The Hymns We Used To Sing

This past Sunday we sang "Father Hear the Prayer We Offer." It is a hymn I have known and loved since childhood. It caused me to reflect on the way our hymnody shapes our theology. Certainly the sentiments of this hymn seem close to my own convictions--Christianity as a courageous not an easy calling. 

We sang Libby's harmonies to the melody that Ralph Vaughan Williams "adapted" from an English folk tune. I remember watching a documentary that explained how Vaughan Williams passed-off as "traditional" a number of the tunes he wrote for the English Hymnal (1906) -- I wonder if this is one of them. Anyway, Libby's harmonies have a little of the South African quality to them.  . . we'll do it a bit faster next time.

Father Hear the Prayer We Offer. (audio) (sheet music)

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Before Christmas I came across this interesting "survey of 28 mainline Protestant hymnals" of the last 130 years or so (Christianity Today, March 2011). The result is the top 27 Protestant hymns. Cast your eye down the list below and see which ones you know. 

At the end of last semester I passed this list out in a couple of my classes. Now keep in mind that these are all religion majors many of whom want to go into some kind of Christian ministry and who are very involved in their own churches. I asked them to give me their personal score. The rule was that you had to be able to sing the first line.  What was interesting was that some students scored very highly while the rest barely made it on the board: either in the high teens or below five (I scored 22). This seems to confirm the observation that for many younger Christians there has been almost a complete break with their musical heritage.

I will not join with the creaking traditionalists who automatically think that if something new displaces something old then that is a Bad Thing. However, it is interesting to contemplate what such a clean break with the past suggests about the way churches today view both their own pasts and those who seem reluctant to make such a clean break. It also makes me wonder if the new praise songs sung by my students will be unknown to their own children?

As long as my kids are still singing #s 13 and 19 by mid-century, I will be satisfied! 

Martin Luther King Jr.: The "Vast Unity" of Worship

  

It is Martin Luther King Day here in the United States; it is also the start of a new semester. As I was preparing to teach my course Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, I ran into a sermon King preached early in his ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Here is an excerpt:

Although private worship is significant and uplifting it must not be a stopping point. A worship period on the radio cannot be a substitute for a worship period in a church Worship at its best is a social experience where people of all levels of  life come together and communicate with a common father Here the employer and the employee, the rich and the poor, the white collar worker and the common laborer all come together in a vast unity Here we come to see that although we have different callings in life we are all the children of a common father, who is the father of both the rich and the poor. This fellowship and sense of oneness that we get in public worship cannot be surpassed.

“Worship,” Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 7 August 1955.

King preached this sermon in the middle of the Montgomery Bus Boycot during the early days of the civil rights movement. Dexter Avenue was a society church and it is reasonable to assume that King's insights came more from his recent experiences of the mass meetings in churches like Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist than from his own congregation. It was from the maids and college professors, the lawyers and laborers rubbing shoulders and singing hymns together at the mass meetings that King glimpsed the "vast unity" created and celebrated in Christian worship.

What is your personal 'worship style'?

I don't often rant on this blog -- but today is an exception.
I was looking at the website of a United Methodist Church in Ohio (it will remain nameless) and I saw its list of Sunday morning services:

Worship at [Big Methodist Church] is offered in a variety of formats knowing that we all experience God in different ways.  

• The 8:15am worship is a quiet & reflective experience with communion offered weekly.

• The 10am worship is a classic service with organ, choirs and favorite hymns.

• The 11:21am is a high energy worship experience designed to take the message of God's hope, mercy & forgiveness deep into your life to impact the world.

Then comes the invitation that blows my little theological mind:

Regardless of the style, all our services are rooted in the Biblical lectionary and offer encouraging words for your life. . . Stop by for a visit to see which one best fits your worship style.

This is rampant consumerism matched with an ultra-Protestant notion of church. Clearly for the author of this website, all the elements of a worship service (other than the sermon) are a matter of personal preference not a corporate practice. Clearly behind the suggestion "see which [service] best fits your worship style" is the idea that a church design multiple services to cater to the preexisting personal preferences of its members and anyone who might wander in.
Why? Because "we all experience God in different ways."
What ever happened to the idea that the worship of the Church shapes us? That from our different experiences of life and God we come together to worship God who has made us one in Christ Jesus?
When we gather together we are shaped by corporate prayer, hymnody, the Eucharist, Baptism and, yes, the reading and preaching of God's Word. 
To be the Church of Christ--the community of dissimilar people, the gathering of reconciled sinners--we are going to have to do a whole lot better than internally segregating our congregations based on the paltry and ultimately spurious categories of "worship style." After all. . .

Who we are is who we love NOT what music we like to listen to.

A subcategory of folk music

We are heading into a new year of congregational singing at Ashland First. The end of 2011 has been a busy and wonderful month -- this is the fifth Sunday in a row we have been leading singing at church.

A good number of good people showed up on Christmas morning for a communion service and carols. We led the singing with a guitar and accordion (Joy to the World, Love Came Down at Christmas, Go Tell it on the Mountain, What Child is This). For a couple of the great carols we ditched the instruments and relied on the voices of the 50+ people present. I introduced Hark the Herald Angels Sing with these words, "We are going to sing this carol the way our forbears sang it. We will use the sacred harp--our voices."  The work from the carol singing school really paid off: we heard four-part harmonies coming from the congregation.  For the closing carol we had the two sides of the sanctuary stand and face each other as we sang O Come All Ye Faithful.

