I prayed to God not like a miserable sinner in despair, but calmly, slowly. In this I felt that an infinite God would surely have mercy on his finite creature, pardoning dust for being dust. These thoughts cheered me up. I experienced a sure joy so confident that as I wished to express the words of the prayer, I could not suppress my joy, but gave vent to my happy spirits and wrote, above the Miserere, Allegro.”

So Joseph Haydn, the 200th anniversary of whose death we celebrate this year, explained how he could set even a prayer for mercy in an upbeat tempo. In one of his late Mass settings, at the point where the tempo usually slowed for the words “Thou that takest away the sins of the world”, Haydn kept going in a fast tempo and even quoted from his own Creation a passage referring coyly to the sexual urge that engenders life. The Empress Maria Theresa insisted that he remove this in her own copy of the score.

Haydn has often been criticised for cheerfulness in his sacred music, which seems to some to border on secular flippancy. There were attempts to cut back the more extravagant choral and orchestral performances in church services. David Wyn Jones has written that the “ambition and flamboyance of sacred music by Haydn and his contemporaries encouraged more than one commentator to note that going to the church was like going to a concert.”

In the 4th century St Augustine had written enthusiastically about the “sweet singing” of the Church encouraging feelings of deep devotion, but then worried about the possibility that his mind was being paralysed by the gratification of his senses and so led astray.

There has always been music in Christian worship, but alongside that has gone an anxiety about the secular and sensual — and the simply overwhelming — aspects of music, which various ecclesiastical authorities have attempted to curb, so that church music would be plain and holy and at the service of the liturgical texts.

Church music can still cause ill-feeling and conflict, with ministers and choir directors at loggerheads, and churchgoers either rejoicing or shuddering at a Messiaen voluntary or charismatic worship songs in church.

These are usually mere matters of taste but if I had to find a criterion for judgment I would take my cue from Haydn and so many classical composers who, when they wrote music for Church use, did not essentially change their style, often indeed using the same music in both a secular and a sacred context. This says that what goes on in church is not essentially different from what happens in the weekday world. Where the Church develops its own peculiar “holy” styles of music — and that could include both traditional hymns and the watered-down Christian pop music heard in many churches — it proclaims that we are a slightly set-apart tribal gathering with our own odd, cautious and perhaps irrelevant, culture.

In our day a Catholic composer such as James Macmillan has broken the barrier, but actually Haydn can still work for us in Christian worship, because his music belongs in concert halls around the world and still speaks directly to people, as all great music does. And Haydn can do more than celebrate the joy of God’s mercy towards ordinary human sin: he can also remind us of the horrors that still threaten the peace of the world (Mass in Time of War); he can induce an atmosphere of solemn stillness on Good Friday (The Seven Last Words from the Cross); and even in the glorious kaleidoscope of The Seasons he can express the grief-laden sadness of winter as an image of our mortality. Above all, in his mass settings and last two great oratorios, the buoyant energy of his choral writing can take us right out of ourselves in praise of God. This music takes us beyond a sacred-secular divide.

The Rev Canon Nick Jowett is vicar of St Andrew’s Psalter Lane Anglican-Methodist Church Sheffield