Your report (Musicians protest at ban on ‘non-religious’ concerts, 24 August) describes the attack on traditional church music by the recent decision to exclude musicians from St Sepulchre’s, where my own father is commemorated. We have a similar local example in St Albans. Here the evangelical congregation has persuaded the vicar of St Paul’s church to apply to remove the church organ completely, on the grounds they need more space and it is “not tuned to concert pitch”. Apart from his very ill-informed stance, surely ripping the heart out of one’s parish church goes completely against the incumbent’s duty to preserve the fabric of both building and worship? It is all very well these Holy Trinity Brompton evangelicals enjoying their current popularity, but such attacks on church music and musicians deprive the rest of the community permanently of any chance to enjoy more traditional forms of both worship and music-making. Removing an organ just when choral evensong is enjoying a well deserved resurgence in popularity is amazingly shortsighted and deplorable.
HTB and others getting on this particular bandwagon should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I hope many more musicians will oppose such action.
Dr Clorinda Goodman
Redbourn, Hertfordshire
• Why do so many religiously correct people, who want to ban everything from their churches that is secular and therefore “non-religious”, seem so spiritually inept and lacking in emotional intelligence? They remind me of the scribes and Pharisees with whom Jesus got exasperated as they insisted on correct religious practice but lacked all sense of humanity and compassion. They were very religious, but not in any way spiritual.
Music is a gateway to the divine. It can take one into a deeply spiritual experience, opening the soul to a broader, all-encompassing experience of God/the divine than the narrow beliefs on which so much religiosity is founded. This must be very threatening to the members of Holy Trinity Brompton, whose fundamentalist belief system cannot encompass a view of the divine that is “broader than the measures of man’s mind”.
Clive Wilkinson
Rothbury, Northumberland
• It’s strange how evangelical Anglican practices are noted as “leaving many traditional Anglicans feeling excluded”, whereas it is seldom commented that traditional and “high” church practices (very common in the Diocese of London in particular) leave less traditional Anglicans feeling the same way. The Church of England would be in dire financial straits without its successful evangelical congregations, and many buildings such as St Sepulchre might well be closed anyway.
Rev David Muir
Weston-super-Mare, Somerset
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
