Singing makes atheist "church" work

I was interested to read this article in the British newspaper The Guardian about an atheist church service in London. Atheists want community and something to do on a Sunday morning. After experiencing the  service, a couple of curious atheists from High Wycombe told the reporter:

"Some of the things I thought really wouldn't work, like the singing, were really good. Normally I hate singing."
Churches do a lot of what they do "because it works", he notes, "Atheists make a mistake to look at church and throw it all out just because they don't believe in God."

And what did they sing together? "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen and "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder.

7000 White Men Singing

Over on his wall, my facebook friend Rev. Ligon Duncan announced the release of a new album of congregational singing.

On November 27, 2012 Sovereign Grace Music will release Together for the Gospel Live II, the second live recording of the singing at Together for the Gospel.
In April of 2010 and 2012, thousands gathered in Louisville, KY, to participate in the Together for the Gospel conference. This album contains 16 of the songs they sang, led by Bob Kauflin on piano.
Go here for ALBUM INFORMATION: http://sovereigngracemusic.org/Albums/Together_for_the_Gospel_Live_II

The Together for the Gospel conference is a gathering of conservative (mostly white) evangelical pastors. They are committed to all sorts of things. Its web site has eighteen articles of "Affirmations & Denials." Among them is the affirmation that, "the teaching office of the Church is assigned only to those men who are called of God in fulfillment of the biblical teachings." If you want to know what this doctrinal position sounds like, listen to this YouTube clip.
The worship leader, Bob Kauflin, explains over on Sovereign Grace Music's website:

While we can glorify God through a variety of musical instruments, we’re commanded over 50 times in Scripture to sing God’s praise. So we left the electric guitars, drums, and basses at home for this project.

While I love this commitment to congregational singing, I can't help thinking that the guitars, drums and basses were not all that was left behind at home. 

I am not trying to score a cheap point here--this group of men make a remarkable sound and from the conference organizers' point of view, this is what seven thousand pastors should sound like. But when I listen to it as congregational singing, the absence of women's voices is deeply disturbing.

I have just finished mixing Red Team's new album and so I am perhaps particularly attuned to hearing all the voices. In the process of mixing the album I learned something new. On one track I had my children sing. They are just two small voices in a multi-tracked crowd of 50 voices. However, the timbre of children's voices cuts through the mix and completely changes the sound. The inclusion of just one voice can change the sound of a large group.

If congregational singing is "a sounding image of the unified church" as theologian Steven Guthrie claims, then I prefer my congregational singing to include everything that has breath praising the Lord. Perhaps it is a good exercise to listen out for the voices we can't hear singing in the sanctuary on Sunday morning. This musical concern might lead us to some significant ecclesial soul-searching.

Science and Group Singing

I am never sure quite what to do with neuroscientists who make claims about singing--I am not in a position to evaluate their research. However, it doesn't surprise me that there may be some biological reasons why singing makes you feel good, after all musicians have known this for millennia.

A couple of reports on recent scientific papers that turned up on the blogosphere are interesting. An evolutionary psychologists from Magdalen College, Oxford, claims that group singing releases endorphines that promote group harmony. This led me to a report of a German study conducted in 2010 of a bunch of four-year olds and the effect of group singing on their interaction with each other. "Children who had sung and marched together were more likely to help one another pick up marbles.

From Memory to Imagination

I am tucking into a fascinating book published last month by Eerdmans, From Memory to Imagination:Reforming the Church's Music by C. Randall Bradley, the director of the church music program at Baylor University.

The book is loaded with subheadings-- in some chapters nearly every paragraph has its own heading. This certainly makes it easy to skim!
Bradley is calling for churches in their response to the current crisis in church music not to retreat to their memory of a simpler time -- rather to dare to imagine the new future for church music and worship. In the process, Bradley has some interesting things to say about singing (emphasis added):

When we sing with a group, we are joining our instrument with those of others; it is an act of intimacy. Our breathing becomes synchronized with the breathing of others, and a physical conformity ensues that is unlike that of any other human activity. The sheer power of dozens or hundreds of human bodies forgoing their own preferred breathing patterns to reconcile with others is a striking picture of community and of the  power of group singing (174).

This gives me a new insight into how congregational singing is a practice that is both the Church's testimony of God's reconciling power and also a practice which requires reconciliation.

Can You Sing With Your Enemies?

Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching at Park Street Brethren Church in Ashland OH. They have two Sunday morning services - the 9:00 in the sanctuary built in the 1920s and the 10:30 service in the gymnasium built in the 1980s. Two very different spaces and different styles of worship music. The second service is set up in the round -- and so I was spinning around like Bono on U2s last tour!

My sermon was really trying to make a theological case for why congregational singing is a constitutive practice of the church -- why singing God's praise together is a profound act that makes us who we are. (The message is streamed over at the Park Street's website). At the heart of what I was saying is that the Church is the community of forgiven sinners and reconciled enemies and that the discipline of singing together testifies to this truth. As the congregation submits itself to this discipline people are taught more about forgiveness and reconciliation and are transformed. I was preaching from Colossians 3:12-17 and was noting the proximity of the instructions to "bear with one another" and to "forgive each other" with the exhortation to "sing psalms hymns and spiritual songs." Congregational singing is the song of the reconciled and the reconcilers. It testifies to this reconciliation because--I claimed--enemies do not sing together.

