11 unqualified provocations about congregational song
”It is not you [alone] that sings, it is the church that is singing, and you, as a member ... may share in its song. Thus all singing together that is right must serve to widen our spiritual horizon, make us see our little company as a member of the great Christian church on earth, and help us willingly and gladly to join our singing, be it feeble or good, to the song of the church. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together)
Author's Note:
What follows are eleven loosely supported but nevertheless passionately believed provocations about the importance of congregational singing for Christians, especially, but not limited to, those in the United States (and even more specifically to mainline and evangelical Protestant churches). As someone who writes hymns, plans worship, leads singing, and teaches writing to Christian students at an historically evangelical college, these jagged notions grate at my conscience when I partake in such activities.
For a more careful, qualified argument about each of these ideas, you'll need to go read a more careful scholar someone who qualifies her arguments by both supporting them and guarding them. See the bibliography below to get some sense of where these notions might go.
1) Music carries too much power--theologically, historically, emotionally, relationally, culturally--not to be thought about and practiced with more care than it is in American churches. Instead, we sing by habit (which might be fine if the habits are good, but they often are not), by taste, by trend. We leave our heads in the car. Or we sing only with our heads, leaving our bodies elsewhere (perhaps to use later in some more exciting way). Or, worse, we don't really sing at all; we pay someone else to do it for us while we sit back and bathe in it. Or judge. Or tune out (interesting phrase, that).
2) Performance is not really worship, though how American Christians would know the difference is beyond me. Our entire sensibility about large gatherings where music is played and sung, or where a story is told, has been shaped by attending concerts, plays, films. We are there to be entertained. We know our role: to consume pleasure, fear, pathos, irony, or some other aesthetic commodity and, when the event is over, we offer critique. Many of us are good at doing this sort of thing.
Worship, on the other hand, requires us to participate as more than passive consumers. In genuine Christian worship, we give ourselves over to the true drama of God's action in human history and in our lives; we open ourselves to the presence and challenge of the Holy Spirit in our midst; and we align ourselves as a part of a community of other believers who are also giving themselves over. I'm not very good at this one; I need to get better.
3 and 4) A longish, two part provocation: Music in worship is always an encounter of two bodies. The first body is that of the individual worshipper who comes carrying within her a whole week's worth of pleasure and tension and energy and restlessness. Because music unites body, text, community, and the Spirit of God, worship can protect us from being either Gnostics or sensualists. The experience of worship is not an experience of either intellect or emotion but rather of a whole self--body, mind, spirit (or, more biblically, heart, soul, strength and mind)--being offered patterns of experience in language, ritual, and song that beckon us, draw us, invite us, call us (rather than coerce, manipulate, bully, or demand) toward God, leaving spaces for God's Spirit to arrive to our whole self. Music in worship offers just such a fully embodied experience, and thus, an opportunity to understand incarnation--sound, rhythm, silence, tone, percussiveness, touch, energy--these parts of our bodily experiences that resonate in particular people in particular and unique ways. Too often the only part of our bodies in touch with anything in worship is our bottom on a bench.
The second body is, of course, the Church, the Body of Christ. The bodies of believers live and move and have their being in the body of God's people as we collect ourselves in the presence of God and with one another. This way of being present in both bodies at once is something singing can perhaps teach us especially well, what poet Jean Janzen
calls "the world's secret . . . to enter and be close, yet separate."
There is a dialogic relationship then between what the individual feels, thinks, and experiences and the more public, communal acts of speaking, listening, singing, and moving that make up worship. And this gathering is not just a gathering of present bodies but of PAST bodies, those who have been in these pews, in these choir robes before us. We summon old presences--the language of hymn writers, the prayers of dead folks, the deeds of other imperfect creatures like us--to join us in God's presence, because they know HOW to be there, even when we don't. I have worshipped with Bach, with Menno Simons, with Martin Luther King, Jr., with southern field hands and with ancient martyrs because of their presence through language in the BODY, which has thus entered into MY body,both bodies being present in song.
