If, as I've been suggesting for quite some time now, you are a needful leader in congregational song (and even in some cases the "buck stops here" person in your church on what gets sung by the congregation in worship), it would behoove you to develop some understanding of those songs being sung and the repertoire of congregational song from which you might choose, in order both to make better choices for your congregation and also to be a more skilled and diligent interpreter of those hymns yourself.
Some of the discernment involved in hymn choosing inevitably has to be musical. If you don't have a lot of musical background you may need help with that part of the analysis, possibly in the form of a church musician helping you sing through the song and get a feel for its singability and playability in the specific context of your congregation. Some things, on the other hand, you can probably figure out yourself; if you find your voice straining because the tune is so high or so low, there's a decent chance that some chunk of your congregation will have the same struggle, and (unless you have a crafty church musician who can adjust the tune on the fly by raising it up or down ("modulating" is the fancy musical word), you may want to pass that one by.
On the other hand, the theological content of the hymn should be right in your wheelhouse, shouldn't it? Being able to grasp spiritual references in the text (hymnals will frequently help with this), theological ideas found in it, and direction of the text should be part of your skill set.
Direction of the text: to whom are the people singing -- to God, to one another, to themselves individually? To God is hard to argue against; most hymns of praise will be directed Godward (or Christward or Spiritward, if you want to break it down by person of the Trinity), for example. Hymns directed people-ward, typically songs of encouragement or exhortation (think of "Sing praise to God, who reigns above," which for all its God-language is an exhortation to the people to praise God) are also useful in a church's repertory.
Inward-directed hymns can be problematic. On occasion such a hymn (one that will tend to use the pronoun "I" rather a lot) can be possessed of theological richness and/or scriptural quality to be good viable hymns for a congregation to sing (note that "Sing praise to God, who reigns above" does have an inward-directed stanza). On the other hand, a lot of "I" hymns are frankly over-indulgent sentimental claptrap. At the risk of tons of offense, "In the Garden" would be exactly such a song. Particularly when paired with the tune most typical of it, it's a syrupy enough concoction to send even the healthiest into severe sugar shock.
"I" hymns and songs tend, at the risk of overgeneralizing, to correlate awfully closely with "I" churches. Churches that don't have much of a mission profile or even a basic awareness of the world around them, perhaps also struggling to articulate much of a theology of God or Christ or much of anything else, but always quite focused on its own fulfillment or the interests or satisfactions or even mood of its own people...there's a decent chance you might notice an elevated level of "I" singing in that congregation. You don't want to be that church, do you?
In short, if you can apply your skills of theological interpretation to the task of studying scripture and preparing a sermon, you can spare a smidgen of that interpretive skill to the task of picking the week's hymns. And the good news is that you won't have to translate from Hebrew or Greek.
*More on this subject later, but likely a hiatus as I'll be away for a couple of weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment