing songs of praise in your vernacular.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, it didn't matter, and they mixed all of those together in these hour, long or longer periods.

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Lester Ruth: So you say. Now, if I jump ahead too fast, let me know you move on to like that. This gets deepened after one thousand nine hundred and sixty five in this stream.

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Lester Ruth: What What is it that happens in that period from one thousand nine hundred and sixty, five to eighty five. Do you you say that's a distinct period of deepening?

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Lester Ruth: Well, you get a second generation of adopters.

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Andy Miller III: Okay,

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Lester Ruth: who do a second generation of theologizing.

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Lester Ruth: So what you get

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Lester Ruth: in this Gift river is usually an emphasis either on the restoration of the tabernacle of David, or an emphasis, a use of the tabernacle of Moses.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, so let's deal with Moses first, and what that gives them is a kind of an architectural overlay on how to shape these extended times of praising.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, Okay. And they attach Psalm one hundred and four

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Lester Ruth: to the Mosaic tabernacle connected to this praise to presence theology. So they develop patterns of beginning with songs of thanksgiving.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, moving to songs of praise,

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Lester Ruth: moving to songs of worship.

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Lester Ruth: And so um! One hundred and four enter his gates with Thanksgiving interest courts with praise, and then the presumption is, is, once you go past all of the different areas and staging points in the Mosaic tabernacle. You end up in the Holy of holies

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Lester Ruth: and drawing God's manifest presence, which is where you worship.

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Andy Miller III: Are there some songs from this period that are? I know It's hard to say what's popular to um, but that are still a part of like the basic kind of like American context. Now that that might typify this,

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Lester Ruth: I'm: sure. Oh, gosh, my

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Lester Ruth: yeah, i'm all

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Lester Ruth: like, I think, about some of these songs like. Ah, David Dancing. Ah, there's this. Maybe So he's in. Yeah, as you're saying it like, I'm: i'm hearing. I'm feeling like, yeah, that if that makes a lot of sense that there's songs about the Temple and

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Andy Miller III: the walking coming into the Holy of Holies.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. Well, I none directly come to mind. Um.

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Lester Ruth: But I invite your readers. If they had a Ccli song, select subscription, they

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Lester Ruth: yeah, go to Ccli song, select and just type in keywords and have it praises okay and thrown on praises, and they'll get his

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Lester Ruth: ranging back more than forty years, including some recent ones. Interesting. The

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. The language sounds so familiar to me, and I wouldn't have thought of it having like this theological emphasis from this stream that's fascinating.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, what Dr. Liv and I discovered is once we began to look for citations of psalm, twenty, two, three, or allusions to it.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, we found them everywhere. Wow.

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Lester Ruth: Mean my favorite story to tell, and it's not in the book,

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Lester Ruth: but it's one of my good students who's lifelong pink Gospel Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee. There you go. So he took my introduction to worship class a few years ago. I have really great conversations with my students after class. So after class, I asked this student.

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Lester Ruth: It's just when this realization of the importance of Psalm Twenty, two, three was beginning to dawn on me. I said Drew, Have you ever heard that God inhabits the praises of his people.

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Lester Ruth: He looked at me. He said, Dr. We've heard it. I've heard it every Sunday of my entire life.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, it's, I mean, and Pentecostals Don't have written liturgies by and large, but it's such a foundational idea

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Lester Ruth: that, and I don't think he was over emphasizing it literally. He's heard it every time someone has to leave up somehow some way that basic notion

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Lester Ruth: pops to the servant.

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Lester Ruth: This. This: this is the key thing, maybe, about Donald. The key thing in this gift. Tradition, this gift river that inhab is connecting, praising God to experience in God's presence, so does that change in eighty five to the ninety S. When things is there a new emphasis that comes after that?

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Lester Ruth: Well, what happens?

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Lester Ruth: The starting late seventys, but through the eightys into the ninetys

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Lester Ruth: the theology is in place by them. So what you get is an explosion of teaching resources

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Lester Ruth: and teaching opportunities.

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Lester Ruth: And this is when that theology and its practices just sweep the feel in terms of Pentecostalism. And that's true, not only for North America, but for global pentecostalism,

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Lester Ruth: it and global evangelicalism for that matter, And it's true, not only for white forms,

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Lester Ruth: white Pentecostals and Evangelicals here, but for Latino Asian

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Lester Ruth: um, it just sweeps the field. Um. One of the more interesting sort of things that we did. Working on this book is, we track down the the only guy who has a complete set of a really important magazine for worship leaders.

