Not welcome here

Does your church say "You're not welcome here" to 20% of the people who come through its doors?

What if you told 20% of your visitors, "you may listen to the music, but we're really not interested in letting you sing." That's about the same thing as saying "not welcome," isn't it? Yet that's exactly what many churches are communicating to men who happen to have low voices. Worship songs are led by high voices, and no tools are provided to help the low voices join in.

I've been visiting a lot of churches recently, and in most of them, there are legions of men sitting toward the back, silently mouthing the songs or not participating at all. In the churches with the highest-pitched music, it appears that many older men have stopped coming altogether. I've noticed the same thing from the platform: when the pitch goes up, the men shut down, unless an effort is made to enable them to sing.

Not only are these men made to feel unwelcome. They have no place else to go. Many churches are doing the same thing at the same time, as they transition away from hymn books and toward projected lyrics and contemporary praise songs.

If your church suffers from the "missing male," it may be a physiological response to your worship style, not the spiritual crisis which is so often blamed.

This issue is particularly important if you want to have a multicultural congregation (such as this 1980 study by Hudson and Holbrook) indicates that black adults have a lower vocal range than whites.

There are many ways these churches could improve their low-voice ministry, if they cared to. They could sing some songs with a lower tessitura (possibly alienating the sopranos and tenors!), place low voices on their praise teams, choose song arrangements with wide harmonies, take time to teach harmony parts to the congregation, choose arrangements which don't clobber harmonies which the congregation already knows how to sing, use a choir as song leaders, choose instrumentation to guide the low voices, mix sound so as not to bury low pitches, or even use hymnals or songbooks to accommodate those who read music.

Yes, I sing bass. In many churches, even as a trained musician--with some choral and barbershop singing background, and experience playing instrumental harmonies to many of the songs--I have great difficulty hearing my part. Surely it's even harder for those without the training.