I’m a clergyman with an FRCO officiating partly in a group of villages. In one village, there is enthusiasm for music, and we have traditional hymns for some services, worship songs for one service a month, an occasional anthem, sung BCP offices, and there’s talk of resurrecting Merbecke for special occasions (it will happen, I’m sure). The musicians decide: I facilitate. In some places, the organist is competent but plays slowly. In some places the speed is fine but the accuracy is not. And so it goes on. The truth is that we have to make do with what we can get. If we organise social events to give tips on stops, pedals, speeds, etc, with a social occasion thrown in, the people who come are those that don't need to. I can believe that in some places, some worshippers might be repelled by what confronts them musically, and not come again. I sometimes would like a said service with unaccompanied hymns, but that assumes that there is someone to lead the singing if I'm not there. How do all you organists suggest we go about dealing with the conflict between mission issues (an organist can repel worshippers) and pastoral issues (the organist is doing the best s/he can and is loyal and faithful)?
It is not only clergy who can act as if that they are the focus of a personality cult: organists can, too, and do. Some organists deliberately choose hymn tunes that congregations don’t know, simply because the tune is ‘better music’. Some organists do the equivalent of sulking when congregations may want to chant psalmody, and do all they can to discourage it because, they imagine, it spoils the ‘subtleties’ of the choir (there is a tradition of good congregational chanted psalmody in the Church of Ireland, that many could learn from). Some organists pitch tunes they don't like too high deliberately, some play tunes they don't like too fast or too slow for comfortable singing. I have been to Anglo-catholic churches (to which I am sympathetic) where the organist plays as if s/he is in a private pseudo-Walsingham fantasy-world quite irrelevant to the needs of the congregation. The organist was using the congregation for his/her private therapy, or prolonging his/her childhood. It was not edifying.
A very significant problem arises because children in most (state aided or state controlled) primary schools are no longer introduced to any traditional hymns: the staff have been brought up with no knowledge of them at all (often no knowledge of Christianity either). Even when the staff are sympathetic to Christianity, there is often an attitude of ‘children don’t like boring old hymns’, the corollary being that they do like jumpy, ‘seekers’ style songs (that is, the staff like them, so the children will). School staff are part of the problem.
Many clergy would be delighted to have decently performed music of any sort, traditional or happy-clappy (a good music group would be better than a poor organist), but outside the prosperous suburbs and posh villages good simple music is not always easy to arrange. Clergy are an easy target for organists, but I know that organists can behave just as badly to clergy as clergy to organists. Perhaps organists should be taking action in the primary schools rather than just moaning about the clergy. Everything goes in cycles: we are back to the 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps, as far as church and church music is concerned, but another revival is not yet in sight, IMHO.