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Lester Ruth: His first one, published from one thousand nine hundred and eighty, five to one thousand nine hundred and ninety five, called the Psalmist. Notice that that connection with the

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

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Lester Ruth: So um. The The originators of it are coming from this restoration of the tabernacle of David folks a lot of theologizing. But anyway, and every issue that came out every other month, I think so. Six issues a year. They had reports from around the nation

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Lester Ruth: clearly people adopting praise and worship, and they were fascinating reads the sense of novelty and the excitement and the wonder of being able to experience God in new ways.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, I mean, this is so old hat now,

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Lester Ruth: right right?

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Andy Miller III: I don't know people can think back to of those who are of a age where they didn't grow up with it. To think when you started to see this emphasis, it was

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Andy Miller III: Yeah, it is a huge I I can think about it in my denomination is when music started to be published, and this is like been in the mid Ninety S. We probably kept caught on when the streams collided. I'm curious, so keep going. But I want to go back still. Keep with the um, the gift stream or the Gift River. There

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Lester Ruth: would things like marinatha and integrity be a part of that. Oh, absolutely

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Andy Miller III: okay.

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Lester Ruth: They're from different tributaries feeding in the Okay. So Marinatha is coming from the Jesus people tributary.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, Southern California tied especially to one Church Calvary Chapel. Costa: Mesa:

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Andy Miller III: Yeah. Yeah.

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Lester Ruth: Um. And tyranny, Hosanna is actually coming from a different tributary. The backgrounds to that is actually prosperity. Gospel Pentecostals.

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Lester Ruth: Oh,

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Lester Ruth: but often what happens is after something develops, and particularly when it goes public, as some sort of company, the sharp edges get rounded off right? Um. And if you can become more mainstream, even if it's primarily kind of a pedecostal mainstream,

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Lester Ruth: you can. You can sell more copies of it.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, I shared one. So yeah, So

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Lester Ruth: those are two strands. The vineyard. Okay, fellowship As a closely related Calvary Chapel Strand, this psalmist would have been a different strand.

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Lester Ruth: What's another? Ah, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, the twenty, four, seven phones yeah bigger, a related but distinct strand in the whole thing.

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Lester Ruth: Uh, and once you get out of English speaking

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Lester Ruth: white folks um

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Lester Ruth: the Central and South America. Um

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Lester Ruth: Ah,

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Lester Ruth: Ah Yakos wit. Oh, sherry sure. Yeah, is the key name. The example that Dr. Lim likes to always point out is a stream of praise which is asian-based

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Lester Ruth: the largest producer of Chinese praise and worship songs is based in Los Angeles, And because there's so many tiny speakers around the globe, their music.

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Lester Ruth: Um hill song. Okay, Yeah. Sure. Another Strand origins connected to that early later rain revival, but filtered through distinctive New Zealand and Australian connections and developments

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Lester Ruth: interest. Okay, So we have this is that that gift, Grant, gift, stream, Gift river. But let's back up to go back to the history of the Gap River. What? What's the Gap River? What makes them up, and what makes them distinct? Well, what makes them distinct is a recurring anxiety. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: that what they've inherited to do on Sunday morning is out of sync with contemporary people. Right won't, appeal to them and won't. Communicate the Gospel well to do,

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Lester Ruth: in fact, will be boring and repulsive to contemporary people.

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Lester Ruth: And so that's what they're always thinking about. Is this gap between what the church is currently doing and where people currently are.

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Lester Ruth: And so they they're motivated to try to bridge that gap

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Lester Ruth: consistently.

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Lester Ruth: They're also doing their own form of Biblical theologizing. That's point. Dr. Lem and I try to make and the book is that ultimately both of these rivers and the whole phenomenon is really about trying to grapple with Scripture.

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Lester Ruth: Yes, what's the Scriptural vision? For how it is, we ought to worship.

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Lester Ruth: Yes, um. Whereas that the Gift River notice all my examples came from the Old Testament, and are dealing or creating very specific Practices

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Lester Ruth: Gap people tend to emphasize the New Testament.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, And what we found is a particular verse from the Apostle Paul. First, Grinthians, nine, twenty, two, I think it's twenty two B. If I remember him correctly, i'll become all things to all people in order that I might win some.

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Andy Miller III: Okay.