It seemed that no sooner was Christmas over than we were preparing music for New Year's day which fell on the following Sunday. As usual we chose music which spoke to the theme of the service, was singable for the congregation and was playable for the musicians. Red Team's lineup changes frequently -- this Sunday we had two guitars, two fiddles and piano/accordion.

This question of "singabilty" is at the heart of a recent (somewhat grumpy) reaction to the poor state of congregational singing by Grove City professor T. David Gordon.   Gordon summarizes his book Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns (P&R Publishing, 2010):

I attempt to locate some of the cultural forces that have caused hymns to sound so foreign to this generation that they feel they need to replace them with something contemporary. I also express misgivings about this circumstance.

Gordon argues that our immersion in pop muzak means that the average person doesn't recognize other forms of music as good music. I am not sure I agree with this thesis. In an article in Christianity Today, composer Lawrence R. Mumford points out that "the simple truth is that our culture has not eliminated all other styles. . . the pop song genre is certainly not the only music that any churchgoer hears, absorbs, or even enjoys between weekend services." Mumford points to symphonic film scores and even computer game soundtracks as one counter example.

Carol Singing School

Ever since we started leading congregational singing at Ashland First I have wanted to have a "singing school." Singing schools were a regular feature of American Protestant churches in the 19C. The idea was to improve the quality of a congregation's singing and sell the self-published songbooks of  the many itinerant singing masters.

A few of these songbooks became famous, notably The Sacred Harp (1844). This songbook used a system of notation that used shapes to represent the relative intervals of notes. These were then sung in the "Fa So, La" scale. It sounds complicated, but the underlying idea was that regular people could learn to sing hymns in three and four part harmony.

The fact that there are "Sacred Harp" and "Shape Note" singing groups still in existence suggests they were on to something. If you go to a one of these "sings" you will notice that the singers are not arranged like a choir; instead they sit in a hollow square formation with each section facing the middle. There is no audience, only congregation. These sings often take place over a whole day with the singers breaking for dinner on the grounds. You can get a sense of this tradition from the trailer to the amazing documentary Awake My Soul.

Sacred harp singing is now divorced from regular Sunday worship as the hymnody is  no longer sung in services. I wanted to reconnect the idea of the congregation singing in harmony with  the hollow square, the singing school and food!

Christmas seemed like the perfect time to introduce this experiment. This Sunday we held our first Carol Singing School. We had about 25 adults stay after church for a pot luck lunch and then Libby (my wife and personal choir director) led us through Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful, Hark the Herald Angels Sing and (by special request) Angels We have Heard on High. We will be singing these carols next weekend -- it will be interesting to see if we can hear any harmonies coming from the congregation.
The participants expressed their enjoyment so I think we can say that the Easter Singing School will be coming our way before too long.

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There has been plenty of singing already this Advent. Here is the congregation singing Come Thou Long Expected Jesus on December 4. The thumping noise is my right foot and the awesome fiddling is thanks to Mary Kettering (no one used microphones).

Merry Christmas!

Singing at the fore

There is an interesting article by Steve Thorngate over at Christian Century. It is a study of four congregations in Chicago that are moving beyond the worship wars. It includes musical samples, so I encourage you it check it out. I was particularly struck by the description of a small Methodist congregation in Rogers Park. Its music director, Mark Bowman believes in congregational singing.

When Bowman leads a song, the congregation follows him readily and ably. Typically he splits the room up by location rather than vocal range. Assisted by other leaders he's trained, Bowman teaches music by rote and quickly produces rich, full part-singing—made all the fuller by the octave doublings of low and high voices.

He is clearly influenced by Jon Bell, both in method and in his understanding of the importance of congregational singing.

That's "what worship is all about," he insists, and it's a practice that excludes no one. With singing at the fore, genre matters less. Bowman laments that "people get hung up on the worship wars—'we do the traditional music; we do the praise music.' That's not the issue. All forms of music have a legitimate place in worship, but neither a blaring organ nor a blaring praise band is conducive to leading singing."

Cohesive programming matters; so does the overall quality of material and execution. But in church music of any style, the values of excellence and inclusion ultimately can't be separated, because whatever one's aesthetic standards, the musical form itself is a participatory one.

"The question," says Bowman, "is this: How do you get the congregation to lift its voice in praise?"

The idea that "with singing at the fore, genre matters less" strikes me as very important and actually corresponds with our experience at Ashland First UMC. I went snooping around on the church's web site and found they organize regular workshops on leading worship. This multi-ethnic congregation is one I'd love to visit.

All Welcome in the Tenderloin

I had the remarkable experience of worshiping this morning at Glide United Methodist Church in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. This is a church which is, in its own words, "A radically inclusive, just and loving community mobilized to alleviate poverty and marginalization." This welcoming congregation has an extraordinary musical expression of this community of dissimilar people.
Most of the music was led by the Glide Ensemble (the choir) and people stood up and clapped, swayed and some sang along. There was only on song that was meant to be sung by the whole congregation--Leaning on the everlasting arms. It had everyone singing.
I had my camera handy and managed to capture some of the song. I remembered not to sing . . . but forgot not to sway. (So sorry if this makes you feel a little sea sick at the beginning. Enjoy the horns!