Dear Pastor: Sometimes they only come to sing

So it was a little less than a week ago that my social media feed offered up this poetic-ish reflection on singing in church. It is at minimum a celebration of singing together as a body, one that emphasizes the corporateness of worshiping in song (as well as the tangible quality of a good solid book of hymns), reveling in so many of the things that even science tells us are good about numbers of people singing together. It is, yes, a celebration.

But I'm not going to lie to you, dear pastor. This is the potential person in the pew who, quite possibly, scares me the most.

This may not make sense, coming from a person who has devoted a pretty decent amount of blog space to the subject of the good things about singing together as a congregation. And yes, it's really a thing I do believe in passionately (otherwise I've wasted a lot of time here).

But...

I have, in this blogspace, advocated for singing a lot of different varieties of hymns as a part of the church's worship. I've advocated for the song of the ancient church, the song of the living church, the song of the whole (i.e. "global" in some terminology) church, and the song of the sorrowing church, so to speak (and these not being exhaustive, but descriptive of the great variety of hymnic inventory available to the church). By no means do I achieve such variety perfectly, but we do "get around" to many different kinds of hymns with varying levels of success.

Now, if that person above happens to be in the pew on a Sunday morning in Gainesville, at least one thing will be satisfying to her: we do use a book (Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal - and yes, we do have the purple one). But that book contains some of that aforementioned variety, and that person in the pew may have some kind of animus against the really old stuff, or the really new stuff, or something from any part of the church in South America. And it's pretty clearly possible that a hymn of lament will be found totally wanting. What then? Is this person gone because we sang something "bad"?

And if that happens, there's no back-up plan, so to speak. The sermon has already been dismissed as a maybe-maybe-not proposition. Prayer and liturgy don't even seem to register at all. What then?

I've also written in this space that, for all the power and vitality and meaning I do grant to congregational song, I've also written the cautionary warning that music is not a neutral agent in any setting, and works its own affective qualities on whatever text is being sung to it. Furthermore, in what seems an egregiously unnecessary warning, music is not the Holy Spirit, no matter how often we may be inclined to deputize congregational or other singing as a reasonable proxy for that Spirit. It is possible, in short, to put too much trust in the hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs we sing.

And if it's possible for us to do so, it's possible for the person in the pew to do so too.

All I can do, as a pastor who is seeking to put together Word and prayer and liturgy and song in some way that actually brings some kind of word to the people, is literally hope and pray that it does so, and if the Holy Spirit jumps in to kick-start that word to the people, God be praised. But I have no control over that. (And by the way, if any pastor tries to tell you that he - and I do mean "he" - does, run. Just run.) I can't please everybody, and I'm not even going to try to claim that I can please God by any of the effort I put into a given Sunday morning. (I suppose the one way that God might be pleased is in my showing up to put in the effort at all. Maybe.)

So, for this person who only comes to sing, I have nothing else to offer. And nor do you.

Here are the songs we sing.

Good luck.

All you have to give is what God gives you, right?

All you can do is start somewhere...