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Lester Ruth: And so it's a theology scriptually based Scripture-based theology of continual liturgical adaptation is the way that it gets applied,

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Lester Ruth: you know, even before we came on you know your own Salvation Army background. Yeah, for sure, that is the theology

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Lester Ruth: definitely. You finding Kathryn Booth, And, in fact, there's a long section on Catherine Booth and Early Salvation army worship the

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Lester Ruth: in the book.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, like a patient that they're doing. But I even run it all the way back in early American.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, their willingness to adapt particularly in terms of camp meetings, and

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and just how successful those were,

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Lester Ruth: and at the time being able to reach people

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Lester Ruth: It's

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Lester Ruth: so, and that's the priority, like the the kind of the ecclesiology that underscores all this is one that's focused on results, revivalist results. And so, whatever the utilitarian task is, you know, is to get that result.

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Lester Ruth: I I think there's a more positive way to. Oh, i'm sorry. No, no, That's okay. I'm. Always a little cautious. That's where this river gets hammered on.

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Lester Ruth: Oh, okay,

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Lester Ruth: thank you. I need to be pushed. This I need. I need to hear this, but I think there's a more positive way to spend. And what is fundamentally

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Lester Ruth: motivating these people is an apostolic vision of faithfulness to God's commission.

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Lester Ruth: Yes, and that's what we see over and over and over again all the people swimming in this room.

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Lester Ruth: God has commissioned us. God has given us a mission,

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Lester Ruth: and we can't let um.

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Lester Ruth: Oh, what Catherine is!

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Lester Ruth: Praise! We can't let red tapism. Ah! Throw us off fulfillment of this mission. We

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Lester Ruth: There's not a bit of red tape in the New Testament. She's right. Yeah, I remember you correctly. So

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Lester Ruth: so ah, you know, and it pops up in a line running out on it. The mainline folks. I found it in my own dissertation director from Notre Dame. Okay, this was his approach in the late sixty S. And early nineteen seventy S.

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Lester Ruth: Ah, but Catherine Booth, Amy Simple, Mcpherson, Charles Finney, Francis Andsbury, and then more to the point in the book. Um. These youth organizations that arose, and their church organizations on a rose right after World War Ii. This is their dominant approach. This is what they're developing,

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Lester Ruth: very strong, sometimes radical adaptation, in order to be able to reach people in this case targeted generations so,

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Andy Miller III: and that might be expressed itself then, maybe like in things like Ah, a large church churches nowadays like might say to have that same sort of imagery, an idea that that central theology that they don't. You wouldn't see it as much now,

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Lester Ruth: but I don't know. Maybe maybe you might tell me it is a case using popular tunes at the start of a worship service as a way to make people who are new. You know um non-church people feel welcomed. I mean that that's that same same problem. Yeah, I was being critical of it. I was. I was thinking critically of the nineteenth century expression. But I would say if somebody listened to all my preaching for the last fifteen years, you're going to hear a healthy

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Andy Miller III: a bit of this theology for me, and particularly people when I change things like that. That's the way. The reason that we are making a change is that we can reach more people for Christ.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, Yeah. And I i'm sorry I felt like I kind of called you on the carpet all I needed. I'm sure a lot of people like that.

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Lester Ruth: Oh,

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Lester Ruth: ah,

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Lester Ruth: well, and i'll tell you why I did it, and I really wasn't trying to do it for you. It is some of my interlocutors, some of my other academic, liturgical historians, who, I think, have been too easily dismissive

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Lester Ruth: of this phenomenon.

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Lester Ruth: And so they just create a straw man

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Lester Ruth: and say, You know, this is nothing but nineteenth century revitalism,

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Lester Ruth: you know, raising his head again. And of course we knew how bad it was then, and of course it's going to be bad now, and you know what I like to my own students is, you know, if they treated you

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Lester Ruth: sixteenth century reformation history like that,

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Lester Ruth: you know they would get

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Lester Ruth: well. You don't have an academic. Sorry. Let me just get a hammer.

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Lester Ruth: So Why is it that they're not hammered

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Lester Ruth: academically when they just raise some sort of

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Lester Ruth: yeah strawman that they can complain about to music? So when you said that about nineteen. It's. This is nineteenth century revivalism all over again. I was like, Well praise the Lord, we need some of that.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, let's bring it up, and I think that's some of my work is trying to focus on

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Andy Miller III: the often. The claim is that the ecclesiology of that period was weak, you know, and I want to say Well, they they had a different understanding of what the church was, but it it seemed like it was pretty effective, and we. Our institutions are here today. Likely in my tradition in the Westland holiest movement because of it.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, I I would.

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Lester Ruth: I would say their ecclesiology wasn't necessarily weak. It was different and had different emphasis.

