August is "Camp Meeting Month" at my church. People are urged to dress casually, and we sing old hymns. For the prelude, our keyboard player played a ragtime hymn arrangement on the piano. Back in the days when camp meetings were actually held in camps, a piano would never be heard in church and ragtime was probably considered sinful!

It is more than a thousand years since the invention of musical notation, and church music has been produced in every conceivable style. Everything new has met opposition, but eventually much of the old has been discarded, the excellent with the mediocre. Why not appreciate the very best of every style and use it all?