Oh, and the global body of Christ matters as well. American Christians need to learn and sing with joy music from other lands, peoples, ethnic and racial groups. We must also take care not to mine these traditions as mere sources of tunes, repeating the colonialisms of our past. Instead, we mush learn to sing them as those peoples would teach them to us. What differences might it make when our bodies (and our church bodies) house the same psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs as others who are different and yet equally valued and redeemed by God? How might a broader horizon of song help us, as Bonhoeffer says, to experience ourselves and "our little company as a member of the great Christian church on earth?”
5) If you can't hear others around you singing, you're probably not engaged in corporate worship. You might be at a concert. Even if you don't want to hear those around you singing, you should. I should.
6) Corporate worship requires others. We need to choose and write and sing those hymns and songs that make us require one another. We need to get less interested in Christian karaoke*, or trying to imitate the worship CD we play in the car. Four-part harmonies (or even two-part harmonies), call and response, canons (or rounds) cannot be sung alone. And simple, ancient melodies (like those of folk tunes) that teach us to ride a particular arc of pitch and rhythm (rather than the glitch and surprise of so much solo music) can bind us together as well. I want to write, sing, and lead such songs. This requires, often, more work, better, singing, deeper commitment.
7) I like to sing tunes that feel like the tunes that make me feel. That's a cool part of music, how strongly it stirs our feelings. May not be worship. Or it could be. Get the "like" and the "feel" out of the way and then we might be onto something. Worship leaders like to make us sing things that make them/us feel. That's often a manipulative, risky thing to do. I still don't know precisely where the line is between responding to the Holy Spirit and rousing people to a false emotional frenzy. I know, though, when I've crossed it. For that, I've often repented. Now, everyone, let's sing a repentance song.
8) Memorial reasons for singing or valuing music are often no better, equally self-centered and inadequate for helping us sort out how to sing together in worship. Everyone's grandma had a favorite hymn, you know? So even in a small church (say 120 people on Sundays), it could potentially take you two years (or more) to sing all the favorite grandma tunes (though there would likely be overlap in certain denominations where everyone's grandma used to hum "How Great Thou Art" or "Softly and Tenderly" or "Pass It On," or "Watched by the world's malignant eye"). The memory we need to cultivate is the long, difficult, necessary memory of God's story worked out in particular bodies of believers over time (see, again, Bonhoeffer).
9) All generations have a musical vernacular we think we deserve to hear/sing in worship. We must get over this. I was reared on the singer-songwriter generation of pop (and Christo-pop) music (Carole King, Billy Joel, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Harry Chapin, Dan Fogelberg , Keith Green, Michael Card, Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett,). That's back (Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, Iron & Wine, etc.). In music for worship, the point is not what I like (or think I need to hear, though we certainly have to follow the example of those legendary Wesley boys who, I hear, used bar tunes from time to time), or about imposing one set of tastes over another. The point is what can be sung together with integrity--theological, communal, individual, and musical integrity.
10) We should be very careful what we put in other people's mouths. Because songs only exist when they enter and leave the bodies of others (either when they are sung or when they are heard), writers of hymns and leaders of singing need to be more careful than ever about the kind of textual relations we have within our bodies (see provocations three and four above). Too often we sing, over and over, lyrics that break under the weight of repetition. Precisely because music lodges in our senses, our memories of the texts with which music is joined will form some of our most powerful spiritual and theological experiences*
Thus, lyrics need to be biblically resonant and, at the same time, able to be sung by diverse congregations of men and women who bring diverse cultural and individual experiences. No single song or text can do this, but more of them should try. And we must sing a greater variety and range throughout a given service or season, so that each hymn or song gains in its relation to others. Also, writers of hymn texts, while exercising all the poetic gifts of evocative diction, meter, sound play, image, figures of speech, etc. are not free. As my colleague Leland Ryken is fond of quoting the British hymn writer Timothy Dudley Smith (who is quoting someone else in this comment): "To write hymns is to write poetry under vows of renunciation." Oh, and theologian and colleague Dan Treier would cry if I didn't mention this: Jesus is not your girlfriend.
