What the Pandemic Teaches Us About Hymnals and Congregational Singing

Singing together in our living room yesterday (Palm Sunday) during the ongoing pandemic, it occurred to me just how difficult it is to replicate the entertainment ethos in our living rooms--no soloists "leading" us, no band, no amplifiers, no voice enhancement technology, no mood lighting, in some cases, no fog machine. How did the underground house churches do it? How do they do church in Nigeria or North Korea without the hipster band? The following is an excerpt from GOD SINGS! my new release on recovering the biblical ethos of worship in our congregational singing: 

GONE AWAY HYMNAL

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 dear pastor friend of mine, lamenting the loss of hymnals in so many churches, refers to lyrics projected up on a screen as “off-the-wall songs.” He’s not a fan. But the popular trend is definitely against him. Most churches see it as a giant step forward to leave their hymnals moldering in the basement of the church, relics of a bygone era, and good riddance.

The rationale is that people are looking up, not fumbling with the pages of an old book. And what about the visitors, unbelievers that come to church? It’s way easier for them to just look at the words up on the screen. No hunting for the right page number. No confusing musical score to distract them. It’s huge progress to leave those hymnals behind us.

Still more, it is argued that the old hymnal doesn’t include all the cool new songs. We’re stuck singing lyrics written hundreds of years ago by a bunch of old dead guys. Ewww. The new way lets us add new songs any time we want. Just get the lyrics to the tech guys; they can plunk them into power point slides, and we can sing the latest new thing next week.

NO GATEKEEPERS

But what have we lost by giving up our hymnals? We surrendered scrutiny. Publishing a hymnal is an enormous task, requiring careful organizing of the hymns by themes and biblical texts, also requiring an editorial committee of people chosen because of their literary and theological training and experience. Hymnal editors spent years compiling the best hymns for congregations to sing.

Giving up our hymnals takes all that scrutiny away and leaves us at the mercy of the latest new songs. We need more scruples about the new material. It’s way too easy to fabricate a worship song and introduce it next Sunday; no vetting, no scrutiny, no gatekeepers, no hymnal editors.

When we abandoned our hymnals we also abandoned literary and theological standards of orthodoxy and excellence. All too often, emotional nonsense, however well-intentioned, supplants a timeless hymn like Bernard of Clairvaux’s “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” that every Christian needs to sing in corporate worship several times a year and in family worship at least as often. Instead, we endure the singing of vacuous, repetitive lyrics that fall far beneath what is appropriate and well-pleasing to God—the kind of lyrics that used to be in our hymnals because they had undergone the rigor of the centuries.

Without that rigorous scrutiny we may find ourselves joining in a catchy Disneyland song about the world singing God’s love, “and we’ll all join hands,/every woman, every man,/we’ll sing His love.” This sounds like it was penned by a universalist Unitarian worship leader. True, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God, but unbelievers won’t be joining hands and singing his love. They will be weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth at his wrath. 

The hymnal helped us learn our theology, get it not only into our heads but into our hearts. The off-the-wall-song phenomenon hastens theological decline and illiteracy, leaving us vulnerable not only to doxological drivel but to blatant doctrinal error and apostasy.

GONE AWAY BIBLE

Another yet more pernicious loss when we abandoned our hymnals for the power point projection screen, is that in doing so we abandoned our Bibles. When we have the screen up there already, and the tech guys have the power point program at their fingertips, it’s simple to project the biblical text up on the screen too. Consequently, few people bring their Bibles to church anymore. Why bother? I realize that this too is motivated by good intentions, even gospel intentions; we want visitors who are unfamiliar with a Bible to see the biblical text under consideration effortlessly, without the distraction of an actual Bible in hand.

Getting your Bible off the screen instead of from, well, the Bible, is the equivalent of taking a nutrition pill instead of pulling your chair up to the dining table and feasting on a slab of grass-fed beef steak with all the delectable accoutrements.

