“You aren't able to accompany a chorale!” Reimann exclaimed to him one day. The older man well may have been justified in his criticism concerning a skill he must have observed when Straube deputized at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. After all, during the mid-1890s Straube seems to have concentrated on technique and repertory, not necessarily on service playing and its attendant proficiencies. Writing much after the fact, Wolgast would capture something of the young man's thinking when he remarked that church and organ music since Bach's death “had slept the deepest sleep,” and that “the stature of the organist had lost more and more credibility.” But the way back to that credibility did not run through the church. Rehabilitation was “possible only in connection and on the same front with the other arts, but detached from all ecclesial actualities. The organ had to be lifted from the constrictions of epigonic church art and placed as a concert instrument on the front lines of a vibrant musical life.” This is a striking position for a young man whose family claimed such deep roots in theology and evangelical religion. If Wolgast got it right, though, the attitude goes some way to explaining why Straube may have neglected the cultivation of liturgical skills in favor of repertory playing. Furthermore, the framing of one's task as the liberation of the organ from the church, however backward-looking the environment, could have amounted to a rebellion against a religiously conservative home life. In any case, this had been neither Reimann's nor Dienel's position. Both believed that the organ, even in modernized guise, was by its nature an instrument that enabled religious devotion, that led a congregation “to an animated thinking, feeling, willing, and doing,” to return to Dienel's words.

Despite the brand of secular idealism Wolgast proffered, ultimately the organ would not be disentangled from the church environment, and neither would Straube. If he was going to realize his mission of renovating “the stature of the organist,” of clothing Bach and others in compelling up-to-date form, and of attracting the musical avant-garde to this ancient instrument, he was going to have to do it from inside the church out, not the other way around.