After one of the services a person came up to me and said they had been estranged from their sibling for over a year (I am being vague here to preserve this person's identity). "We used to sing together. I think I am going to suggest we sing together again . . . we won't talk, we'll just sing." This person heard in my words the notion of singing as a transformative discipline which might open up the possibility of reconciliation.

I have been thinking about this and I was reminded of something the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about prayer. In his short book Life Together, Bonhoeffer talks about a “happy discovery” he made. “I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner” (Life Together, Fortress Press, 1996, 90–91).

Perhaps, in a similar way, one can no longer hate a brother or sister in Christ with whom one sings God's praises.

Preparing for Eternity

In a workshop I led recently, as we were discussing the future of a church's worship program, a women in her eighties said, "but what about the older people like me - we need to be preparing for eternity"

She was expressing her concern that her church might stop playing the hymns with which she was familiar. She was telling the younger worship leaders present that she needed to be singing the hymns that meant something to her. What was going to prepare her for eternity if not the hymns of her youth? Earlier this woman had told me that she played piano as a girl - she grew up in rural Ohio. "We didn't have a telephone," she told me to emphasize just how rural it had been. "But I had the hymn book and I played all the hymns.  I don't suppose people would do that today." she had said with a smile.

Her comment reveals the connection between congregational singing and pastoral care. I don't know if this woman was simply saying she found comfort in the hymns of her youth or if she was saying something more. But she is right that the images of eternity with God in the Bible certainly involve a lot of singing. And if we are to be reunited in glory with the saints who have gone before, perhaps they will still be singing the songs they learned as children. So getting back into hymn singing shape might be a good way to prepare for eternity.

I suggest "When the roll is called up yonder" might be a good place to start.

Recording a Singing Church

The reason this blog has been a bit quiet over the summer is that I have been concentrating on producing a new Red Team album. After several intense days in the studio recording the instruments, yesterday we recorded the voices. The album is going to be called Singing Church, and like this blog, the idea is that it will be all about congregational singing. I find it odd that much of the recorded music used as a resource by worship leaders is comprised  of songs led by solo vocalists with back-up singers.  For this reason, there will be no solo vocals on the new album -- its a philosophical position which will mean we won't break into the top 40!

When I started the project I thought that we would bring in Red Team's singers and multi-track a couple of passes to give us a full sound, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to record a larger group made up of regular members of the congregation. If this is about congregational singing then I wanted it to sound like a congregation was singing!

This threw up a technical problem. We are not making a live recording -- where everyone sings and plays at the same time. We needed to play the already recorded accompaniment for the singers to hear. This is usually done over headphones in the studio but there were not enough headphones and extension cables for a congregation. One option is to play the music at low volume through carefully placed speakers - the trouble is that inevitably some of the backing track bleeds into the vocals. If you want to multitrack the vocals then this is a problem when it comes to mixing.

The transmitter and the frequency

After trawling through the arcane world of sound engineers' chat rooms and blogs, I hit on an unorthodox solution - I could broadcast the tracks in FM stereo and then ask folks to bring their own radios and simply tune in to the accompaniment. I have a little FM transmitter for my car and I found that it had a pretty impressive range, certainly big enough for a church sanctuary.

As the recording day approached I made announcements on the Sunday mornings: please stay behind after Sunday school on September 30 to have a run through of the songs for the recording. I emphasized that this invitation was for everyone. I ran off a bunch of song sheets - Libby whipped up bread and homemade soup for the throng that would descend . . .

Now I don't know if it was because we picked a Sunday when folks had a lot of extra commitments, but getting folks to sing was like trying to milk a horse. I positioned myself at the main door and as folks kept walking I repeatedly heard comments like "Oh, you don't want my voice on a CD."

"Yes I do, I really do!"

Singing church at the ATS Chapel

In the end five righteous souls came to the practice (and one of them was in Red Team!). I continued to ask everyone I met last week to turn up to sing on Saturday morning. "I don't mind that you have never sung some of these songs -- you'll pick them up."

I ran into a new problem: people didn't have radios. It had never occurred to me that the once ubiquitous FM radio was now obsolete! On Friday I remembered that I had been told the university's Rec Center has radios for the gerbils on the tread mills to tune into the TVs. They kindly lent me six new Sony Walkman radios still in their packaging. Now all I had was a knot in my stomach wondering if we would have enough people.

In the end a we had a group of around twenty show up (including two of my colleagues from the Religion Department).

I had chosen the chapel of Ashland Theological Seminary for our recording mainly because it is set in the middle of the campus well away from any roads. When I was checking out different sanctuaries and halls, I had thought the chapel's acoustics seemed live but not too big. It turned out  that the acoustics were better than I had hoped for--the wooden vaulted roof gave a wonderful warm, big sound to our voices.

Getting two or three passes at the twelve songs took longer than I had advertised -- the 'congregation' didn't escape until 2:30.

Five hours of singing and we are still standing (just)!

My sense was that those who came and were part of our little tuned-in congregation found the experience affirming of their own value as singing members of the church. There were a number of amused comments along the lines of "Who would have thought that we would sing on a real recording." As we sang the last song, I had a growing feeling that we had transcended the mechanics of recording and were worshipping God. Before the "congregation" escaped, Pastor Dan Bilkert led us in a prayer which called us to continue glorifying God in song.

With the crowd gone, that left Red Team to dig in and record harmonies -- two hours later there were seven of us still standing (just). Marshall, the engineer, seemed pretty excited about what we had recorded. We will start mixing this week and we'll see what we have.