hen I was first learning to write in elementary school, I remember learning about parts of speech. There were nouns - persons, places, things or ideas; verbs - action words; and adjectives - words that describe. Adjectives were the parts of language that made everything more vivid; you didn’t technically have to have them but they added new dimensions to communication.

In thinking about hype, one of the ways that we allow hype to get into our churches is in the adjectives we use. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. We have exciting new ministries. We have powerful worship services. We have creative, inspiring, and insightful sermons. We have life-changing songs. Really? Really?

It’s part of the continual push to be newer and better. We might not believe it, but with our rhetoric we’re saying: “Those old ministries are passé, check out these new exciting ministries!” “Those old churches are staid and boring, we’re relevant!” And even if it were true, even if the new things were ten-times more exciting and creative, it doesn’t do us much good in the long run anyway. Why? Because the only people who really care if things are that much more exciting are Christians who already go to other houses of worship who want to be a part of the newest, the latest, the greatest thing.

It’s just too much.

What if we saved the word exciting for things that are truly exciting like the Gospel or a new church being planted or someone returning to the church after years away or a baptism or a first communion? That’s exciting. It is exciting to know that my sins, though they are countless, are not counted against me. It is exciting to know that the Holy Spirit is active in my life, uniting me to Christ. It is exciting to see hearts that were once dead in sin like mine made alive in Christ. The Gospel should be what truly excites us - not a bunch of promotional junk surrounding yet another church program.

The greatest singer in rock and roll
Would have to be Romeo
His vocal chords are made of gold
He just looks a little too old

Wilco, “The Late Greats”

I pray that my church (and I) would never get to the point that the Gospel just “looks a little too old”.

would imagine that everyone who knows the biblical reference where “Psalms and Hymns” comes from asks the same question.

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
Colossians 3:16 (TNIV) 

“What about the third category? What about the spiritual songs?”

That’s a great question.

The short answer is that I think that there are enough spiritual songs out there and that the other two categories are neglected (especially the psalms). There are also side issues of simply wanting to write music and not spend hours fine-tuning lyrics when there are perfectly good lyrics out there.

The long answer is that I started writing when I was in college. Every week, I was learning new music. (Or, to put it more accurately, I was playing along with unknown music and figuring it out as I went along. That was a pretty harrowing experience! Thankfully, all of the music was fairly predictable.) There was such a drive for the latest expression of worship, the freshest tune, the newest lyric, that I got burnt out on it all. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t involved with some fine people who were doing a great job leading several hundred college students each week. It was just that the continual drive for what’s new forced me to stop and take a look at what’s old.

What I discovered was a treasury of incredible lyrics that my peers had all but forgotten. Here were words that were not captive to the latest pop metaphors for God but were rich and full of meaning. I found lyrics that had withstood the test of time and were rightfully called “the great hymns of the faith”. (Of course, there are some truly wretched old hymns, just like there are some fantastic spiritual songs being written today. One isn’t better than the other based upon its genre, necessarily. The content is the standard by which it should be judged.)

I found great hymns with some great tunes but also some great hymns with lesser tunes. Different musical settings of the same text can be wonderful counterparts to each other, as long as they both faithfully represent the content of the text. It’s like looking at a diamond from many different perspectives or like reading the bible in several different translations. They all add to each other. “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” is a fabulous hymn whether it’s sung to “Hamburg” or “Gift of Love” (but not when it’s sung to the tune of “Green Acres”). So I began trying to compose tunes that would accurately reflect the content of hymn texts with a musical vocabulary that was more common to my peers.

For centuries, Christians not only sang hymns, but they also had settings of the Psalms to sing (the Psalter). I can’t possibly write everything there is to write on the use of the Psalms right now, but I’ll leave with an observation that we have all but forgotten the Psalms in public worship and it’s to our detriment.