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Lester Ruth: Yes, yeah. And one of the nice things my own dissertation Director James White taught me was Ah appreciate every group on its own terms. Okay, yeah, I know. I Yeah, I appreciate James. Why, it's right through the

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Lester Ruth: well known, you know.

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Lester Ruth: And my shorthand way of saying that is that no one shows up on Sunday morning trying to figure out how they can intentionally mess it up.

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Andy Miller III: There you go,

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Lester Ruth: you know, so there's always a rhyme or reason to it.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah,

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Lester Ruth: you know, and once you understand it, then you can take a step back and go Well, This is what they're missing, Or perhaps this is what they're over emphasizing,

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Lester Ruth: you know. Yeah, interesting. So So what happened before these rivers combined? What else happened in the Gap River. What else was going on there beyond? So it gets connected after World War Ii. To these various Ah, youth, ministries and campus ministries! What else. Who who else is A part of this? Is this kind of like the bill gather side, or I don't know. I'm curious where

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Lester Ruth: some of the names, and not here. I am just talking about music again. But what else is part of this stream?

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Lester Ruth: Well,

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Lester Ruth: for the Gap people, initially, they really do emphasize music first.

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Andy Miller III: Okay,

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Lester Ruth: and what it gives people due to. But they're willing to use anything that they already have at hand. They're not trying to create anything new. They're just trying to repurpose what they already have.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, Okay. But the Gap people are trying to create new things. And so they're intentionally doing things.

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Lester Ruth: They're trying to be edgy. So the best example is a fellow named Ralph Carmichael the

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Lester Ruth: Oh, yeah, Who? I? We had hoped to interview him, but He was in poor health, and his life, in fact, has recently passed away.

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Lester Ruth: But we had some email exchanges with his wife, and she sent us a wonderful glossy photo of Carmichael that we put in the book. But anyway, you know.

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Lester Ruth: Ah, he tells an interesting story, which I think is paradigmatic kind of for what's going on here, and he's discovered that his own teenage daughter in the early sixtys is sneaking out of the house to the car so she can listen to pop radio in the car. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: Um, He must not have allowed it in the house itself,

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Lester Ruth: In the

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Lester Ruth: he says, you know, if I want the church to be able to reach my own daughter. You?

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Andy Miller III: Yeah,

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Lester Ruth: it's got to use music that interest her.

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Yeah,

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Lester Ruth: so. And he's a wonderful, very flexible composer and um, and starts to compose some things. Um! Ah, perhaps one of the more influential things is a music score he did for a movie that Billy Graham.

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Lester Ruth: It came out of the Pilgrims Association of the Mid Sixtys. What particular song is everything to me? Okay, yeah,

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Lester Ruth: which we try to argue in the book is perhaps the first instance that many Evangelicals ever saw a worship time led by an acoustic guitar. Okay, as a scene in the movie where they're singing that song,

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Lester Ruth: but he's just the first youth for Christ doing it. But mainliners are involved in this too. The nineteen sixty S. Is a very tumultuous cultural period, right?

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Lester Ruth: And so I've heard, I guess. Well, I yes, even though I was a kid, you know, even even

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Lester Ruth: you know, as a small kid. You just do how tumultuous it! Why, I

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Lester Ruth: um assassinations protest uh civil rights movement, you know. I tell my own students here, you know I

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Lester Ruth: when I was a kid, I used to think, try to calculate how soon my own town would be bombed in the coming nuclear war. I figured it'd be pretty early, since there were all refineries.

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Lester Ruth: Now I grew up. Who you know, what are six and seven year olds thinking like that, you know. Yeah.

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Lester Ruth: So it was a tumultuous Yeah, this is that period. And so and the other thing to factor in something that we would just

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Lester Ruth: not think twice about

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Lester Ruth: the one thousand nine hundred and sixtys is really where you start getting pervasive Tvs.

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Oh, yeah.

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Lester Ruth: And so prior to that. And this is something my own dissertation director was arguing at the time, he said,

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Lester Ruth: for our generations are used to listening to the radio, and so they're willing to sit there and worship service and have most of it come in through their ears.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. But now we have a Tv generation who are used to looking at things.

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Lester Ruth: Our worship services. Much must be much more

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Lester Ruth: visually enticing. Mm-hmm which is a stretch for any form of Protestant worship, but

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Lester Ruth: because Protestants have always emphasized speaking or listening

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Lester Ruth: faith comes by hearing and hearing, by the Word of God. That's a fundamental Protestant, a vertical principle.

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Lester Ruth: Um! And so to emphasize faith comes by seeing

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Lester Ruth: and seen in a dynamic setting.

