Why We Sing A Cappella

The first thing most people notice on a Sunday morning here is that there is no piano. No band, no screens, no one up front with a guitar. Just voices. If you have come from almost any other tradition that is a jarring silence for about thirty seconds, and then it is not silent at all.

We sing this way because it is what we read the church doing in the New Testament, and because nothing was ever added to it. That is the whole argument. It is not that instruments are ugly, or that we think we sound better without them — plenty of Sundays we do not. It is that congregational singing is something the whole room does together, and the moment you put a band up front some of the room stops.