Dear Pastor: When congregational singing gets tribal

Note: post partly inspired by a chapter from Don Saliers & Emily Saliers, A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice.

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.

Dear Pastor: Music is not the Holy Spirit

So, dear pastor, have any of these things ever happened to you?

*In order to make worship more "exciting," you, or some members of your governing body, or perhaps some fringe member, or an advertisement that comes in your mail suggests switching the style of worship in your church to something more "contemporary." It's hard to find good organists, after all, and nobody sings those fusty old hymns anymore.

*Your organist/choir director is seeking to augment the choir with some professional soloists, possibly from the local opera company or university school of music or conservatory. With such singers hired, naturally (in addition to the choir's anthem each week) those soloists are going to need to sing, well, a solo, to help justify the expense. Also, the extra singers are effective and this means that the choir becomes a main attraction, which means possibly more than one choral anthem per service. When this causes the service to get long and unwieldy, the obvious response is to drop one of the congregational hymns or songs.

*So the hymn sings are kind of fun on occasion, but it seems like those have to happen more and more often to keep the congregation's interest, even though inevitably those hymn sings become trapped in the same little rotation of eight to ten hymns, every time. (Not to mention, you end up preaching less and less.)

If you're the type who actually reads this blog, you probably observed Pentecost in some way during your service this Sunday morning. Whether through visual representations of the "tongues, like fire" that marked the Acts account, or the evocation of multiple languages in that reading, or any number of hymns or anthems that might work for the day (even if you went all crazy and preached on the alternate reading from Ezekiel -- the "dry bones" vision -- like some crazy pastor around here), in some way or another the Holy Spirit was a prominent focus or subject of the service. That's quite natural for the one day on the liturgical calendar that more or less focuses pastors who would much rather avoid the subject of the Holy Spirit to avoid avoiding the subject.

To a large degree that will be it for formal acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit as a theme of worship. That doesn't mean, however, that the Spirit isn't of concern throughout the rest of the church's week-to-week life, even if the Spirit isn't acknowledged by name.

We are seeking the Spirit when we wonder what we need to do, for example, to "get people excited" about church, or to "get more young people" (who will, if we're honest, turn around and act and think exactly like the old people, so that everybody will get along) in the church, or any number of other convoluted ways we talk about wishing things were different or somehow better in our church. At root, we're seeking some kind of action of the Holy Spirit in the life of our congregation.

Except, really, we're not. Or only limitedly so.

We want the Spirit to do something safe. We want something predictable that will look good and have obvious tangible impact -- something that shows up in counting statistics, preferably. And that's not how the Spirit operates.

This explains, I think, why churches are so often prone to use music as a substitute or proxy for a genuine in-breaking experience of the Holy Spirit.

Music is not tame or neutral, as was hopefully made clear in the previous entry here. It inevitably affects any words to which it is joined, any audience to which it is played, any event in which it is introduced. And it is true enough that you don't necessarily know absolutely for sure what that effect is going to be, or at least not for every person involved (different styles of music will cause different people to respond differently and all that).

You don't know for sure, but you do have a pretty good idea, or at least an expectation, what that result will be.

For one thing, in the cases noted at the beginning of this entry, you've probably already got some feedback about the use of "praise & worship" music (still, no one has ever explained to me how those two things got separated) or a professionalized choir or hymn repertory, whether you asked for that feedback or not.

Some of what you can know is more or less baked into the style of music in question; by about the third contemporary worship song, at the latest, some of the congregation will be lifting holy hands or something. That's just how that goes. After the professionalized choir essays a movement of a Mozart mass, their efforts will be rewarded with judicious, tasteful, proper applause. Congregants will get all nostalgic and weepy when they've sung "Amazing Grace" at the thirteenth straight hymn sing. We know these things.

In short, music (yes, including congregational singing) is good at producing all the feels, as some of my seminary classmates would say, and so it becomes a quick and safe way of generating a series of largely emotional (maybe sometimes intellectual) reactions that can be passed off as "the moving of the Spirit" in the congregation.

It's not.

Music isn't neutral, remember; it really does have a first and foremost tendency to call attention to itself before anything else. It will have its affect; it will produce joy or sadness or rage or melancholy or any number of other responses if deployed without regard for that affective quality that is, frankly, a lot of the pleasure in most of the music that even has a chance of entering most churches (the likes of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez etc. have mostly not entered the church's musical repertoire).

Music can, when chosen and prepared with diligence and prayerful insight, be a vehicle through which the Spirit can move. It can and has happened, sometimes even working through those affective qualities that can otherwise make music more distraction than witness. The mere presentation of music in worship, however, is no guarantee of the Spirit's action in worship. People may well be moved, yes, but not necessarily by anything other than well-done music. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but by no means is it the main thing as far as worship is concerned.

Given that, about the best you can do, dear pastor, is choose what is yours to choose with the same mind and theological training you use to prepare your sermon; work with your musicians to prepare and present that music with the most skill and understanding possible; and to see that song of the people as an intrinsic part of the gathering of the congregation, the proclamation of and response to the Word, and the sending of the people out to be the body of Christ in the world. In other words, treat the hymns as if they are important parts of worship.

They are, right?

None of the musical types represented here guarantee that the Holy Spirit will show up and do what you want it to do. None of them. Okay?

Dear Pastor: Music is not neutral

It's an old canard, one that gets perpetuated in multiple forums and classrooms, not just in theology but even in music history as well (I used to teach that, remember, so I'm not just talking through my hat): Of the primary reformers, Martin Luther was the music lover, while John Calvin was anywhere from absolutely opposed to music to downright suspicious (in the manner of his theological ancestor Augustine), and Luther enthusiastically embraced congregational singing while Calvin accepted it only begrudgingly.

You'll probably not be surprised, if you know how historical misperceptions get distributed, to learn that this is a dramatic oversimplification, if not an outright falsehood.

It is true that Calvin's musical acceptance was never as wide as that of Luther: he never did embrace purely instrumental music in the church nor the use of music as accompaniment (the churches that followed in his tradition got over that fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things) -- he was not the organ-destroyer that Ulrich Zwingli was, but he wasn't hiring organists either. "Hymns of human composure" weren't favored in Calvinist churches, instead words of scripture -- the Psalms in particular -- were the stuff of singing. And that singing was strictly a matter for the congregation -- choirs and soloists and such weren't part of the design.

Beyond that, though, Calvin's attitude about music in worship was not only as hostile as often portrayed, but also (gasp!) evolved over time; after a time Calvin even came to a place of some enthusiasm about monophonic (or unison) a capella congregational singing. As described by Jeremy Begbie, "when Calvin speaks of Psalm-singing as enhancing and enriching the experience of worship, it is implicitly the Sursum Corda that is in play -- the lifting up of our hearts in the power of the Spirit to Jesus Christ at the right hand of the Father, who is in our midst 'conducting' our hymns."*

Pretty powerful image for a supposed music hater.

*Note: the quote is from Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening, p.27. Begbie offers a fairly robust discussion of Calvin and music. 

The distinctive musical contribution of Calvin's churches to music was the metrical psalm, a unison setting of a poeticized psalm text sometimes known slightly derisively as a "Geneva jig" for the utterly danceable qualities of many of the tunes (something Calvin would not have approved of). The term "metrical" points to the degree that the psalm texts were not only translated into the vernacular language (French, in Calvin's case), but also then reconfigured into poetic metrical patterns that were fairly easy to set to music.

Another part of the creation of those psalm tunes was the degree to which they suscribed to ancient musical theories about the particular affective qualities of different modes, or scales of music. (Nowadays most music we know is either in major or minor -- the latter often being stereotyped as "sad"; older musics could be in many different scales, typically called modes, according to the pattern of whole and half steps by which these modes advanced from one pitch to another. Any more explanation and this blog might break into a music theory lecture, and I'm no good at that.)

Here's the thing: different psalm tunes created under Calvin's influence were composed in different modes in order to use the presumed affective qualities of the mode to reinforce the particular emotional (or affective) qualities of the psalm text being set. As much as gets made of Calvin's sola-scriptura attitude about the singing of the congregation, Calvin's very tunes were in fact making use of musical affect to "enhance" or "enrich" the text, and therefore the singing of the people, and therefore the experience of worship.

In ways that escape our modern ears, even Calvinist psalm tunes are "affective."

Here's the deal, pastor: music is not a neutral resource for worship. Music always favors one thing over another, namely itself. It demands attention. It must be heard and its particular affects or abilities or powers must be reckoned with, and indeed music mismatched to words can utterly overwhelm the words or uttery undermine them.

In the church, this is far more likely to be obvious or noticeable in choral music in worship. A humble text set to raucous music (or vice versa) can not only fail on its own but can wreak havoc (or whatever the opposite of havoc would be -- somnolence? lassitude? torpor?) on the entire service to follow. That's just one possibility. Even music well-matched to its choral setting can land with a clang if it is out of step with the rest of the service, to the point of the music and worship seeming to be part of two separate and unrelated events.

But these things aren't impossible to find in the congregational-singing part of worship either. It usually happens with the chooser of hymns (you, right, pastor?) starts to feel desperate and decides to throw something in to "liven up the service" without much regard for the text being conveyed or the context in which the hymn or song is placed. It's a virtual inevitability when the congregation's singing is employed primarily as a mood-setter, a program of emotional manipulation with no further design or intent to bring the congregation to an emotional high and then "settle it down" in time to hear the pastor speak.

(Of course, if you're the pastor of a congregation where that is the principal purpose of the congregation's song, let's be blunt about it; you're pretty unlikely to be reading this blog.)

Music as neutral agent in worship is like the square root of -1; imaginary. Music inevitably affects anything to which it is attached. That affect (and effect) may change over time, as what was once radical and daring becomes melted down and has its rough edges sanded off, but the music still is not a neutral actor on the text being set; it does something to that text.

Understand this, dear pastor, about this thing you are deploying in worship. It isn't a submissive tool. It isn't harmless. This is, of course, a large part of its power and, frankly, a large part of its appeal. However, this is also part of the real risk of music in worship, even in congregational singing.