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Lester Ruth: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: I'm not so. That's

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Lester Ruth: now the gift people are going. What What are you talking about? We're just going to sit here and praise God for an hour.

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Lester Ruth: So is this where it is a gap, a Gap World Gap River, where Music festival, Christian music festivals come into being.

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Lester Ruth: We're both connected as Berry and the festival, that type of thing.

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Andy Miller III: So yeah, So that's this desire to see something that see something going on in the culture with Woodstock, or whatever, and create an alternate vision. And it is Ccm. In itself a part of the Gap tradition.

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Lester Ruth: Well, well, Ccm: bridges both rivers.

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Andy Miller III: Okay,

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Lester Ruth: see? And that's the thing was. Any aspect of this gets industrialized

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Lester Ruth: businesses. On the whole, don't care who they sell their products to.

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Lester Ruth: In fact, they want to sell their products to as many people as possible. Yeah. So the industrialization of this

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Lester Ruth: starting in the seventys, but especially in the eightys, and then the ninetys is part of what really causes the confluence. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: because the company's creating the the

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Lester Ruth: the overhead. Um lambda nets.

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Lester Ruth: Well, they don't care who you're using their overhead laminet. The projectors don't care who they're selling them to,

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Lester Ruth: you know. So the motivations for why you might buy the overhead, or you might find a new slide projector, or you might end up buying pro presenter in the late ninetys. You know the motivations for why you might be getting into this could be completely different.

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Lester Ruth: But the product itself is the same. Yeah, interesting.

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Lester Ruth: Okay. So I worked at a Christian bookstore in the late ninety S. In part because of my desire to connect with my generation as a good gapper to ah present Dc. Talk and the like to people who are looking for it. But here's I never thought of this until we've had this conversation

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Andy Miller III: at that Christian bookstore in the Mall Limbstone books there was a variety of of, I would say, gap type of products, but they're almost separated. So then there was another wall which was a praise and worship wall at the time, so this would have ninety, six, ninety, seven,

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Lester Ruth: and the praise of worship. Wall, you had

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Andy Miller III: maybe a little early hill song, but more the marinatha and integrity, and those type of things, and it was a different type of person

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Lester Ruth: who came in a different type of tradition that came in and looked at that side of the wall, and the praise of worship side was just not something. It even had a certain musical texture that was very different from the Ccm. Wall.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, absolutely. It's really helpful to think about these two distinct trends. So what happens, though, is these walls, these rivers you're saying in the mid ninetys come together.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, eventually, I mean, because

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Lester Ruth: you know, you're working at this bookstore. You're not checking. Ip cards. When the people

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Lester Ruth: you're a bamboo. You're a gapper, you know, don't go on that phrase of worship ball,

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Lester Ruth: you know, and some assembly of God God comes in and you go. You wouldn't be interested in any of this

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Lester Ruth: literature on how to effectively reach people and how to start these services. You know you're willing to sell to anybody right right? Right. They themselves make one way or the other. But in fact, you want them to linger and look at the

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Lester Ruth: Let me show you this river. It's a nice one. That's right. Yeah. Because once it's industrialized and becomes a business, you don't carry yourself. So is that is it a market Focused reason that the rivers come together.

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Lester Ruth: That's yeah, a lot of it in this, and also other developments that support the market.

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Lester Ruth: Okay. So my favorite, one of my

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Lester Ruth: favorite aspects of the history that we learned in doing the research was where C. Cli actually came from. Oh, wait! I have no idea I still have to use it.

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Lester Ruth: It's coming from a church in Portland, Oregon, Bible Temple.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, now known as Mana House,

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Lester Ruth: Pure Gift River

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Lester Ruth: Church.

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Lester Ruth: In fact, the graduate's illness. Canadian.

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Andy Miller III: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: the the first C. Ceo of Ccl. I grew up in Raj Lazelle's Church interesting,

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Lester Ruth: and his parents were church planters and musicians for Regg Lazelle. Okay, that's the word. He went to Rentaliselle's Bible College. I mean, that's He's If you talk to Howard Roshinski, he's pure

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Lester Ruth: a primitive gift River thinking guy Okay, So Ccli: Develops in that church and in the Pentecostal network associated with that church. It was a large but of coastal church that sponsored ministers, conferences, and music ministers conferences

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Lester Ruth: in the Eightys. They they dawned on them because of a lawsuit against them

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Lester Ruth: up in Illinois that they were using all of these songs in their hour, long times of singing illegally. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: There was a church that got really hammered

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Lester Ruth: a lawsuit, and they go, hey? We got to find a solution to this, and there were several companies. But Ccli copyright Licensing International is the one that

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Lester Ruth: worked with the industry and came up with the largest corpus of songs that the license gave you access to the,

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Lester Ruth: and we got their first denominational break down the list. They put out every six months along with their top twenty, five list that they put out with their every six month row if you pay out, and it's really interesting. There are a lot of southern boundaries,

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Lester Ruth: but initially, everybody else on the list towards the top are all kind of.

