Eric Wyse and Contemporary Praise Music
May 15, 2013
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143,
fbns@wayoflife.org
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Eric Wyse’s “Wonderful, Merciful Savior” is included in Majesty Music’s new Rejoice Hymns. Wyse taught at Liberty University’s Center for Worship in October 2011. 
Wyse served as organist at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Nashville from 1993 to 2001, when he was named music director. This church’s 2012 Summer Movie Nights features such filthy fare as the R-rated film “Knocked Up,” which “follows the repercussions of a drunken one-night stand that results in an unintended pregnancy.” The church also hosts Jazzercise classes in its gym.

As a producer and consultant, Wyse has worked with ecumenical rockers such as Keith and Kristyn Getty, Amy Grant, and CeCe Winans. 

Wyse is a one-world church builder who sees music as a major aspect of this endeavor. One of the web sites most highly recommended by Wyse is Internetmonk.com, which promotes such things as handmade Franciscan-inspired rosaries, the blogs of apostate emerging church leaders Shane Claiborne and Scott McKnight, and the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, which is dedicated to the philosophy of the Buddhist-Catholic monk Thomas Merton. 

In his blog Wyse published a statement by Steven Harmon promoting ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church. Note the following from Wyse’s web site:

“In a previous post I expressed my my appreciation for the Baptist-produced 
Celebrating Grace Hymnal (2010) in light of the implications for receptive ecumenism of the Baptist practice of hymn singing that I noted in my 2010 Lourdes College Ecumenical Lecture (subsequently published as ”HOW BAPTISTS RECEIVE THE GIFTS OF CATHOLICS AND OTHER CHRISTIANS” in Ecumenical Trends 39, no. 6, June 2010, pp. 1/81-5/85). BAPTIST HYMNALS ARE ARGUABLY THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ECUMENICAL DOCUMENTS PRODUCED BY BAPTISTS. They implicitly recognize hymn writers from a wide variety of traditions throughout the history of the church as sisters and brothers in Christ by including their hymns alongside hymns by Baptists…[In addition to numerous] patristic hymns, Baptists receive through their hymnals the gifts of Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Jesus, Martin Luther, the post-Reformation Roman Catholic author of ‘Fairest Lord Jesus’ from the Münster Gesangbuch, the Methodist Charles Wesley, and more recently the Pentecostal pastor Jack Hayford, to name a few hymn writers whose ecclesial gifts Baptists have gladly received with their voices and hearts” (“Baptist Hymn Singing, Receptive Ecumenism, and the Nicene Creed” by Steven Harmon, published by Eric Wyse at HymnWyse, March 14, 2011).

This statement reflects the spiritual blindness that permeates the contemporary praise music movement, and fundamentalist, Bible-believing Baptist churches that are messing around with this music by “adapting it” are building bridges to this extremely dangerous world. The adapters, who are trying to take the rock out of Christian rock, argue that since Baptist churches sing some Lutheran or Methodist hymns from the past, it is inconsistent to reject music written by contemporary worshippers today. This is a foolish argument used by people who are following their feelings and lusts rather than living strictly by God’s Word. I don’t know of one Baptist church that became Lutheran by singing Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress,” but I know of dozens that have become contemporary by messing around with contemporary worship music. Further, I don’t know of any teenagers in Bible-believing Baptist churches that became rock & rollers by listening to Fanny Crosby’s hymns, but I know of many that have become out-and-out worldly rock & rollers by messing around with Christian rock. Whatever Luther was, he left Rome and was not trying to yoke together with the Harlot to build a one-world church, but playing footsie with Rome and building the one-world church is exactly what contemporary worship musicians are doing. We have documented this extensively and irrefutably in
The Directory of Contemporary Worship Musicians, which is available in print or as a free eBook from Way of Life -- www.wayoflife.org. 



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