he congregational singing where my wife and I worship is better than most. A good number in the congregation actually sing. We mostly sing hymns from the Baptist Hymnal on Sunday mornings, with more modern “praise choruses” mostly sung on Sunday evenings. Though it is far from the best, the Baptist Hymnal still contains many priceless gems. The title to this post comes from the first verse of one of those faithful, God-centered hymns that we sang this past Sunday morning; “Come, Christians, Join to Sing” (#231). This hymn was cradled on one side by “Praise Him! Praise Him!” (#227), and on the other by “When Morning Gilds the Sky” (#221). This is how a worship service should begin, with a call to worship, and with hymns comprising more than the insipid and nondescript “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Praise you, praise you, praise you, ohhhhh Lord.”
I haven’t seen very many posts around on the topic of congregational singing, at least not until the past week or so, and now just in the past couple of weeks there are four or five. Maybe this is a sign that some are beginning to connect the dots between the “shrinkage” problems that we now face in the SBC and the trajectory choices we have been making over the past half century in the area of congregational singing.
I first stumbled across The slow death of congregational singing in a post by Jonathan Leeman over at Church Matters. The approach to this article on congregational singing by Michael Raiter is uncommonly practical; it doesn’t criticize music style so much as it criticizes the philosophy of praise bands. Raiter argues that by its very nature praise bands drown out the congregation, and at the same time provide an atmosphere of performance, both of which discourages congregational participation. If I had to pick a one-sentence quote to sum up the whole article—which I believe defines at least one of the major problems of a praise-team approach—it would be “All the microphone does is make someone a very loud singer.”
I ran across the same article just a few days ago when the iMonk (aka Michael Spencer) used it as a spring board to his own post on hymnal congregational singing. To top that, a couple of weeks later he posted a second post, featuring a comment from his previous post. I’m not going to comment on the comment of a post of a post; well not much. These two posts pretty much say it all; well almost. My purpose here is to link you to some excellent arguments for traditional congregational singing (without a performance on stage). Spencer’s argument rightly begins with the subject of musical content:
I like a lot of contemporary worship music, but as a whole the content is different than the best older music. It’s designed for expressive presentation and not as much for edification through musical teaching or mutual encouragement. So you can have a lot of “You are holy!” and “I will worship,” as opposed to four or five verses describing the incarnation or considerations of the meaning of salvation.
Notice that Spencer is not arguing against style of music, but rather he is arguing from the angle of content; what information the song is delivering. In Spencer’s second post, his commenter, Tom Schwegler, cites five areas that make singing praise choruses more difficult, which I have abbreviated as 1) complexity of rhythms, 2) multiple “bridges” and ad-lib repeats, 3) the lack of a prominent melody to follow, 4) the lack of advance information about the music, and 5) a less precise oral transmission of music. Admittedly, this argument is based on style, but in a practical way, showing the liabilities inherently brought to congregational singing.
Now to represent the other side of the argument, at 12 Witnesses I found a link to this post called the controversial organ, in which Dan Kimball gives the history of the controversy of bringing the organ into church worship, followed by a couple of set-up scenarios. A set-up scenario, usually found in the form of a letter of complaint is one of those devices that draws an opponent in because it sounds like the crank in your church that is always complaining about the new praise song, only to find out that the letters were written well over a hundred years ago about traditional hymns you hold near and dear. In this case the device backfired because the second commenter to the post responded that he agreed with the criticisms of the two “old” hymns:
In the 19th century, there was an explosion of these kinds of sappy and sentimental songs that were lacking theologically and artistically shallow. This was the result of a confluence of a few things: 1) the feminization of the church, 2) Pietistic revivalism that sought to use music as a tool to create an emotional mood to bring about “repentance”, and 3) a turning away from traditionalism in favor of making the church mimic popular culture.
Now, I admit there is quite a bit of historical background to digest there, as well as in the rest of the brother’s comment, but all would benefit from a brief education in nineteenth-century Christianity in America. The best place to start is to familiarize yourself with the central figure of revivalism, Charles Finney. I can think of no better article expounding Finney than this article by Michael Horton. Another place to go would be to read Finney’s own Systematic Theology. There is a lot there so just read Finney’s view of justification, and if you rightly understand the gospel, you will see about what I and the above commenter am concerned. Finney influenced a multitude in his day, including many, many hymn writers.
I read somewhere the saying “We sing the faith into our hearts.” I ask you as I close, how much do you think about the content of what you sing? What is it teaching you and those around you about the truths of the faith? What faith are you singing into your and your fellow congregant’s hearts? What faith are you singing into your childrens’ hearts? Is it the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3)? We have a mandate from Colossians 3:16 to teach and admonish one another by use of faithful Christian music, as well to use that medium to sing back to God the truths about himself as a means to praise. How faithful are we to “preach” the whole council of God (Acts 20:27) as we sing in church, not just what we feel like? Do we even sing at all? Look around you this next Sunday and see.
But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
Psalm 22:3 (KJV)
Does God inhabit the praises of the assembly where you worship?