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Lester Ruth: They're all gift River folks from these pentecostal worlds

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Lester Ruth: six years later. That's no longer the case,

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Lester Ruth: Southern Baptist convention and mainline denominations like United Methodism. So how the Mid ninetys, the

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Lester Ruth: he medalcles and Mainliners,

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Lester Ruth: are some of the predominant users of A. C cli license,

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Lester Ruth: you know, in Cca allied, I mean. They adapted their own marketing scheme, and figured out how to

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Lester Ruth: advertised to a wide range of churches and make themselves available to a wide range of churches.

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Lester Ruth: Um, you know this is part of the air we breathe now, and the water we drink.

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Lester Ruth: You gotta have a

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Lester Ruth: so, then this is it. And so it's. In that period where things start to shift and it becomes more mainstream. Here it is. The the streams come together and make the mainstream, I guess, of what's happening, and so tell me then, what's happened then in the last twenty five years.

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Lester Ruth: Well several things pretty much what happens to every developed movement that's entering its second.

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Lester Ruth: Ah, one thing is, you get a whole new generation of people who don't remember anything prior right, and just assume the way things are on the way things are. And so for many folks there's less emphasize and less emphasis on the underlying theology.

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Lester Ruth: Sure, Um.

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Lester Ruth: And so you you start getting some literature that says, Oh, we can't forget this. This is really what's

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Lester Ruth: motivating the whole thing.

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Lester Ruth: Um, you start getting celebrities.

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Lester Ruth: So there are no no real celebrity worship leaders

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Lester Ruth: until the nineteen ninety S. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: Who would that be like in the ninetys. Would this have been like? I don't know Ron Canoli, or I don't know. I'm trying to think of

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Lester Ruth: um from the British sign of the Gift river folks. Um,

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Lester Ruth: Matt Redmond.

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Andy Miller III: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: Chris Tomlin, if you want an American sort of name. Yeah, sure. Um, Paul Bolosh,

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Lester Ruth: you

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Lester Ruth: kind of a dominant sort of name.

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Andy Miller III: So what is okay, but getting off the music side. Then what does this do, then, to Protestant worship like? I have an idea. But i'm curious more from a historical perspective, like What's then? What? What has become a process and worship in this period?

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Lester Ruth: Well, it depends on which river a congregation started it around it.

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Lester Ruth: So what's happened in Pentecostalism globally,

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Lester Ruth: that this form of worship has just almost displaced everything else.

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Andy Miller III: Okay,

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Lester Ruth: this is what Pedecostal worship looks like to one degree or another around the world. Now,

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Lester Ruth: I mean, there's some outliers. There's some different things, but this is what it looks like.

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Lester Ruth: What happened here in North America. Among evangelical, but especially mainline denominations, was the addition of a

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Lester Ruth: about near-service

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Lester Ruth: I call it the movie theater phenomenon.

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Lester Ruth: Okay, So when I was a kid,

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Lester Ruth: and we went to the movie theaters.

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Lester Ruth: It almost didn't matter what movie was playing, because there was only one screen. You just wanted the experience you went. You bought your popcorn, your coat, and you went in and you watched the one movie.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, the theater was going to show for about three to four weeks unless it was a block about there. They kept showing it.

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Lester Ruth: Today You go

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Lester Ruth: to the movie theater, and there are multiple screens, and you have to make a choice.

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Andy Miller III: Yeah,

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Lester Ruth: what kind of movie do I want to watch? And that's what happened to mainline congregations and many evangelical congregations. So the Marquis started saying: Eight, thirty contemporary,

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Lester Ruth: you know often what you got is at eight, thirty, traditional service, a nine o'clock tippery service, eleven o'clock. Traditional service,

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Lester Ruth: You know I had an interesting interview with. I put a coastal pastor about four or five years ago. He was

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Lester Ruth: ah Church of God in Christ. He was African American.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. And he said, You know, it was really interesting to see him begin to realize that there was a gap way of thinking.

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Lester Ruth: And so I was hearing him describe to me, he says, Oh, my church is really kind of settled into an old form of praise and worship, and i'm afraid we're not reaching the young people in our church.

