The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 5

Allen Webster

Topic(s): Denominationalism, God's Will, Worship

Links to this entire series:

• The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 1
• The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 2
• The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 3
• The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 4
• The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 5
• The Amazing History of Instrumental Music: Part 6

The Baptist Church is the largest Protestant group, with about 34 million members. Most members of the Southern Baptist Convention, and other Baptist affiliates, would be surprised to learn that their denomination once sang without accompaniment. In fact, their preachers argued against instrumental music!

According to The Baptist World, a Baptist website,[1] this denomination was founded around 1610 by John Smyth, who originally was a bishop in the Church of England. Roger Williams founded the first Baptist church in America around 1639 in Providence, Rhode Island. For a period of almost 200 years, most Baptists worshipped by unaccompanied congregational singing. The change gradually took place between 1825 and 1900.

Consider two voices from among the Baptists on the subject of instruments of music in worship:

DAVID BENEDICT: Noted Baptist historian David Benedict (1779–1884) wrote Fifty Years Among the Baptists[2] which was published in 1860. In it, he revealed: “In my earliest intercourse among this people congregational singing generally prevailed among them” (p. 281). He explained how small instruments of music were gradually accepted in some Baptist congregations. He continued,

The changes which have been experienced in the feelings of a large portion of our people has often surprised me. Staunch old Baptists in former times would as soon have tolerated the Pope of Rome in their pulpits as an organ in their galleries, and yet the instrument has gradually found its way among them, and the successors in church management, with nothing like the jars and difficulties which arose of old concerning the bass viol and smaller instruments of music.

Incidentally, Benedict did not object to the use of organs with singing. Far from it—he seems proud of the fact that he was the pastor of a Rhode Island Baptist congregation, which he claims was the first in the country to use an organ.[3] He says:

The Introduction Of The Organ Among The Baptist. This instrument, which from time immemorial has been associated with cathedral pomp and prelatical power, and has always been the peculiar favorite of great national churches, at length found its way into Baptist sanctuaries, and the first one ever employed by the denomination in this country, and probably in any other, might have been standing in the singing gallery of the Old Baptist meeting house in Pawtucket, about forty years ago, where I then officiated as pastor (1840) . . . How far this modern organ fever will extend among our people, and whether it will on the whole work a RE- formation or DE- formation in their singing service, time will more fully develop (page 204–207).[4]

CHARLES SPURGEON: Consider also the views of arguably the most famous Baptist preacher of all time, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, of London, England. Spurgeon could be called the “Billy Graham of the nineteenth century” because he was comparable in influence in his time to that which Graham has had in the last generation.

Spurgeon preached to a congregation of 10,000 at London’s Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle from 1853 until 1891.

At twenty-two he was the most popular preacher of the day.

Spurgeon’s sermons were published in printed form every week, and enjoyed a high circulation. By the time of his death in 1892, he had preached almost thirty-six hundred sermons and published forty-nine volumes of commentaries, sayings, anecdotes, illustrations, and devotions. Some of these are still in print today, including the widely used Treasury of David commentary on Psalms.

His influence is seen in the fact that the church’s website—more than a hundred years after his death—still headlines itself as “Spurgeon’s” church.

He has been described by many as “the greatest Baptist preacher who ever lived.”

In the Treasury of David, Charles Spurgeon commented on the phrase, “Praise the Lord with harp” (Psalm 33:2) by saying:

Men need all the help they can get to stir them up to praise. This is the lesson to be gathered from the use of musical instruments under the old dispensation. Israel was at school, and used childish things to help her to learn; but in these days, when Jesus gives us spiritual manhood, we can make melody without strings and pipes. We who do not believe these things to be expedient in worship, lest they should mar its simplicity . . .

On the phrase, “sing unto him,” he continues: “This is the sweetest and best of music. No instrument like the human voice.”[5]

In his notes on Psalm 42, Spurgeon commented,

David appears to have had a peculiarly tender remembrance of the singing of the pilgrims, and assuredly it is the most delightful part of worship and that which comes nearest to the adoration of heaven. What a degradation to supplant the intelligent song of the whole congregation by the theatrical prettiness of a quartet, the refined niceties of a choir, or the blowing off of wind from inanimate bellows and pipes! We might as well pray by machinery as praise by it.

Again, this is not an isolated historical case, or a preacher on the fringe of his denomination’s fellowship, but a widely held belief and a widely recognized scholar within the Baptist fellowship.