11) Though I have not so far mentioned it, God is the given of all worship--music, preaching, prayer, liturgy, silence. This means that our tunes and texts need to be in tune with God as revealed in the scriptures and with God's desires for the body of Christ. Christian hymns, then, must embrace a Trinitarian God, one beyond our experience yet active in history. They must not be about abstract experiences but about the concrete, incarnate presence of Jesus Christ in daily human lives and cultures. Hymns must reckon, always and often, with the incarnation and the Holy Spirit's regenerative presence in our lives and communities. Hymns must comfort, but they must also challenge. Songs must praise, but they must also lament (we have almost no space for lament in much of our worship). They must speak for individuals, yet they must always reckon with us as members of a community. They must turn us toward God, toward one another, and toward a world beyond the ends of our tongues.
Useful Resources on Christianity and Congregational Song
Web Sites
Calvin Institute on Christian Worship
The Cyber Hymnal
Books/Key Voices
Singing: A Mennonite Voice
Brian McLaren’s Open Letter to Songwriters
Marva J. Dawn: Body Building: Worship that develops strong community
Jeremy Begbie’s Theology Through the Arts
Songwriter and PastroJohn Bell
The Iona Community
Wild Goose Publications
Endnotes
*Learning to Sing in Parts from Piano in the Vineyard. Lancaster, PA: Good Books, 2004.</span>
*I steal this line from the poet Scott Cairns. I don't know that he's ever written it down
*As Scottish hymn writer John Bell puts it in The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Song (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2000), music is so powerful precisely because "[w]e are creatures of our past. We cannot be separated from it, and although we cannot always remember it, songs will unexpectedly summon portions of it into mind. If this is true of secular ballads, it is even more true of Christian songs and hymns, especially those which have been in currency since childhood. . . . What we learn in childhood we retain all our life and the images of God we receive from such songs will determine our faith and theology. That means that whenever anyone teaches a child a hymn or religious song, they may be preparing that child to meet his or her Maker. Does that seem too extreme?"
Author's Note:
What follows are eleven loosely supported but nevertheless passionately believed provocations about the importance of congregational singing for Christians, especially, but not limited to, those in the United States (and even more specifically to mainline and evangelical Protestant churches). As someone who writes hymns, plans worship, leads singing, and teaches writing to Christian students at an historically evangelical college, these jagged notions grate at my conscience when I partake in such activities.
For a more careful, qualified argument about each of these ideas, you'll need to go read a more careful scholar someone who qualifies her arguments by both supporting them and guarding them. See the bibliography below to get some sense of where these notions might go.
1) Music carries too much power--theologically, historically, emotionally, relationally, culturally--not to be thought about and practiced with more care than it is in American churches. Instead, we sing by habit (which might be fine if the habits are good, but they often are not), by taste, by trend. We leave our heads in the car. Or we sing only with our heads, leaving our bodies elsewhere (perhaps to use later in some more exciting way). Or, worse, we don't really sing at all; we pay someone else to do it for us while we sit back and bathe in it. Or judge. Or tune out (interesting phrase, that).
2) Performance is not really worship, though how American Christians would know the difference is beyond me. Our entire sensibility about large gatherings where music is played and sung, or where a story is told, has been shaped by attending concerts, plays, films. We are there to be entertained. We know our role: to consume pleasure, fear, pathos, irony, or some other aesthetic commodity and, when the event is over, we offer critique. Many of us are good at doing this sort of thing.
Worship, on the other hand, requires us to participate as more than passive consumers. In genuine Christian worship, we give ourselves over to the true drama of God's action in human history and in our lives; we open ourselves to the presence and challenge of the Holy Spirit in our midst; and we align ourselves as a part of a community of other believers who are also giving themselves over. I'm not very good at this one; I need to get better.