An unintended consequence of getting our Bible from a screen, is that many do not know how to find their way around their Bibles (many can’t even find where they last laid their physical copy of the Bible; it’s got to be here somewhere). I wonder how many millennials could even find Zephaniah 3:17, back there in the clean pages, in a physical Bible, with pages, margins, a concordance, maps—you know—a real book.

I began annotating the margins of my Bible(s) in college, cross referencing, adding hymn lyrics on similar themes, quotations from Puritans and Reformers, and other great preachers since. My Bible is precious to me. First and last, because it is the Word of God, but also, because I own it. It is the same copy of it I read over and over. It has my marginalia in it. I can reread passages that I read and dated in times of celebration and thanksgiving, and in times of grief and sorrow.

Forfeiting our hymnals in favor of an ephemeral projection screen is one of the greatest contributors to biblical illiteracy. We are no longer a generation of Bible Christians. Oh, sure, we have the app on our phones, with all the notifications popping up to distract us, but we don’t truly own our Bibles.

The loss of the Bible leaves us vulnerable to the theology of the new social revolutionaries, shouting their unflinching doctrinal priorities in our faces. One of the ways we can tell when we are being more shaped by our culture than being shapers of it, is when the Bible’s language and themes begin to sound odd to our ears, when we feel like we need to make apologies for the biblical authors, worse yet, for the Holy Spirit. They didn’t really mean to put it that way. Couldn’t they have been more sensitive to the priorities of our culture? 

This is yet another important reason the Church must continue singing the psalms and the best hymns of our spiritual forebears. Then, after our minds, hearts, and imaginations have been thoroughly shaped by biblical and historical doxology, only then are we equipped to contribute new appropriate hymns for this generation of Christ’s body to sing.  

HYMNS AS POETRY

In the course of my research, writing, and teaching about hymns over the last decades I have learned many wonderful things about hymns, hymn writers, and hymnody—and every time I open the hymnal (usually the Trinity) I learn something new.

I love singing hymns. I love the very best of our hymn lyrics from the last 1,800 years or so, and I have come more and more to love them not only as heartfelt passionate expressions of praise to God but as the best of English poetry...

Douglas Bond is author of twenty-eight books, including The Resistance set in enemy occupied Normandy, and two-time Grace Award book finalist; he directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, is an award-winning teacher, podcaster, speaker at conferences, and leader of Church history tours in Europe. Visit his website for special buy-3-get-1-free book deals and study guides during the virus lock down at bondbooks.net

Heal Us and We Shall be Healed: How our pandemic is similar to the plague in Wycliffe's day

"Lord Jesus, turn us to you, and then we shall be turned. Heal us, and we shall be truly whole. For without your grace and help no man may be truly turned or healed." John Wycliffe

The following is an excerpt from chapter 15 or THE REVOLT, my novel set in Wycliffe's 14th century England. Listen daily to my read aloud of The Revolt at bondbooks.net.

...Over the next weeks, I came to know fear. Like I had never known it before, I came to feel it gnawing deeply within my bosom. I lay awake in my bunk at night, my stomach churning, wondering who was next. Which one of us would be the next to die? I clamped my hands over my ears in an attempt to block out the cries of other people's terror, the wails of their denial when first they discovered the dreaded buboes on their glands. I was in torment.

My mind cast about for some solace, to make sense of it all. Was it the especially bad ones who died first in a pestilence? I felt it must be so. So I determined to be good, to pray, to confess, to give alms, anything to win the favor of God and avoid dying. I made promises to God if he would spare me. I begged. I cajoled. I cried and wept and begged some more. I feared dying like I feared nothing in all the world. Death hung all about me. I could think of nothing else.

