If Jesus showed up today, would he play guitar?

Nashville (RNS) — In recent decades, there has been a revolution in how Protestants worship.

Services were once centered around prayer, hymns, a sermon and the Lord’s Supper, also known as Communion. Now, many worship services resemble a Coldplay concert followed by a TED Talk — a long worship song set followed by a topical sermon with slides.

And worship songs have become a primary way people experience God.

This reality led Paul Ryan, a worship pastor at Calvin University and staffer at the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship, to ask a complicated question. If Jesus were preaching today, would he still take up bread and a cup of wine and say, “Do this in remembrance of me” as he did in the Bible?

“Or would he pick up his acoustic guitar and say, ‘Sing this in remembrance of me?’” asked Ryan, during a meeting of worship scholars in Nashville earlier this summer.

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The question came up during a talk by Emily Snider Andrews, a scholar at Samford University in Alabama, about the way praise music can make God “experientially real for participants.” Ryan said that scholars have struggled to find the…