The number of potential pitfalls lurking in the practice of congregational singing, dear pastor, would boggle your mind.
Maybe you've run into some of them. Ever worked out the idea to accompany a particular hymn differently than usual and felt yourself on the precipice of death from the icy stares of the congregation? Or a particular song chosen for a particular service draws ire from the congregation for being "different" or "complicated" (often a synonym for "different").
Though not necessarily a widespread thing, it is possible for churches, even in the mainline, to get caught up in their music as a marker of their identity. It doesn't have to be about the congregational singing, and frequently is not; a church can be identifiable as, say, "the one with the really good organ," or "the one with the opera singers as soloists," or "the one that does Messiah every December (possibly in sing-along form)," or so on and so on.
In fact, for much of the history of the mainline, the church's musical life did define many congregations, but the musical life that formed that identity had very little to do with the congregation lifting up its voice in song. Whether it was the organist, a soloist, or other vocal forces providing the special music (likely a vocal quartet or octet of paid singers), the musical identity of the church might even vie with the pastor's reputation as a most well-known marker of that church in its city.
That is less common today (although a few vocal-octet churches like this one), but there are still ways in which a church's music can become a focal* point of that church's identity.
*I initially typed "vocal point" by mistake, and it was almost better and I nearly left it in.
Nowadays there's a somewhat better chance that such a musical identity might well be centered on what the congregation sings (or supposedly sings in some cases). The interesting challenge is that such identities, perhaps because the people of the congregation are more directly involved, can become pretty fiercely identified and defined, maybe even to the point of becoming a means of defining the borders of the church; i.e. we sing this, not like that other church that sings that. The song of the people in the congregation becomes virtually a tribal marker of identity.
Sometimes that identity may be little more than an advertising schtick. "Our music is alive!/fresh!/exciting!/new!/powerful!/" etc., with the heavily implied corollary that the music of other churches is not. Churches of the "contemporary" variety can often be quite caught up in such markers of identity.
On the other hand, perhaps the other variety of church that is most susceptible to the tribalism of congregational song is the variety at more or less the opposite end of the spectrum. You might see the church speaking of the "Great Songs of the Faith" or "Timeless Classics," invoking the kind of breathless pseudo-religious rhetoric that would normally be associated with the hopelessly outdated promotional office of your symphony orchestra or concert hall. The implication that such a church would never demean itself with something "new" (whether "contemporary" or not) is of course unspoken but no less explicit.
These are extremes, and particularly obnoxious ones. Still, there is some risk when a congregation gets hung up on congregational sing of one particular type or another. And on the whole that risk is not necessarily about the music itself; it may well be that the fierce identification with that music is a mask for other issues within the church or its leadership. Such things are beyond the scope of this blog, but it's still an outside possibility.
Having gone on record with basic ideas about what the church might sing, I will acknowledge that such a program of congregational song as described in those entries will have the effect of introducing variety into the church's hymnic repertoire. If nothing else the intentional singing of old and new songs will work against that.
And a final thought; what some churches might forward as their identity, a marker of their tribe, might for some others seem more like being in a rut. Just a thought.
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