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

Hip or Holy? Can We Be Cool and Christian?

Marty Sampson, former songwriter for Hillsong

COOL OR CHRISTIAN (excerpt from God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To)

Co-opting the entertainment ethos as many churches have done, has brought some large hipster churches to the attention of the mainstream media. And they’re not all critical.

“The music! The lights! The crowds!” gushed a reporter on a CNN segment after a visit to an 8,000-member hipster church in NYC. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are enough to make any nightclub envious.”

Sophisticated, men’s high-end fashion and lifestyle magazine GQ embedded a reporter, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in a Hillsong worship service “to find out if Christianity can really be this cool and still be Christian.” Studying the 8,000 attendees entering the worship center, including Justin Bieber, Akner gave her first impression: “It’s where the cool kids spend Sunday morning after Saturday night at the club.”  

The GQ journalist continued, “the singing is hot-breathed and sexy-close into microphones.” But she wrote, “It made my body feel confused.” After listening to the singing for a while (there’s more music on the stage than anything else going on in most cool churches), Akner’s assessment was that the songs had “melodies that all resemble one another, pleasingly, like spa music.” She admitted to being drawn into the ethos, at least to some extent, by songs that “call to mind deeply sincere love songs.”

Though not falling on her knees in repentance, by any stretch, Akner’s over-all assessment was tentatively positive. She even confessed to wanting to raise her hands the morning after her visit to Hillsong. But not everybody who comes agrees, and not everybody stays.

“Hillsong has done for Christian music,” wrote feminist writer Tanya Levin, former Hillsong Church member now atheist, “what the Dixie Chicks did for country and western: made it blond, sexy, and mainstream.”

Put another way, they made it seem cool.

CLEVER DEVIL

Does anyone actually think that if God came down, he would dress that way, talk that way, sing that way? Would God sing “hot-breathed and sexy-close into microphones”? Would God our Maker “who gives songs in the night” (Job 35:20) sing those songs in anything that could remotely be labeled “sexy and mainstream”? None of this is God’s way. It seems blasphemous even to consider it.

Would God inflect the way some cool pastors inflect? You’ve heard it, the perpetual up lilt, as if every statement is a question; it sounds so breezy and urbane, as if to say that you alone have come to pose the questions no one else is asking. What’s more, by your seeming spontaneity that showcases your cleverness and wit, you let others know that the answers come easily for you.

God, for whom alone answers do come easily, doesn’t talk that way. His voice does not sound that way, he does not sing that way. It’s as if we think he ought to, but there is zero biblical evidence that God, who is “a consuming fire,” takes a casual, cool, hipster approach to anything. Nor should we.

“Preacher, give up trying to be cool,” wrote Southern Seminary President Al Mohler. “Cool changes so quickly… Do what cool can’t do. Bathe your heart and mind in the ancient Scriptures. Devote yourself to proclaiming the eternal truth of God.”

A heart bathed in God’s holy Word produces one thing. A heart bathed in pop entertainment and celebrity culture produces quite another. One cannot have it both ways. 

Even agnostics Strunk and White, in their classic book on writing, understood that an affected and artificial tone of voice and manner of communicating was indicative of pride: “Do not affect a breezy manner. The breezy style is often the work of the egocentric.” They strongly suggest avoiding “uninhibited prose” that “creates high spirits.” 

The “breezy manner” sounds suspiciously like the hipster cool voice in the pulpit on the stage. These egocentric pretentions place the author, the pastor, or the music leader at the center. This comes so naturally to the entertainment ethos because that’s how it all works. The performer on the stage is there to perform, and the fawning crowd are there to be amused, to take for themselves, to be entertained. It’s how it works, regardless of the words. Remember, most of us don’t listen to the words.

The focus of breezy entertainment is me-centered. The focus of worship is God-centered, and there is no place for breezy when entering the presence of the living and holy God.

There were versions of entertainment evangelism long before anyone used the term hipster (a term that may outlive its cool status soon enough). Even in Charles Spurgeon’s day. “The Devil has seldom done a cleverer thing,” he wrote, “than hinting to the Church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them.”

A DANGEROUS PLACE

However in step with the popular culture entertainment worship may be, it is profoundly out of step with the Bible. Like his Father, Jesus was not cool. The Son of God was so radically out of step with the culture around him that viscous critics tore off his robes, flogged him until his naked back was raw and bloody, and then they nailed him to a cross, suspended him in mockery and shame, and crucified him, the world looking on, deriding and making sport of him. No, Jesus was not cool. The world hated him.

Holding the hipster approach to worship and singing up next to the persecuted church further unmasks the fallacy of cool. It is not cool to be a Christian in Nigeria today, or China—the list is long. Imagine the bewilderment of any of our brethren in the persecuted church as they try to get their minds around the notion that it’s cool to be a Christian, at least cool if you identify with our brand. They would likely think that it was something else altogether, not the Christianity they experience. It would seem ten million miles from the cost of following Christ in their bloody world.

“Consumer-based, me-centered, music-driven, reductionistic, therapeutic, and theologically vacuous Christianity,” wrote Gospel Reformation Network Executive Coordinator Jon D. Payne, “is ten million miles from the real thing. It mirrors the world more than Scripture.”

There’s little argument that no single entity has more shaped music-driven, entertainment worship in recent decades than Australian mega-church Hillsong.  In a period of just eighteen months, there were 760,000,000 downloads of Hillsong songs, creating vast sums of money for the writers of those songs. Amidst a wave of apostasy among high-profile church leaders, one of Hillsong’s songwriters, Marty Sampson, joined in the trend. “I’m genuinely losing my faith … and it doesn’t bother me.”

It ought to bother the Church, however, when a key contributor to the lyrical content of what millions of professing Christians sing in worship says of the gospel, “it’s not for me. I am not in anymore.”

Dr. Payne helps us connect the dots. “It’s no wonder, then, why so many celebrity pastors and leaders are abandoning the faith for the idols and approval of our culture. It’s the culture, not objective truth, that has been chiefly shaping their thinking all along.” Pew Research Center findings concur, but it’s not just celebrity leaders abandoning the faith. In our rapidly secularizing society, there’s a spiraling decline of people willing to identify themselves as Christians. Especially young people. Which is odd considering the rationale justifying the use of the entertainment ethos is evangelism and church growth. If it's working, statistics ought to be showing an increase in young people identifying as Christians... 

Douglas Bond is author of Grace Works! (And Ways We Think It Doesn't) and twenty-seven other books of historical fiction, biography, devotion, and practical theology. He is lyricist for New Reformation Hymns, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, speaks at churches and conferences, and leads Church history tours in Europe. His book God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To), from which this post is an excerpt, is available at bondbooks.net/shop; order today and receive a free Rise and Worship cd.