Most of you know what I think of current worship practices in church. My disagreements on that area are mostly philosophical, aesthetic and methodological. However, sometimes it is just plain old incompetence what gets you.
Two Sundays ago, I went to our church service. The worship (or what passed for it) was directed by a certain lady. Everything was truly awful (as usual), but then things sank to a new low. She called for Hymn #370. I searched in my hymnal and thought “wow, that is great. An Old German choral by Gebhart.”
However, the music started and something was awfully wrong. The music was completely different! Searching, I found out that the music was in fact that of Hymn #217, which is the exact same lyrics but with a completely different music. Even worse, the worship group even got the melody wrong and repeatedly made mistakes!
What became evident is that not only the directing lady didn’t know anything of even basic music reading; the whole worship group didn’t know the first thing of score reading as well. Awful, just awful.