I have been a musician since I was 10 years old on the trumpet. I then picked up the French horn, the bass guitar, the drums, and the electric guitar, with piano chording thrown in for good measure. Much of my musical career has been in Pentecostal churches, although I now play for my local Lutheran church about once per month. I think that being a musician kept me in Pentecostalism for longer than I would have otherwise. It gives one a place to vent our musical talents on a regular basis – three times per week full of jam sessions and pretty good playing in most places. You get a sense of accomplishment and you get a certain amount of insulation from the rules and regulations that others are more closely scrutinized with. Perversely, the emotional ups and downs of Pentecostalism produce extreme stress, and Pentecostal musicians have an outlet to vent all of these frustrations. Thus, there are powerful incentives for musicians within Pentecostalism. If certain musicians have sufficient reputation, they can have more power than the pastor in some cases. For a pastor to have good musicians is a big draw for churches, and this means more people which means more money. Thus, musicians who know this can bargain for better treatment with the threat of leaving or something similar.
So, those of you who are lurkers and musicians, you must ask yourself: is this right? Why do I sacrifice my moral integrity for the chance to play or sing? Do I really believe this garbage or am I just putting on a show to allow preachers to manipulate people? Ask yourself if you are doing the right thing in serving such a corrupt system that manipulates people are you are the main instrument used for the manipulation.
When will you face the Truth that you are doing things that are really not right? When will you stop serving the wickedness of preachers? They cannot live without you, so why are you supporting the corrupt system?
Think hard about that.
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Sometimes I also wonder about the emotional releases and explosions during Pentecostal services. Perhaps all these rules and regulations in some places, and obeying the pastor in other places like shepherding causes people to have bottled up emotional problems where they can vent during these services of intense emotions. So perhaps the emotional intensity of the particular service is a “gas gauge” as it were as to the magnitude of the emotional problems of the congregation.
Think about it. If you are a Pentecostal and you think you are “saved,” why would you spend an enormous amount of time kneeling at the “altar” weeping and shedding buckets of tears? If you are saved once, why all the extra weeping and emotional displays? I know that there is this thing among Oneness Pentecostals that one sin can make you lose your salvation so maybe that is the reason. But also all this emotional abuse and restrictions have a vent during high emotive services. So perhaps in a Darwinian fashion, the system has developed its own way to cope with emotional abuse with all these intense services, which are usually driven by the musicians.
There is also this phenomenon among Pentecostals with musical addictions. I know several people on these boards over the years have mentioned that they had particular songs or bands that they had to listen to to get through the day. I think that I had a similar problem within Pentecostalism as I can recall. I always had to be around music to probably soothe the guilt and shame of being Pentecostal. Maybe I listened to that stuff constantly like an alcoholic drinks too often: it was a way to cover up things that really needed to be looked at and taken care of. The novelist Ayn Rand once mentioned that the root of all evil is evasion. Evasion is when one refuses to look at things in front of their eyes, and they refuse to face the facts of reality. Perhaps music in Pentecostalism swept us up into an induced emotional fog for the very purpose of evasion. We were getting drunk on music to forget the problems and the pain.
What do you think?
JP Istre
Source: - http://ex-pentecostal.blogspot.com/
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