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Lester Ruth: So i'm thinking about starting a second service on Sunday morning with a different sort of style to me, and for him that was just kind of like a completely novel idea. Yeah,

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Lester Ruth: Because he was used to a Pentecostal world where

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Lester Ruth: praise and worship, they already been there. Yeah, you've been there.

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Lester Ruth: But he was getting old enough now. He thought it was getting a little bit stale.

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Andy Miller III: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: so yeah, he was as flabbergasted when I said, You know There' been people who have been specializing in this literature thirty years ago to do it right. It's interesting.

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Lester Ruth: Yes, Um, that's a major development, and the other big development is that the education got very formalized. By that I mean, you started getting accredited institutions offering degrees.

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Andy Miller III: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: and how to lead this

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Lester Ruth: and don't push, you know, and like in the as such, like. The market is asking for it. I'm sure like people like a seminary, like the two jobs that you have, that churches are looking for a worship pastor and senior pastor, you know, like, and and they have something very particular in mind, and it's like, Well,

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Lester Ruth: how do you go about educating that market need, so to speak. And then also we don't want to respond just to the the We don't want to just respond to the needs of a market, too. This is a pension that seminaries um are facing on a regular basis.

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Lester Ruth: Thanks for bringing that up. And that term worship pastor,

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Lester Ruth: because that's another big development.

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Lester Ruth: Um, I mean. I know many congregations where it's presumed that the musician is the main shaper of the service. Hmm. So you get the Scripture. You get the main.

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Lester Ruth: Serve an idea, and you get kind of the main kind of feel or purpose of the sermon from the pastor Right. But then the musician shapes the service

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Lester Ruth: that's astonishingly new in the history of Christian worship.

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Lester Ruth: It is part of what

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Lester Ruth: you know where we started the interview this podcast that you know my story. He was having a hard time wrapping his brain around the idea that the preacher, the pastor,

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Lester Ruth: he is the main shaper of the service.

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Andy Miller III: Yes,

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Lester Ruth: one of the more interesting churches I've gotten to study over the years is an Evangelical Covenant Church up on the north side of Chicago,

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Lester Ruth: and some other folks did a thorough documentation of this church in the early Os, and they had had the same main musician for twenty years,

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Lester Ruth: and one of the things that we tracked

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Lester Ruth: was how her job title and her job responsibilities morphed, interesting,

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Lester Ruth: and she went from being like a pianist and song leader

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Lester Ruth: to a worship leader where she was the main shaper of the services

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Andy Miller III: it's. It's even. There's the word song I remember like watching my father, my parents, such as my father

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Andy Miller III: try to cope with what was going on in the mid ninety S. And there's always this pull towards a like in general, and people disagree to blend right the the famous word in order to to blend. But there is a way of like it's still being connected to this older,

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Lester Ruth: These older expressions um of of songs or singing in like. So I mean, i'm sure you've You've seen this. But the quote, praise and worship time originally in the Savage Army lands that I was in. Was this inspiration right here. Oh, yeah,

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Andy Miller III: you have this idea like It's still like Maybe it's just something you might clack, clap to. That might have a drum set. Be trying to figure this out, so my my denomination then moved to half, and they called up a whole series called The Holly a courses, but they waited until the songs were shown to like, have some prominence, but that didn't, and never was cutting edge enough, and it created all sorts of challenges like for what it was going to be, and just trying to do be both in and as and when I was serving as a pastor, you know, and within the context of the savage army.

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Andy Miller III: You have all of these things that are pulling on you, and yet wanting to create a situation that's evangelistic. But yet, ah! Enabling people to experience the gift side of the river at the same time. So these are all really helpful terms that it helped me think through my experience.

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Lester Ruth: Well, I i'm glad. I mean um.

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Lester Ruth: You're almost answering your own question, because every time you say something I should stop talking. Yeah,

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Lester Ruth: yeah, the whole movement. Actually, it's been really hard on printed hymn for song collections,

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Lester Ruth: because Gap people are always really cautious about them, because as soon as you print them they're static right right? And so you might get to a point

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Lester Ruth: the near future where they're no longer useful or attractive, and the Gift people,

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Lester Ruth: man. Those folks can generate songs,

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Lester Ruth: so they almost don't want to create hymn those because you just you put boundaries over this huge creativity of songwriting

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Lester Ruth: that comes out of the Gift River.

