Worship
Why Did Early Christians Sing Without Instruments?
Why did early Christians sing in worship, and what does the New Testament say about instruments? Examine Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16, first-century worship, and a cappella practice.
What the New Testament Says
Christian worship is repeatedly described with the language of singing.
The New Testament contains several instructions and examples involving Christian singing. Jesus and the disciples sing a hymn. Paul and Silas sing in prison. Paul tells Christians to sing with the spirit and understanding, to speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, and to sing with gratitude in their hearts.
These passages establish singing as a normal feature of Christian life and assembly.
The debate begins when Christians ask whether the command to sing also authorizes instrumental accompaniment or whether instruments constitute an additional form of worship not supplied by the apostolic instruction.
Christians are told to address one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in the heart to the Lord.
Christians are told to teach and admonish one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with gratitude to God.
The Instrument Question
The New Testament does not record a church worship assembly using instruments.
That observation is narrower than saying musical instruments are inherently evil. Instruments plainly appear in the Old Testament and in symbolic imagery elsewhere in Scripture.
The specific question is whether the apostolic church is shown or instructed to use them in Christian congregational worship.
The New Testament passages normally cited for Christian music consistently speak of singing, praise, thanksgiving, teaching, and melody of the heart rather than congregational instrumental performance.
Two Different Interpretive Approaches
Christians disagree about what biblical silence means.
One approach argues that because the New Testament commands singing but never forbids instruments, accompaniment may be used as an aid to singing.
Another approach argues that when God specifies the form of worship, Christians should practice what is specified rather than adding another kind of musical offering.
Who Changed the Church? adopts the second approach. Its broader method is that the apostolic pattern is sufficient and should not be expanded by later practices simply because they are not explicitly prohibited.
The Heart as the Instrument
Ephesians 5 places the melody in the worshipper's heart.
Paul's wording in Ephesians 5 is especially important in the non-instrumental argument. Christians sing and make melody in or with the heart to the Lord.
Wood treats this as deliberate spiritual language: the music specified for Christian worship is vocal praise flowing from the inner person.
Other Christians understand the phrase as describing the disposition of the worshipper rather than excluding accompaniment. The disagreement therefore turns partly on how specification and silence function in biblical authority.
Paul locates the singing and melody in the Christian's worship toward the Lord.
Teaching Through Song
New Testament singing is congregational instruction as well as praise.
Colossians 3 connects singing with teaching and admonishing one another. That makes Christian song more than background music or entertainment.
The congregation participates in communicating truth to itself while praising God.
That mutual dimension helps explain why vocal congregational singing became important in restoration traditions: everyone participates directly in the act the text assigns to the church.
Paul joins teaching, admonition, wisdom, psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and thankful singing.
The Prison Congregation
The El Reno prisoners reached a cappella worship without being taught the tradition first.
Who Changed the Church? describes the prisoners studying Ephesians 5:19 and other worship passages while trying to construct congregational life from Scripture alone.
The manuscript says they sang without a guitar because, in their reasoning, the New Testament told Christians to sing and did not tell the congregation to play.
Wood treats this as another part of the book's 'same seed, same church' experiment: the prisoners were not trying to imitate a known denominational identity but nevertheless reproduced practices associated with restorationist churches.
History Raises Another Question
If instruments later became normal in many churches, when did that change happen?
The biblical question is only the first layer. The historical question asks when instrumental accompaniment became established in Christian worship and how early writers described church music.
That investigation matters because Who Changed the Church? is not merely asking what modern churches prefer. It is asking whether later worship forms can be traced back to the apostolic foundation or whether they entered later.
The same method used for bishops, priesthood, canon, miraculous gifts, and communion can therefore be applied to music: establish the earliest recoverable pattern first, then trace the development.
Why It Matters
The New Testament clearly commands and describes Christian singing, but it never records a first-century congregation worshipping with instruments. Christians differ over whether that silence permits accompaniment or whether the command to sing defines the practice. Who Changed the Church? argues for the latter and points to the Blake Williams congregation as an unusual modern experiment: prisoners reading the New Testament alone concluded that Christian worship should be sung without instruments. The larger historical question is where instrumental worship entered the story—and whether that development belongs to the apostolic foundation or came afterward.