God has given us the gift of music and he has given us a song to sing. Psalms and hymns allow us to sing the same song as the saints of old - the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs and all who have gone before us. We sing along with the “living faith of the dead” (as Jaroslav Pelikan has written) and join in the thunderous chorus praising:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Luke 2:14 (TNIV)

Note: This was a post that I originally wrote on January 28, 2006 but haven’t posted until now. My thoughts on the subject have changed a little but I still agree with the main thrust of what I wrote. Today, I would only qualify that we be vigilant in rejecting any romanticization of the past, thinking that older lyrics (and older theology) must necessarily be better than more modern expressions. We must always be returning to the scriptures as our source for life and our vocabulary for worshiping the living God.

ichael Spencer (whom I quoted last week in my sermon) has brought to my attention an article that’s come out of the Australian Anglican church. See The Slow Death of Congregational Singing and Michael’s riff on that article, Riffs: The Briefing on “The Slow Death of Congregational Singing.”
Here’s a quote from his reflection on internetmonk.com:

[In the place of robust congregational singing,] we have a lot of songs that a lot of people don’t know, a lot of bad and unknown tunes, a lot of watching the worship team perform (especially if they are female of the right type and dress), a lot of forgettable, narcissistic lyrics, a lot of bad and inexperienced worship leaders, a lot of bone-headed thinking about congregational singing in relation to church growth, a lot of imitation of churches and methods that most congregations can’t imitate, a lot of lay people who simply don’t know how to sing at all, a lot of churches that don’t teach singing, a lot of turning congregations into audiences anyway and whatever else goes into the stew that does away with congregational singing.

It’s unfortunate that the discussion turns into old songs vs. new songs so often. Ultimately, when the songs were written, what kind of beat they have, what instrumentation one uses, etc. are secondary (and even tertiary) issues. The fundamental question that those of us who plan and lead music must wrestle with in terms of our role is “What does it mean to lead in song?” Does it mean that people are supposed to be inspired by the devotion and the passion of the person who sings at the front? Does it mean that we’re to model what the congregation should be ideally doing? Or is it different than that?

For me, leading in song involves a lot more behind the scenes work than overt, up-front action. Leading in song means that we pick keys that are the most comfortable for a congregation to sing in, no matter if they’re good keys for a lead vocalist to “shine” in or not.* (That’s why much, if not most, of the worship music coming out of places like Nashville and Atlanta has to be rekeyed before congregations can even attempt it. In CCM worship recordings, men are usually tenors and women are usually altos, while congregations are typically more oriented toward baritones and mezzo-sopranos. If you’ve been singing along with a worship leader until they reach a high note, at which point your voice cracks and you look around sheepishly to see if anyone noticed, you know what I’m talking about.) Leading in song means eliminating confusion from the musical arrangements so that the congregation feels confident of where to come in. Leading in song means picking accompaniments and arrangements that support the congregation’s singing, rather than allowing them to feel naked and left out to dry.

*Ideally, you shouldn’t need to turn up a lead vocalist’s volume so loud that anyone can hear if he or she is in their best key. And what does it say about our sales-oriented approach to worship that we would care if someone is in their best key or not?

ark Galli writes concerning the physicality of liturgical worship:

The liturgy does not point us to “the Christ spirit,” “the ground of all being,” “the Universe,” or any other amorphous, abstract spiritual entity. Instead it points us to the one who did not think Pure Spirit a thing to be grasped. He who created flesh and called it very good, put his money where his divine mouth was, and took on bodily life and lived among the embodied. To put it simply: we worship a material Savior.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells, p. 85

’m currently sitting in my hotel room in Grapevine, Texas after a busy weekend.  After beginning the day on Saturday with the wedding of two good friends, I drove up here to the Metroplex so that I can attend a conference on Monday and Tuesday.  As part of my trip, I visited several churches in the D/FW area to get an idea of what their worship services look like.  Within a span of 24 hours I attended 4 services.  Here are some reflections while they are fresh in my mind. Read more »

lenn Lucke at Common Grounds posted a link today to a wonderful and challenging article by Sally Morgenthaler. She is the author of Worship Evangelism but has since changed her tune…

ast Friday night, I graduated from Seminary. Our ceremony was held at the First Presbyterian Church in Downtown Orlando. It was a wonderful evening with an inspiring message from Sandy Wilson from Second Presbyterian Church, Memphis, on the biblical imperative to love the poor. We also heard from the Rt. Rev. Jackson Matovu, the Bishop of Central Buganda in the Anglican Church. Central Buganda is located in Uganda along the shores of Lake Victoria. One of the Bishop’s priests has been a classmate of mine while I’ve been in seminary and he came in, along with his family, to celebrate with us.

