David W. Music

    Many American churches of the seventeenth and  eighteenth centuries vigorously opposed the use of musical instruments in worship. Over time, some of the objections against instruments began to break down and they were gradually introduced. However, the innovation seldom met with immediate or complete approval. Sometimes people would not come into the service until time for the sermon and would leave immediately after to keep from having to hear the “ungodly instrument” played. Some even tried more extreme measures, as the following examples from Baptist church records will show.
In Flemington, New Jersey, a cello was introduced into the Baptist church about 1838 to accompany the singing. However, when the choir assembled on one Sunday, the instrument was not to be found. Sometime later, a church member was called upon in business meeting to explain how he came to be in possession of the missing instrument, though he “made no acknowledgement of doing wrong in the act.”
At a Saturday business meeting in 1844 the Walnut Street Baptist Church of Louisville, Kentucky, passed a resolution that “no instrumental music be allowed in this church.” On the following Monday the church was called into a special business session to determine why a musical instrument had been used in the service on the intervening Sunday!
Perhaps the strangest result of the opposition to instruments was that experienced by the First Baptist Church of Houston, Texas. An organ that had been in use since 1845 disappeared from the church in 1847 and was subsequently found “at the bottom of Buffalo Bayou.”     fine