It was a “bonkers gig”, pairing heavy metal with a pipe organ – a musical curiosity that the bands thought would surely seldom be repeated, if ever.
But Pantheïst and Arð, the doom metals bands who performed the concert at Huddersfield town hall last year, have been inundated with requests to repeat the performance – with churches leading the way.
“We thought that churches would look at it as slightly heretical, – having a metal band playing in church – but that wasn’t the case at all,” said Mark Mynett, a senior lecturer in music production at Huddersfield University. “They really embraced this bold new world – some of them talked about bringing a new audience into church.”
The experiment last August saw Pantheïst and Arð accompanied by David Pipe, the cathedral organist at the Diocese of Leeds, playing Huddersfield town hall’s 1860 “Father” Willis organ.
Mynett said that after the Observer covered the event, it was featured on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship, prompting dozens of churches, among others, to get in touch with him and Pipe.
Now the new genre has its own name – “organic metal” – and a series of similar concerts is planned, starting with gigs this week at the deconsecrated St Paul’s church in Huddersfield.
It will feature Mynett’s band, Plague of Angels, alongside Pipe on the organ and Anabelle Iratni, a classically trained vocalist, who will sing an aria by Handel – as well as delivering death metal growls.
edit: Pantheïst’s full set (they have more bits on their YouTube channel)
Any metal, including doom metal, is infinitely better than contemporary Christian music.
I don’t know about that. You can’t pass the time by counting the unintended references to man on man anal sex in the lyrics of metal music the way you can Christian music.
Fucken watch me milksop!
The experiment last August saw Pantheïst and Arð accompanied by David Pipe, the cathedral organist at the Diocese of Leeds,
This dude took his last name and ran with it. David Pipe, Master of the Pipe Organ.
I see they still havent met nordic church burning metal
Great somewhat topical album
This isn’t appropriate. Churches are places of worship, not rock concert venues. Or anything for that matter which isn’t somehow or in some way worshipping God.
We thought that churches would look at it as slightly heretical, – having a metal band playing in church – but that wasn’t the case at all
The thing is, a lot of C of E “Churches” are just ran by “modernists” who are basically just closeted agnostics at this point who only do stuff for money, unfortunately.
I’m not from England, but i do pay a lot of attention to music and, broadly speaking, religion, and I’m not entirely sure this is a fair take. Places of worship are not traditionally meant to be exclusively worship zones; they can and should be places to engage the community. An example is that old (medieval) german churches traditionally gave free beer to their patrons as an incentive to attend mass. One major criticism of modern religion is their inability to adapt to modern youth, and this seems like a creative way to engage the community.
Additionally, a lot of “heavy metal” (which is separate from Rock) is basically classical scales but sped up and using distortion. For me personally, there’s a subgenre of metal that incorporates operatic vocalists that i find surprisingly fitting for such a sitting.
But people who are coming to concerts aren’t going to typically stay for Jesus.
The main reason churches are losing youth/young adults is due to a failure of keeping a community of them. Churches creating young adult fellowships and youth fellowships are important. There is definitely an audience there, as non-denominational churches know this and know to keep a Christian centre, hence the youth go there.
Free beer as an incentive to attend mass is a bad example as well, you should attend mass because you want to go to mass.
Maybe the reason we don’t go to church anymore is the lot of you are more interested in our musical tastes than the pedophiles hiding within your ranks.
Of course we care about paedophilia. You have to be deranged not to
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54433295
This you guys?
Why are you more concerned over the Church of England than the BBC with the whole Jimmy Savile scandal?
Didn’t Jimmy Savile regularly dine with the Supreme Governor of the church? Was he not a family friend?
Not sure I’m following your points here. You suggest that the church needs to keep and maintain a community, but doing things that attracts such potential members is inappropriate? I’m not really understanding what the idea to get new members is. Outreach and knowing your audience are important factors in growing a community.
One way to attract members is to showcase that the things that matter or are interesting (within reason) to potential members matters to the current members. People tend to be attracted to people that at least appear to understand them. Highlighting that everyone around you is wrong and doesn’t get it kind of pinpoints a major underlying issue with the church today.
Unfortunately, the reality is that every group needs a way to attract members and increase attendance. I’m providing one from 1400s Germany, and some areas in Germany are, to this day, prolifically religious (bavaria, for example). Maybe it turns out it was a good idea to do what you can to keep members?
But you’d want an audience that is actually religious- not coming for the free beer.
That’s the part I’m not understanding. So how do you recruit new members if you exclusively advertise to people that already agree with you? Your audience is explicitly people who already are part of your group, and that number continues to decline.
There are two groups to try to entice - current members who are losing interest, and non members who are currently non believers. If you only create events that are catering to current and active members, you alienate the others and won’t grow
Are they preaching the Gospel at this metal concert?