Like I said, the ceremony was wonderful - except the music. And the music was good - except for one hymn.

Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound
let all the nations know,
to earth’s remotest bound:
Refrain:
The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

It wasn’t that the hymn was bad. The organ was in tune, the trumpets played their parts correctly, the singer sang the right notes. Well, scratch that. I think the singer sang the right notes. The problem was, nobody knew what the right notes were because no one had heard the hymn before. It wasn’t that the crowd didn’t sing, they sang with gusto on “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”, it was that they didn’t know what to sing. I am not exaggerating when I guess that less than 15 people in the entire building had heard the song before it was played at graduation.

This is not a diatribe against new music, a manifesto that we stick to what is familiar. It is, however, a comment on how we use new music. A seminary graduation is not the place for an unfamiliar hymn. At the very least, the music should have been printed in the program or a hymn from the hymnal should have been chosen. There are certain occasions when it’s best to stick with what people know. Weddings, funerals, graduations, etc., these are events where teaching new songs might not be the best course of action.

I am all for new music; I write new music. However, I am concerned with how we teach new music. This isn’t a complaint post about my seminary graduation. Rather, it was an event that got me thinking about how we use new music in the church and how we teach new music in the church. Look for more developed thoughts to come.

Sing to the Lord a new song! (Only, do it at the right time.)

piphany is like that lost holiday that no one really knows what to do with. We’re so ready to get back to work or get back to school after the “holidays” are over that we seem to forget that Christmas isn’t the end of things. Traditionally, Christmas has been a season, not an event, and that season leads up to Epiphany on January 6.

Why does this even matter? Epiphany isn’t that attractive as a holiday in our culture. There are no gifts to be bought, no new clothes to wear to church, no long trips to see family members, no marketing campaigns from Hallmark to make us feel guilty about not purchasing a card or trinket, no jewelry stores accusing every man within 60 miles of not caring about his wife, there’s none of that. That’s probably not a bad thing. Strip all of the excess away and epiphany is really about the same thing Christmas is about: joy and gratitude.

Epiphany celebrates several things, all wrapped around one theme. First, the visitation of the wise men from the east to see Jesus. Second, the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan. Third, Jesus beginning his public ministry by miraculously turning water into wine at Cana. The theme: Christ is revealed to all people. Jesus is not confined as simply the Jewish Messiah - though he was nothing less - he is the only Savior for the world. Epiphany completes Advent and Christmas. In Advent, Christ is promised. In Christmas, he comes. In Epiphany, he is revealed to the world. As Simeon sings when Jesus is presented at the temple, Jesus is “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2.32)

Presbyterians, like me, have not been good at all at giving Epiphany its proper due and celebration. There are two hymns in the Trinity Hymnal section labeled Epiphany. (And that doesn’t even include “From the Eastern Mountains”, a terrible omission.) Thankfully, God has not left us alone. The Lutheran and Anglican churches have rich hymnody concerning this celebration.

From the Eastern Mountains
Godfrey Thring, 1873

From the eastern mountains, pressing on, they come,
wise men in their wisdom, to his humble home;
stirred by deep devotion, hasting from afar,
ever journeying onward, guided by a star.

There their Lord and Savior meek and lowly lay,
wondrous Light that led them onward on their way,
ever now to lighten nations from afar,
as they journey homeward by that guiding star.

Thou who in a manger once hast lowly lain,
who dost now in glory o’er all kingdoms reign,
gather in the heathen who in lands afar
ne’er have seen the brightness of thy guiding star.

Gather in the outcasts, all who’ve gone astray,
Throw Thy radiance o’er them, guide them on their way.
Those who never knew Thee, those who’ve wandered far,
Guide them by the brightness of Thy guiding star.

Onward through the darkness of the lonely night,
shining still before them with thy kindly light.
Guide them, Jew and Gentile, homeward from afar,
young and old together, by thy guiding Star.