Unplugged - the new experiment

Its the first Sunday after Easter and we have just had our first service unplugged!

Unplugged Fiddlers:
Mary Kettering and Alli Squires

I realize this needs a little explanation:
     For nearly four years my wife and I have led a small team of musicians at a fair sized Methodist church here in the Midwest. We were asked to lead a team (Red Team) to provide the contemporary music for the regular Sunday morning service. I am a theologian/Church historian and I have experience in church music ranging from English cathedral choirs, Vineyard Praise and Worship, Black gospel music, and Wild Goose worship from the Iona Community. I also have a love for folk and roots music from America and the British Isles. Libby, my wife, is a classically trained choral conductor with a similarly eclectic church music background (from early music in the Church of the Advent's choir in Boston to modern chant at the Taizé Community in France).

     Inspired by John Bell's book on Congregational Singing, the music we brought to the services for the last few years had one objective - to enable the congregation to sing God's praise. There are many things that have come to work against congregations singing -- too many to go into here. After a year of playing with some talented musicians we made a CD. We called it Church Music - you can hear the results by clicking on the player on the right. We summed up our philosophy on the sleeve and in the notes for cdbaby:

Red Team plays music for congregations to sing: this is Church Music.
This music will be of particular interest to ministers, worship leaders, church musicians (and anyone else) who wish to put the worship wars behind them and get on with the business of everyone singing God’s praises in the same place at the same time.

     For the last few years we have struggled using the church's sound system. The church is not unusual in having a sophisticated 24 channel mixing desk with monitors etc. and we were rarely able to achieve a decent or consistent sound mix with the team of volunteers. This is not their fault as a good sound engineer is hard to come by. It is, however, disheartening to have arranged and rehearsed vocal harmonies only to be told after the service that your mic was never switched on! I decided to take some advice from Reinhold Niebuhr and accept the things I cannot change and change the things I can.

A Sounding Image

In the Jan 11 issue of Christian Century, Steven Guthrie wrote a short article with the fantastic title "United we sing."  It is condensed from a chapter in the book Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology which is winging its way to me!

The martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch

 I have been feeling my way towards the importance of congregational singing for the last five years. I recently wrote   "American congregations need to rediscover congregational singing as a constitutive practice and discipline of the Church that unites a community of dissimilar people in singing their 'great Redeemer’s praise.'"


It is exciting and reassuring to know I am not the first person to think this. In his article, Guthrie quotes Ignatius of Antioch: "In your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. . . [So] become a choir, that being harmonious in love, and taking up the song of God in unison, ye may with one voice sing to the Father through Jesus Christ."


Guthrie roots his argument in his exegesis of Ephesians 5:18-21. Paul follows up his command to "be filled with the Spirit" with five injunctions:

1. speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs
2. singing
3. making melody to the Lord in your hearts
4. giving thanks to God the Father
5. Be subject to one another

"Three of the five activities have to do with music, which is extraordinary if we think of singing only in terms of emotion," Guthrie writes. "But if singing is a sounding image of the unified church, the connection makes a great deal of sense. The unified church is-like Jesus-the temple of the Holy Spirit, the place on earth filled with God's glory."

So I am with St. Paul, Ignatius of Antioch and Guthrie in believing that congregational singing is a constitutive ecclesiological practice of the Church. We need to relearn how--or develop new ways -- to sing the same psalms, hymns and spiritual songs together in the same place at the same time.