faith | A Latent Existence

An ethical dilema

My business has recently become a web hosting reseller. In addition to creating sites, we will also have customers signing up online and uploading their own web sites to our servers. As a business run by Christians, this could lead to some ethical issues.

We may end up hosting customer web sites that promote activities that we as Christians do not want to be associated with. My specific example is a stripogram service, but there will be other examples.

My first thought is that as a company we should not pick and choose our customers, nor dictate what is acceptable to place on web sites that we host. As long as the content isn’t illegal, we should not be involved. Unfortunately this argument does not hold up very well. In the case of the stripogram service, I do not want to earn money that has come from such behaviour. I could solve this problem by giving them the service for free – except that then I would be subsidising the service too.

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Hymns old and, err, older.

I often complain about the music in my church. Let me explain why.

The church I attend has an ageing congregation. It also has a choir made up of 15 or so people. It is a very serious choir. They take all their music seriously, sing it perfectly, and have robes and everything. Unfortunately most of the hymns that they sing were written in the 18th or 19th century. Very occasionally they sing something modern, by which they mean written after 1900.

Now, there are some very powerful hymns written in the last few centuries, the best of which are still sung in churches around the world today. Most of the hymns sung in our church, though, are at best obscure and at worst have no consistent tune, are completely unpredictable and are impossible to sing without being taught the tune and practicing extensively. I get the impression that the music is selected to allow the choir to show off their technical competency. In contrast, modern church music (And I include anything written since 1970 in this group!) is normally easy to learn, easy to remember, and (to me anyway) much more meaningful during worship.

But this brings me to an important question.

What is the purpose of church music?

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