That isn’t the point though, it’s to first better engage the community, then preach later. there’s an art to proper outreach. Convince the community that you’re part of it, then they express interest in your organization. That’s when you go for it. If it’s all preaching all day, that simply won’t attract new members. And overly preachy metal music would probably chase almost everyone away. And who would want to hang out somewhere that’s just non-stop preaching? That sounds horrible
Not everything is completely black and white. In fact, that kind of exclusive thinking is what drives people away. The point here is to improve the image, encourage the community to get more engaged, and just be there. Potential new members will come along.
Honestly, the mindset of “why bother if you aren’t preaching” sounds very similar to a business caring only about its stocks. What about research? Quality control? Community outreach? Those things are important for a good company to thrive, as opposed to one looking only at short term profits. Look at what’s happening with Boeing. They’re focused on stocks only, the same way some churches only care about preaching. and their image is tanking, and everyone is wondering what happened.
If your goal is to acquire more members, then you need to find a way to reach other people in a way that makes sense to them, not you. Imagine trying to teach English to non English speakers. You don’t just do it randomly in the town square, spouting off the virtues of English speaking. you need to entice people to even want to not only learn English in the first place, but from you.
Churches are places of worship, not rock concert venues. Or anything for that matter which isn’t somehow or in some way worshipping God.
Why? Says who? This seems like an incredibly outdated view of things. If the church wants to stay relevant then they need to seek ways to have a role in the community and bring people into the church. The church is just a building, there’s nothing really special about it, what’s important are the people within it.
The best way to bring people to church is evangelism.
And how’s that working out? Congregation numbers have declining for a long time. There’s no rules to say that there’s only one way to bring more people into the church.
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Because Christianity is declining as a whole in the UK
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A lot of churches die when they stop preaching the Gospel and start preaching lukewarm wishy-washy stuff. Unfortunately the Church of England does that A LOT these days. It would be best for the C of E to draw in crowds from the small congregations dotted around various shop units, that meet in schools, other buildings, etc. I’ve seen C of I parishes do that to quite a big success.
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“how’s that working out” Evangelism is declining and so are churches. That’s why we need better evangelism
Your conclusions are flawed. You don’t need better evangelism, you need better Christians.
Exactly! We need both. I think I heard a good saying, it went like this:
People will read Christianity from the actions of Christians before they read the Bible.
Charity is a really good and effective outreach. I think welcoming immigrants as well into spaces in Church is also effective, eg, lunches for international students, english lessons, etc. More of that and less of this.
It would be lazier to let a musical band come and desecrate your premises to raise money than it would be to suck it up and begin an outreach.
Don’t say “we.” I am not a Christian.
That lowflying attack still somehow flew right over your head. Christianity is fucked because Christians are fuckers.
Having grown up as and around Christians, I have yet to meet one that could convince me to come back. Fuck you.
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They used to live, eat, make music, theatre, dance, hold guild meetings, banquets and fairs with stalls selling trinkets in churches for longer than they didn’t (200AD - 1642AD)
LOL this one not willing to admit that the bible is way more “metal” than most of these metal bands will EVER be! LOL bible be full of insest rape, guests at your home rape! Dashing babies to death on rocks! Drown the whole damn world and EVERYONE in it, every man, woman, child, babies all drowning to fricken death! The coutryside would have been strewn with the skeletons of millions of deceased once the flood waters receded! They wanted to bury Jesus before the sabbath so they asked for permission to BREAK HIS LEGS to speed along the whole death process! The J man was already dead so they just broke everyone elses legs! This was so they couldn’t stand up and breath leading to suffication! And all this brutality simply because you couldn’t work on the Sabbath which was the next day?!! I could go on and ON for days on this shit! Kill your son Abraham. Okay boss, whatever you say! LOL just jokes dude, murder this ram instead! Frick you were gonna do that bro?! Kill your own son?! Lambs blood on the doors to ward off the angel of death and prevent said angel from unenlivening every single first born son of every single family!! Rivers turning to blood! The whole Nile! That’s a significant amount of blood! Like a LOT!! Holy shit! Metal bands be like an old womens knitting club compared to this shit! Pretending to drink Jesus’s blood & eat his flesh! They nailed him to the cross through his feet and hands!? Do you have any idea how hard it must be to nail someones FEET to something?! Maybe it’s not that hard?! I wouldn’t know! But it’s BRUTAL!! So much BLOOD in the Bible! Metal music be like a soothing meditation after reading the bible!
😎
This’ll make a good copypasta
Nobody goes to church in the UK.
🤨 so do I hallucinate every Sunday morning?
I dunno. Do your communion wafers have smiley faces on them?
Well if nobody went to church then nobody would be there to give me communion