Of course, if you're using a hymnal, there's a pretty good chance that the committee charged with compiling that hymnal included more than a few musicians and theological types who are fairly sensitive to the ways that music and words go together, or don't. At least in theory, very few hymns with such clash of word and music affect are likely to get through into the final collection. As far as music from other sources, I can't speak to those in any large-scale way.

Here is something really important, though; you probably reecognize this when you hear it. 

You probably can't articulate it in lofty theological or theoretical language, but you can tell when the music and the text are "off," or they "don't fit," or they're "out of sync" with one another. These are not rules made up by a secretive cabal of music theorists; they come from experience. Those experiences may be felt or perceived differently in different musics of different cultures, so don't go thinking your perceptions of what affect a music may have necessarily apply to, say, Indonesian gamelan music or West African drumming or Native American vocalizations. But your instinct, if you're listening with even a modicum of care, has a real good chance of being correct.

And for the sake of worship and singing, the lifting up of our hearts to Christ our Great Conductor, listen to that instinct. It may save your worship service.

His thoughts on music in worship were probably more complicated than you think.

Dear Pastor: The preacher's voice

Just briefly, I'd like to revisit from a slightly different angle one of the topics already discussed in this series, the role of you, the pastor, in the singing of the congregation (first addressed, in a somewhat minimalist way, in the first entry in which I put forth the radical idea that you should sing when the congregation is singing). Here I'd like to discuss the different ways that will mean something depending on the kind of congregation in which you serve.

You will be vital if you are preaching in a small congregation.

Whether or not that congregation has an organ and/or piano, a music director and/or choir, or (as occasionally happens) relies on some sort of pre-recorded accompaniment to have something to sing with, your voice will matter here and will matter in the most literal sense. They will need your help in some cases to get going. It is possible that in some cases you will be the "song leader" for all practical purposes. (I did have some supply preaching experiences where this was the case before coming to my current position.) Even in the case of a very familiar hymn, a voice to "set the tone" or to provide a focal point for getting the singing started matters. As well, in a small congregation your participation (with a bit of enthusiasm, even) does send the very important message that this activity matters. It's bad enough to blow off the congregational songs in a large, expansive space where you might think you can get away with it because half the congregation can't see you; in a small, close space, the importance of your participation is magnified exponentially. In that situation you are "on stage" more fully and completely in a sense than in the most highly choreographed and scripted "contemporary" worship service, simply because everyone really is watching you. Don't demean the act of congregational singing by your indifference.

In more of a mid-size congregation, the effect may be different. Perhaps there is an organ (still after all these years the best instrument by far for supporting a group of singing voices, but that's a subject for another entry), or at least a piano, for the support of whatever singing goes on. There may be a choir as well (and you'd better believe they'd better be singing the hymns, but again, another entry). Still, your voice will matter, and matter a lot, particularly if you are taking the counsel provided in these earlier entries in this series.

If something less familiar to the congregation is being introduced, as is necessary for a theologically healthy congregation (yes, I actually mean that), it is vitally important that you are singing that song. If you've done your prep work the choir is also prepared to put forth vocal leadership for this new song, and it may even be helpful to have the choir sing a verse of the hymn before having the congregation join in for the remainder. (In some cases, though, a good, "game" congregation might just be better off jumping in headfirst and catching up; it's not remotely a failure if they're finally chiming in strongly by about midway through the second verse.) At any rate, if you've chosen this new thing to sing, it's hopefully obvious that you should be singing it strongly and with engagement, whether you sound like Gomer Pyle or Barney Fife. (Suffice to say that this level of participation is equally important in that smaller congregation too, where you are likely to be teaching the new hymn, and for that matter in whatever size congregation you may serve, when introducing something the congregation doesn't know.)

Now here's the part you may not believe; it might be most important of all for the pastor (or pastors, but especially the lead pastor, whatever that title may be) of a large church to be engaged in the singing of the congregation. Here's why.

Here we are speaking of a congregation with a multi-pastor staff. There may be members of the congregation who participate "up front" in the service's liturgy, leading prayers or reading scripture; there's a good change that there are other pastoral staff who also take leadership in these parts of the service. Indeed, there is some possibility that, until near the time of the sermon, you as the "lead" pastor have not visibly taken a leadership role in the service yet. Up to that point, what visible involvement do you have in worship? Or are you slipping into the role of spectator, watching the "rest of" the service go by until your big moment?

Truthfully, I don't personally know any pastors who would treat the service that way, or at least I'm pretty sure I don't. But honestly, if you're not singing, or if you're at best mumbling along with the hymns, aren't you kinda doing that?

By visible and energetic participation in congregational singing in that setting you are redirecting any straying attentions in the congregation back to the hymn at hand, which you've presumably selected with some intent towards connecting with or reinforcing other elements of worship like, I dunno, your sermon. Your "performance" demonstrates that the hymn matters; your lack of attention or participation in the hymns, as would be the case with any other part of the service, very clearly states to your congregation that it does not.  

So yeah, it matters if you sing. If you have that much trouble, get your church musician to help you prepare. But do what it takes to sing.

(continued...)

I'm not saying you have to go quite this far with it, OK?