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Andy Miller III: What? What's been the biggest surprise to you as you enter into this study in the last fifteen years, like, what did you not expect? I I I applaud you for going after it, you know it would have been easy to, you know. Here you are, a a career as a professor now in a research position you could have just said I'm going to stay focusing on

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Andy Miller III: eighteenth century Methodism. But there's something in you that's pulled you to want to figure out what's going on in our current context. But what surprised you in that?

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Lester Ruth: It's,

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Lester Ruth: I think, What really surprised me is how this is not a new history. Okay. So within the broad history of Protestant worship there's a long strand called Free Church worship.

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Lester Ruth: Okay? And and there are a lot of people wrapped up into that. It starts in the sixteenth century, but it encompasses a wide variety of folks over the centuries. Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, an abandoned Salvation Army,

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Lester Ruth: you know. Uh, but the underlying idea

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Lester Ruth: that we will shape worship according description. Okay,

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Lester Ruth: we're not worshipping faithfully unless we're worshipping scriptually Okay, that's the recurring idea, the

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Lester Ruth: and it slowly dawned on both me and Dr. Lim

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Lester Ruth: that this history is just a new episode of that old story.

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Lester Ruth: Yeah, Because the musical aspect has been so dynamic and so enticing, and I mean individually for me, I came to Faith singing the courses of the late one thousand nine hundred and seventys,

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Lester Ruth: and just flabbergasted that we could sing them to guitars, you know, rather than some pie.

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Lester Ruth: Most of the academic literature has been focused on the music. But to come to the realization that it's really about the

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Lester Ruth: Protestant Christians grappling with Scripture.

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Lester Ruth: But that's the real story.

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Lester Ruth: That's been the biggest surprise. And it's also been the biggest delight because it's allowed other significant historic figures to come to the forefront,

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Lester Ruth: you know. Just a minute We We shifted the camera focus, and many other folks who were on the stage,

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Lester Ruth: but a music setting for the camera lens didn't pick up once you shift it.

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Lester Ruth: It shifted the aperture to Scripture rather than music.

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Lester Ruth: I'm getting my camera terms correct.

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Lester Ruth: Then a whole different set of people and events and days pop to the surface, and that's that was the most pleasing

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Lester Ruth: for me. As a historian. I like to bring attention to important people

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Lester Ruth: who, I don't think, have gotten their trust. You. Yeah, that is great. Well, again to everybody listening here. The book is a history of contemporary praise and worship,

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Andy Miller III: understanding the ideas, the Biblical ideas that reshaped the Protestant Church. So, Dr. Ruth, thank you so much for your time. I always ask this question in a good Methodist way. I think of

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Andy Miller III: two sides of the Gospel, not justification, but sanctification. That's the idea behind the title. More to the story.

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Lester Ruth: But I also like to think you know there's more to the story of praise and worship music which we found out today. But also, I bet there's more to the story of Lester Ruth, Than's typically told. So i'm curious. You're the first person. By the way, i'll give you a chance to think about it. Who picked up

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Andy Miller III: my Martin Luther bobble head, he said, What's that? And then you saw my Salvage Army flag in the corner. So you figured it all out the liturgy of Andy Miller's office. She got it. But ah, curious! Is there more to the story of Lester? Ruth.

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Lester Ruth: Um,

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Lester Ruth: Yeah. I um. Most people, when they think of alternative historians,

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Lester Ruth: assumed that our own first comfortable home of worship is pipe organs and the

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Lester Ruth: you know, a lot of formality, etc. Etc. You know that I've got a complete collection of Gregorian chances.

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Lester Ruth: Um,

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Lester Ruth: and they would not assume the same thing for my co-author glimpsed me home.

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Lester Ruth: But one of the things that we found really helped us, and kept us committed to the project is that this world is a first home for us.

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Andy Miller III: Go away

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Lester Ruth: Well, I mean I came to faith and became an active Christian disciple in a campus Ministry college in the late one thousand nine hundred and seventys. The

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Lester Ruth: singing old courses like Siki first, or therefore the beam of the Lord shall return and come with singing on the Zion.

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Lester Ruth: And so,

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Lester Ruth: yeah, I had to learn how to appreciate organs and him of the interesting. Once I got the seminary

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Lester Ruth: it's,

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Lester Ruth: and that that just might surprise some. Yeah, I think that is distinct.

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Lester Ruth: I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you so much for taking time to come on this

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Lester Ruth: my pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really, Dr. Lemon, are excited about this book, and we just hope people will pick it up and read it and and realize there is more to the story.

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Andy Miller III: Oh, sounds like a good title for a podcast.

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Lester Ruth: Oh, yeah,

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Lester Ruth: Thank you. Dr. Rou: Okay, Thank you.