The Last Waltz:

The middle years of the 1960s were the last great era of faith. Faith, that is, in science and technology as saviours, makers of a new heaven and a new earth coming down from outer space. The later years of the decade marked a turning point, as scientific progress ceased to be an unquestioned good, as the environmental and social costs of modernity became a cause for concern. The turn of the tide was visible early in seemingly superficial things. Modernist styles in fashion and design were supplemented or replaced by historical revivals. Musical culture concentrated ever more on sensual, irrational experience. Design guru Paul Reilly, writing in 1966, sensed that television and magazines had undermined modernity, as people saw the historical and the modern side by side as equals to be chosen or mixed, rather than as a linear progression with the modern superseding the historical. The stylistic and behavioural revolutions of the 60s were the firstfruits of an enduring cultural change. Somewhere between 1965 and 1968, Western society crossed the boundary from modern to postmodern.

People now in their 60s and 70s were in their 30s during the 1960s. Some embraced the new culture. Some saw themselves as already too old. And many followed the changes up to a point where the aesthetic and cultural break with their own formative years was too great, and stopped there. The sea-change in sentiment can be symbolised by the failure of the Beatles' single 'Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane', the firstfruits of the 'Sergeant Pepper' sessions, to reach number 1 in February 1967 - their first single to miss number 1 since 'Please Please Me' early in their career. The song that outsold it, 'Release Me' by Engelbert Humperdinck, illustrates the desire of a significant - generally older - part of the pop audience for a more straightforward and comforting music.

This has been noted by several writers on the period, because it contradicts the myth of 1967 as belonging to the counterculture. In the year of Jimi Hendrix and the Monterey pop festival, 'Sergeant Pepper' and the Summer of Love, the three best-selling singles were all by Humperdinck. As the Beatles and others turned to sonic experimentation, and pop music abandoned traditional song-and-melody structures for groove or noise, a generation of older followers turned back. Over the next few years record shops would invent the category 'Easy Listening' as a catch-all meaning 'anything liked by people over a certain age' - and the term speaks volumes for what those people thought of the new directions in rock and soul. Interestingly, this was the age group who were going to be leaders in their churches for the rest of the 20th century.

When we look at the age profile of the English Church as revealed in current statistics it is clear that the 'missing generations' are those who were young in the 1960s and after. It seems very much as if the 1960s cultural shift is passing upward through the population, eliminating Christianity as it goes. Why should the Church be hit so hard in this way? Many things could be said, but in essence most churches have never achieved a form of Christian spirituality native to the new culture, but have lingered in the old order, through nostalgia, distaste, fear or uncertainty.

At first the churches dealt with the 60s cultural shift by making room for some of its music. This approach was valid because music was the major carrier for 'baby boomer' culture and had a central role in its creation and dissemination. Specifically, it was the folk or soft rock aspect of counterculture music that was taken up as a vehicle for Christian worship. At the time this made good sense. It was the idiom of protest, of Dylan and Baez, socially conscious and literate. It seemed a more natural vehicle for Christian sentiments than the love'n'lust of teenage pop. Being song-based and melodic it could be accommodated into the existing church culture as a new form of hymnody. Aesthetic gentleness and low technology [acoustic guitars] cushioned the culture shock, although notions of propriety of behaviour still had to be [sometimes fiercely] renegotiated.

But even this gentle new hymnody struggled in many places to win acceptance until the late 1980s. And acceptance often came through fencing it into a space marked 'for young people' - where a jolly song would be accompanied by a guitar before the organist resumed his tour of the 19th century. Since the new worship culture could at first be located primarily in its songs, it could be incorporated as a section of songs in a particular style to satisfy the needs of those who wanted that kind of thing, while leaving the rest of the worship structure intact for those who didn't.

This partial resolution took 20 years, often waiting for the young people of the 1960s - those that had stayed - to be old enough to gain some power within their churches. But by this time the wider culture had moved so far that its incorporation was no longer possible at all within traditional church structures. The young Christians of the 80s had grown up listening to the full range of post-1960s musics - metal, punk, disco, rap. Many had found personal and spiritual meaning in such musics and were disappointed to find them given no place or worth by their churches. Hippy soft rock and folky protest musics were now rather despised, as genres, and their Christian outgrowths came weighed down with extra saccharine and sincerity. It seemed that the Church had chosen the wrong musical route out of the 60s. We should have got into the groove, or built our church upon the rock.

Unfortunately such musics are largely unacceptable to the 'Easy Listening' generation. Faced with the choice between Humperdinck and Hendrix, the Church has always plumped for Humperdinck. And in a church culture that equates quietness and reverence with worship, what chance ecstatic dance or sonic dissonance? Most post-1960s musics are quintessentially postmodern in their insistence on emotion and the body as primary sites of meaning. But to many 'Easy Listeners' emotion and the body are suspect, both in a Christian context and in the social context of their own upbringing. To use post-60s music is to impose postmodernity, if only for the duration of a song. Of all the idioms of the 1960s, the church chose to work with the one that was most about reasoned words.

Popular music, while not being so dominant a generational unifier as it was in the 1960s, remains one of the most powerful determinants of how people construct their identities and social positions in contemporary society. But the forms of music they deploy to do so have remained largely unacceptable to those who run churches and now dominate their congregations numerically. If music is a key component of social identity, then to exclude or criticise a particular music is to exclude or criticise the people for whom it is important. It does not, therefore, seem wrong to invoke music as the most telling battleground, the battleground that stands for all the other battlegrounds, in the contemporary Church. The problem of post-1960s church culture is not that it is wrong but that it is far too narrow, too limited in its options and too far from the cultural mainstream in those few options that it does offer in most places. There is a fundamental impasse, in that the scale of change in worship culture and idiom necessary to connect with the wider contemporary world is beyond not only the resources but the wishes of most congregations.