3 and 4) A longish, two part provocation: Music in worship is always an encounter of two bodies. The first body is that of the individual worshipper who comes carrying within her a whole week's worth of pleasure and tension and energy and restlessness. Because music unites body, text, community, and the Spirit of God, worship can protect us from being either Gnostics or sensualists. The experience of worship is not an experience of either intellect or emotion but rather of a whole self--body, mind, spirit (or, more biblically, heart, soul, strength and mind)--being offered patterns of experience in language, ritual, and song that beckon us, draw us, invite us, call us (rather than coerce, manipulate, bully, or demand) toward God, leaving spaces for God's Spirit to arrive to our whole self. Music in worship offers just such a fully embodied experience, and thus, an opportunity to understand incarnation--sound, rhythm, silence, tone, percussiveness, touch, energy--these parts of our bodily experiences that resonate in particular people in particular and unique ways. Too often the only part of our bodies in touch with anything in worship is our bottom on a bench.
The second body is, of course, the Church, the Body of Christ. The bodies of believers live and move and have their being in the body of God's people as we collect ourselves in the presence of God and with one another. This way of being present in both bodies at once is something singing can perhaps teach us especially well, what poet Jean Janzen
There is a dialogic relationship then between what the individual feels, thinks, and experiences and the more public, communal acts of speaking, listening, singing, and moving that make up worship. And this gathering is not just a gathering of present bodies but of PAST bodies, those who have been in these pews, in these choir robes before us. We summon old presences--the language of hymn writers, the prayers of dead folks, the deeds of other imperfect creatures like us--to join us in God's presence, because they know HOW to be there, even when we don't. I have worshipped with Bach, with Menno Simons, with Martin Luther King, Jr., with southern field hands and with ancient martyrs because of their presence through language in the BODY, which has thus entered into MY body,both bodies being present in song.
Oh, and the global body of Christ matters as well. American Christians need to learn and sing with joy music from other lands, peoples, ethnic and racial groups. We must also take care not to mine these traditions as mere sources of tunes, repeating the colonialisms of our past. Instead, we mush learn to sing them as those peoples would teach them to us. What differences might it make when our bodies (and our church bodies) house the same psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs as others who are different and yet equally valued and redeemed by God? How might a broader horizon of song help us, as Bonhoeffer says, to experience ourselves and "our little company as a member of the great Christian church on earth?”
5) If you can't hear others around you singing, you're probably not engaged in corporate worship. You might be at a concert. Even if you don't want to hear those around you singing, you should. I should.
6) Corporate worship requires others. We need to choose and write and sing those hymns and songs that make us require one another. We need to get less interested in Christian karaoke*, or trying to imitate the worship CD we play in the car. Four-part harmonies (or even two-part harmonies), call and response, canons (or rounds) cannot be sung alone. And simple, ancient melodies (like those of folk tunes) that teach us to ride a particular arc of pitch and rhythm (rather than the glitch and surprise of so much solo music) can bind us together as well. I want to write, sing, and lead such songs. This requires, often, more work, better, singing, deeper commitment.
7) I like to sing tunes that feel like the tunes that make me feel. That's a cool part of music, how strongly it stirs our feelings. May not be worship. Or it could be. Get the "like" and the "feel" out of the way and then we might be onto something. Worship leaders like to make us sing things that make them/us feel. That's often a manipulative, risky thing to do. I still don't know precisely where the line is between responding to the Holy Spirit and rousing people to a false emotional frenzy. I know, though, when I've crossed it. For that, I've often repented. Now, everyone, let's sing a repentance song.
8) Memorial reasons for singing or valuing music are often no better, equally self-centered and inadequate for helping us sort out how to sing together in worship. Everyone's grandma had a favorite hymn, you know? So even in a small church (say 120 people on Sundays), it could potentially take you two years (or more) to sing all the favorite grandma tunes (though there would likely be overlap in certain denominations where everyone's grandma used to hum "How Great Thou Art" or "Softly and Tenderly" or "Pass It On," or "Watched by the world's malignant eye"). The memory we need to cultivate is the long, difficult, necessary memory of God's story worked out in particular bodies of believers over time (see, again, Bonhoeffer).
9) All generations have a musical vernacular we think we deserve to hear/sing in worship. We must get over this. I was reared on the singer-songwriter generation of pop (and Christo-pop) music (Carole King, Billy Joel, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Harry Chapin, Dan Fogelberg , Keith Green, Michael Card, Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett,). That's back (Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, Iron & Wine, etc.). In music for worship, the point is not what I like (or think I need to hear, though we certainly have to follow the example of those legendary Wesley boys who, I hear, used bar tunes from time to time), or about imposing one set of tastes over another. The point is what can be sung together with integrity--theological, communal, individual, and musical integrity.
10) We should be very careful what we put in other people's mouths. Because songs only exist when they enter and leave the bodies of others (either when they are sung or when they are heard), writers of hymns and leaders of singing need to be more careful than ever about the kind of textual relations we have within our bodies (see provocations three and four above). Too often we sing, over and over, lyrics that break under the weight of repetition. Precisely because music lodges in our senses, our memories of the texts with which music is joined will form some of our most powerful spiritual and theological experiences*
Thus, lyrics need to be biblically resonant and, at the same time, able to be sung by diverse congregations of men and women who bring diverse cultural and individual experiences. No single song or text can do this, but more of them should try. And we must sing a greater variety and range throughout a given service or season, so that each hymn or song gains in its relation to others. Also, writers of hymn texts, while exercising all the poetic gifts of evocative diction, meter, sound play, image, figures of speech, etc. are not free. As my colleague Leland Ryken is fond of quoting the British hymn writer Timothy Dudley Smith (who is quoting someone else in this comment): "To write hymns is to write poetry under vows of renunciation." Oh, and theologian and colleague Dan Treier would cry if I didn't mention this: Jesus is not your girlfriend.
11) Though I have not so far mentioned it, God is the given of all worship--music, preaching, prayer, liturgy, silence. This means that our tunes and texts need to be in tune with God as revealed in the scriptures and with God's desires for the body of Christ. Christian hymns, then, must embrace a Trinitarian God, one beyond our experience yet active in history. They must not be about abstract experiences but about the concrete, incarnate presence of Jesus Christ in daily human lives and cultures. Hymns must reckon, always and often, with the incarnation and the Holy Spirit's regenerative presence in our lives and communities. Hymns must comfort, but they must also challenge. Songs must praise, but they must also lament (we have almost no space for lament in much of our worship). They must speak for individuals, yet they must always reckon with us as members of a community. They must turn us toward God, toward one another, and toward a world beyond the ends of our tongues.
Useful Resources on Christianity and Congregational Song
Web Sites
Calvin Institute on Christian Worship
The Cyber Hymnal
Books/Key Voices
Singing: A Mennonite Voice
Brian McLaren’s Open Letter to Songwriters
Marva J. Dawn: Body Building: Worship that develops strong community
Jeremy Begbie’s Theology Through the Arts
Songwriter and PastroJohn Bell
The Iona Community
Wild Goose Publications
Endnotes
*Learning to Sing in Parts from Piano in the Vineyard. Lancaster, PA: Good Books, 2004.</span>
*I steal this line from the poet Scott Cairns. I don't know that he's ever written it down
*As Scottish hymn writer John Bell puts it in The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Song (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2000), music is so powerful precisely because "[w]e are creatures of our past. We cannot be separated from it, and although we cannot always remember it, songs will unexpectedly summon portions of it into mind. If this is true of secular ballads, it is even more true of Christian songs and hymns, especially those which have been in currency since childhood. . . . What we learn in childhood we retain all our life and the images of God we receive from such songs will determine our faith and theology. That means that whenever anyone teaches a child a hymn or religious song, they may be preparing that child to meet his or her Maker. Does that seem too extreme?"
8 June 2008
by David Wright
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