It’s a curse, all right. During my youthful church-going days I could hear that the congregation was anywhere from a quarter tone to a half tone off from the organ. Catholics neither sing loud nor do their organists play loud. (The Protestants knew how to sing!) The low volume on the organ caused the congregation to drift off in pitch during the hymn. It drove me nuts.
You need to come to our joint. We sing LOUD . . . and while our music director doesn’t like to blow the congregation out of the building, he cranks it up enough to keep everybody on track. Then he blows them out of the building with the postlude . . . I didn’t know anything about the French composers to speak of until I got here, he did a Fulbright at Lyons and he’s a big fan of Vierne, Vidor, Franck, and so forth . . . but thank goodness (since I’m an ex-Episcopalian) he doesn’t neglect Byrd, Tallis, and Gibbons.