It was when Alfred stopped jesting, and I first saw real fear in his eyes, that my horror was complete. Everyone had their cure and clutched at the tiniest thread of hope. For Alfred it was fresh strew on the floor. For others it was leeches; it was beer, specially brewed with certain herbs; it was flight. Everyone cast about for something on which to pitch their hope. Hope that plague would pass them by. Hope that it would lay hold of another. Hope that they had done something good enough that the death angel would pass over them and fall upon some other soul--but not on them.

Some blamed it on the conjunctions of heavenly bodies, some claimed it was caused by the winds bringing foul contagion from the French, others said it was the street filth, still others said it was from the rats, and the horrible stench they gave off in death, the miasmas from their rotting flesh. Furiously we dug holes and entombed rats--hundreds of rats.

Still others claimed the contagion was from the wrath of the Almighty for our sins. And so I fortified my efforts, renewed my determination to put off my sins, vigorously bent my will to doing good works that would appease the wrath of God, divert his rage from me to fall upon my less-vigilant neighbor, so I hoped, and so I labored to outdo my neighbor in being good.

Then the news arrived, bitter news it was to me. Thomas Bradwardine, newly installed archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Profundus himself had succumbed to plague. I cannot describe the gut-wrenching torments of the days that I endured after hearing the news. If such a one as His Holiness, Thomas Bradwardine, fell under the dreaded curse of the pestilence and died of plague—who could escape?

Despair followed, despair and still more dread, a fear I could taste, the only taste I had in those months. My breathing came in shallow gasps, and I never felt I was getting enough air inside me. I vacillated from frequent and minute inspection of my armpits and groin for buboes, to supreme avoidance, never once in a day, in a week, so much as touching myself. As the death toll mounted, and new reports of the afflicted and the dying came to my ears, I fell into the very dregs of despondency.

Most people stayed indoors, fearing contact with other human beings, ones who might be carrying the disease, paralyzed with the fear of breathing miasmas from the pestilence in the street. The wealthier fled to the countryside leaving the poorer people to take the brunt of the plague on themselves and on their children. Those who had silver, the priests and friars--many of them, though not all--were first to turn their backs and flee. Their money could buy for them lodging far from the dreaded contagion. While their flocks faced the agonies of dying alone, of perishing in unresolved iniquities, safe from it all they would live, take their ease, and be merry.

It was during these months of pestilence that the first seeds of resentment toward the clergy began germinating in my heart. I had, heretofore, pushed such thoughts aside with violence. That now ended. As I watched yet another of my fellows gasping for his final breaths, his eyes casting about in horror, the frantic clutching of his fingers at the bed clothes, the sheen of sweat and blood on his brow, the blackness closing in, the cries, the moans--I felt that I hated all friars and their kind still the more for their abandonment. And then I feared it was a mortal sin to hate them, and surely I would be damned for it.

I could discover but one source of comfort during those horrific months. My school fellow John of Wycliffe. His was imperfect comfort, to be sure; death was soul-numbingly real, and he had his own fears. I observed, however, that he faced the imminent horrors of plague like few other men. He seemed at his best when on his knees. Make no mistake, I prayed. I prayed like I had never prayed before. But I prayed as an act, a good work by which I desperately hoped to win the favor of the Almighty. My attempts at praying were poor, infrequent, and, at times, nothing short of hysterical. At other times, when I managed to calm myself sufficiently, I made to ape the pious incantations I had heard recited since my boyhood in church. I clung to the hope that God would deliver me by these my praying efforts.

But John of Wycliffe's praying was of another order. One morning in November of 1348, I awoke to hear him at his bedside. I propped myself up on an elbow and studied him as he did it. I confess that my motive was to learn from his method, from his technique, and thereby improve my chances with the Almighty.

Douglas Bond is author of twenty-eight books, including The Resistance set in enemy occupied Normandy, and two-time Grace Award book finalist; he directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, is an award-winning teacher, podcaster, speaker at conferences, and leader of Church history tours in Europe. Visit his website for special buy-3-get-1-free book deals and study guides during the virus lock down at bondbooks.net