The "Golden Ages" of Worship Music: which one is yours?

Last week I put up an extensive history of what I would call my "Golden Age" of worship music. Actually, it was not extensive at all, but only the tip of the iceberg—oh well! 1994-2004 was my personal "good old days", when worship music was done right and not like the garbage they are putting out today! (said like an old man sitting on his porch with a shotgun across his lap, a scowl on his face, and an old dusty hymnal open to his favorite song).

The fact of the matter is that there are any of a number of "Golden Ages" of worship music, depending on who you talk to. My hope is to briefly document a number of those "ages" here. 

Hymnals = Vinyl Records: The case for and against hymnals in worship

For music lovers there has been a resurgence of vinyl sales over the past decade. (Or so they say.) The story goes that once tape cassettes and CD's were introduced into the music industry artists put their music on records at a steeply decreasing rate. Now, through illegal downloading services, itunes, Youtube, and through all the many streaming services even the compact disc has become obsolete. But in the midst of the binary age (some) people realized they love their music in a physical form, loved the "warmer" sound of "analog" recordings, and loved spending lots of money on audio equipment. Records are back baby! From used record stores, to remastered reissues of classic albums, to entirely new albums, people are buying and listening to music on records again.

I Am An Irrelevant Worship Pastor

I am the worship and music pastor of a small church community in Peoria, Illinois.  I have been planting this church with another pastor going on 5 years now and thus I am a bi-vocational pastor, taking in very little income from my ministry job.

Every week when I go to select the music we are going to sing at my church the next Sunday a number of immediate tensions rise up within me.  Tensions in the form of questions so high in number that if I let them they would absolutely paralyze my ability to pick the music at all. For example: