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...

Overlooked Christmas hymns

Ugh, I've become desperate enough to resort to a listicle.

Hopefully it will be at least a somewhat thought-provoking listicle, though. Having now passed through a Christmas season worth of Sundays, i.e. no more opportunities for the corporate singing of Christmas "carols" and songs, I'm left to wonder at what I included that possibly not a lot of other pastors/churches did, what I didn't manage to work in, and what I might never get to in whatever length of pastoral career I might have.

So, without further apology, five hymns of the Christmas season you might not have sung:

5) "From Heaven above to earth I come." Martin Luther, for pete's sake. It's an interesting hymn in that it moves from angelic proclamation to human response. Musically, the VOM HIMMEL HOCH tune is pretty sturdy and maybe not some people's ideal of Christmas Eve, but there's always the Sunday after.

4) "It came upon the midnight clear." Maybe this seems an odd inclusion, but somehow it feels like it's always the first to go, so to speak. In some ways the reference to Christmas is pretty indirect: aside from the angels and their song, there's not necessarily a lot of obvious Christmas stuff in it. What it does is bring that message - "peace on the earth, good will to all" - forward to and through a world that has known more of suffering and wrong than our Christmas services tend to acknowledge, and that makes it worth holding on to.

3). "On Christmas night all Christians sing." For an old English carol (some of which can be pretty trippy and obscure), this hymn actually does some decent theology. It takes up the subject of sin and our deliverance from it and the new life that comes out of that deliverance, things that are often overlooked at this time of year.

2) "Of the Father's love begotten." I'm guessing that not all congregations (or their pastors) are super comfortable with singing a chant tune, one that is typically rendered in an unmetered fashion even in Protestant hymnals. It's a shame to miss this one, though. It touches on the typical Christmas-story stuff but also soars heavenward in its exultation of the One born "the world's Redeemer." Perhaps the most outright beautiful imagery and description of any Christmas hymn I know.

1) "Who would think that what was needed." Much more recent than the above selections, this John L. Bell/Graham Maule text plays wonderfully (as its title suggests) with the upside-down nature of the Christmas event. The final stanza also invites reflection on our current, progressed-but-not-necessarily-improved state, and brings that surprise to us into our very current lives.

All of the above are in Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal. I have absolutely no doubt that there are other such not-so-well-known Christmas hymns out there that are, in fact, not so well known to me. But this simply comes from my own experience as hopefully a prompt to reflect on what the hymnody of the church has to offer this time of year, besides those that have become so familiar as to be almost meaningless.

Ironically, the image comes from a blog entry from Concordia Publishing House, a couple of years ago, doing the very same thing I just did. Two of the same hymns are included: "From Heaven Above" and "Of the Father's Love Begotten."

Dear Pastor: Thoughts on coordination, prompted by Advent hymns

In the previous post we left off with a question about how much it matters if one sings Advent hymns all the way through Advent when your sanctuary starts looking like Christmas at the mall the day after Thanksgiving. This prompts some thoughts that may well open up questions that apply to the song of the church more broadly, not just during this particular time of year.

There is a tendency, all the more powerful for being unspoken, to act in a practical way as if the musical life of the church is somehow a separate and independent thing from the church itself, somehow. (To be clear: music is hardly the only part of the church’s life that can be treated this way – a church’s youth program might never have real interaction with the larger body, to name just one aspect.) This is a more prominent tendency if some part of the church music life “stands out” in some way – a historic or powerful organ, for example, or a choir capable of an active concert life outside of the church’s worship. Note that none of these things are inherently bad. There are few things in the world like a musically prolific and varied organ (which has prompted me to give much larger sums of money to my seminary for the installation of a real live organ than I normally give in one chunk), and a musically talented choir can still be a powerful leader in worship, if the focus on leading in worship is maintained.

Here two past experiences leap to mind, both of which come from my time in South Florida. One was a brief experience of observation, needed as I was teaching at a university where the students were highly familiar with the latest in contemporary worship music (or “praise and worship,” that weird separation of two very integral things) but had never heard “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” This required fieldwork of a sort at a local megachurch, even though I was trained as a historical musicologist and not an ethnomusicologist.

The musical outfit at this megachurch was not strictly a typical praise and worship band. It was a much larger ensemble, even including a brass section, but with the guitars and drums at its core. It also featured not a lead singer or two, but a small ensemble of singers (one might even have called it a “choir”!), again, with a clear “featured singer” as its lead. Stylistically and functionally, though, it was a praise band, and its role was to give in effect a small concert before the preacher took over. (This of course was what was supposed to fill the role of “congregational” singing in this church.)

At that point an amazing thing happened in at least a couple of my observations. After the band finished and the preacher commenced to preaching, some of the “worshipers” left. They actually got up and left the sanctuary, never to return. I couldn’t pursue them to find out why they were leaving and still observe the rest of the service, to my great regret. But one can only guess that they had come for the concert, so to speak, and having gotten what they came for, they were quite content to move on to lunch or whatever came next. This was not widespread by any means, but it was rather jarring nonetheless. Mind you, also, the preaching turned out to have at least as many qualities of a “show” as the music did, and plenty of folks presumably got what they came for in staying for the sermon.

Still, even on that small scale, it does point to an example of how musical life can be its own thing, separate even from the worship service going on around it.

The other South Florida experience, at a church my wife and I attended long-term, was in a very different setting but had a startlingly similar result. Choir and organ ruled in this church, and the choir in particular was the church’s pride and joy. Many of its more prominent singers were in fact recruited from a professional opera company in Miami, whose rehearsal accompanist was one of the church’s organist/choirmasters. Here the “show” was clearly all about the choir, for which Mozart and Brahms and other classical masters were standard repertory, arias and solos from their works were featured with those professional opera singers, and the pastor in this case had no illusions that his preaching was anywhere near as favored (or at least the congregation didn’t). Here the shock value, which took much longer to observe and to sink in, came in the degree to which the singing of the congregation was clearly second-tier. If one of their large choral numbers was coming up after a hymn, a large proportion of the choir would not be singing the hymn. Gotta save that voice, after all. (You’d think it might be useful as a light warm-up to sing along on the hymn, at least?) Correspondingly, even with such a proficient choir, the congregational singing at this church was minimal at best. It was valued by neither choir nor musical leaders nor congregation, and it showed. It got to be embarrassing singing in the congregation. People kept looking at me (and my wife).

(Note: I do not in fact attribute this to the attitudes of the “hired gun” singers, some of the veterans in particular, who frankly seemed as far as I could tell to want to be supportive of all the stuff in worship. Their interest was not particularly encouraged.)

Both of these examples speak to lack of integration in a church’s worship life. And this brings us back to the question of how useful it is to stick to your guns about singing Advent hymns throughout Advent when the church looks like the Christmas tree lot in A Charlie Brown Christmas. (That’s an exaggeration. I hope.) If the choir is already singing Christmas anthems, if the tree is already up and blinking, if the Nativity scene is fully loaded, then your Advent hymns might not be having the effect you’d hope. (A “progressive” Nativity scene, which only fills up over the course of Advent, can actually be an effective means of emphasizing the season, which would in turn work in harmony with your musical and presumably preaching efforts.)

But elements of worship working at cross-purposes with one another are not particularly helpful in proclamation. The inconsistent and maybe even contradictory message is not usually an effective message. And this truth holds no matter what liturgical season is at hand, not just in Advent.

It’s a lesson to learn and apply at all times and in all seasons. 

Dear Pastor: Advent hymns

Note: more illness, more interruptions, and some major ones coming along in the future. But for now, plugging away, and trying to find something else to think about...

I suppose, depending on the church you attend, that either it has been Christmas for a couple of weeks now, or it's not Christmas yet.

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course. Christmas is on December 25, most churches have some sort of service on Christmas Eve, and that's how the liturgical calendar frequently used in mainline churches draws it up. The four Sundays prior to Christmas Eve constitute the season of Advent, registered as a two-sided time of preparation; for the birth of the Christ child at Christmas, and for the coming return and reign of Christ for eternity.

It is possible, however, that the music congregations sing might not - not quite - reflect this particular liturgical orientation.

It's just a guess, mind you, but I'm going to wager that guess that some of you, even in seriously mainline churches, have started seeing some decidedly non-Advent hymns slip into worship by now. Dare I say, quite possibly, that maybe some of you sang Christmas carols this morning? Or maybe even last Sunday morning? Again, just a guess.

You're probably expecting some sort of argument (or screed, depending on your opinion) about why churches shouldn't jump the gun on Christmas carols. Or possibly you're making the argument in your head, rehearsing it for when you get the chance to spill it, that there simply aren't enough worthwhile Advent hymns to sing for four whole weeks, and "jumping the gun" is simply a necessity.

First of all, I have to say I can't buy the latter argument, at least not if your church has Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal (or its ecumenical counterpart). They're not all prime, but you can make it through four weeks of Advent on the Advent hymns it offers (especially if you have the wit to break up "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" and its seven verses over two or even three spots in your service, especially on the Sunday of Advent that falls on December 17, 23, or somewhere in between.

However, I'm going to go a different, I think, route with this question. Ultimately, the question of how much Advent hymnody to sing or how soon to jump on the Christmas carol bandwagon is probably best not addressed in isolation. Rather, it should be a part - one part - of a much broader question about how a church approaches the whole season.

A couple of weeks ago this article (over a year old) somehow popped up on my Facebook feed. One doesn't have to take the positions put forth by the visiting couple in the article to open up some fairly serious questions about how the church participates in the season that is currently underway. Indeed, the very identity of the season opens the question: is this the "Christmas season"? Or is it really Advent? And no matter how we answer the question verbally, what, for example, does our sanctuary say about how we answer the question? Even if we exhaust the full complement of Advent hymns in our hymnal, is their message getting lost amidst the wreaths and Christmas tree (even if it is decorated solely with "chrismons" - and what exactly are those supposed to be anyway?) and all the trappings that look like a pale imitation of the local shopping center? (As for the "Chrismon tree" business, am I the only person who gets the sinking suspicion that it was invented as a backdoor excuse to put a Christmas tree in the sanctuary?)

Do we, in short, send a mixed message in what our congregation (or especially a visitor) sees and sings? And what purpose is served in looking like a pale imitation of the mall? Is it possible that what we do with everything in our church during this season - not just the songs we sing, but what we show the world in our place of worship - might be worth reconsidering?

Is this the only visual evidence of Advent in your church?

Note: in the interest of full disclosure, I have recently written a batch of hymns for Advent, which can be found here, here, here, and here; an accompanying hymn for Christmas Eve is here.

Pope Francis (!!!) on choir and congregational singing

A combination of travel and illness has sidelined this blog for a while. How nice of Pope Francis, of all people, to hand me a little boost to get the blog back on its feet and at least starting to recover with a little warmup entry.

Apparently the Vatican welcomed an event with the unprepossing title "International Meeting of Choirs" over the weekend. In giving welcome to the participants in the event the Pope said many fairly boilerplate-type things about the importance of choirs and the power of music and all that. Naturally, one particular, not very boilerplate-type thing (at least in the context of a gathering of choirs) that the Pope said is what caught my attention.

The money quote:

“You are the musical animators of the whole congregation. Don’t take its place, depriving the people of God of the chance to sing with you and bear witness to the Church’s communal prayer.”

Not bad, particularly considering he's speaking to a whole bunch of choir singers. (Not to mention speaking from a tradition that has only been practicing congregational singing for about half a century.)

Of course, choirs can be allowed or even encouraged to outshine the song participation of the congregation. To the degree that significant resources, i.e. dollars, are invested into the program - music, possibly paid soloists, etc. - the temptation to put the choir front and center more often is going to be pretty natural, responding to a perceived pressure to "show a return on that investment." Still, the choir's principal job is to encourage the song of the congregation, and to the degree that it becomes a substitute for the congregation rather than a support to it, the choir becomes a problem.

And let's be clear that choirs are not the only potential such impediments. There is supreme irony that in churches that go the "contemporary" route, the very bands/worship leaders ostensibly hired to lead or encourage the congregation's song can (and do, often enough) end up drowning it out. Heavy reliance on soloists can do it, as can an overzeaous organist.

At any rate, I wouldn't have expected the Pope to be quite so direct on the subject, but hey, when it comes to the encouragement of congregational singing, it's nice to have such an ally, even from outside the mainline.

That headline though:

"Help community sing, don't replace its voice"

Confession: I just Frankensteined a hymn

You might recall a comment from some weeks ago about an overly well-known evangelical figure penning two verses to the hymn "Great is thy faithfulness" to bend it more toward his own theology (supposedly), and making a poetic hash of it. You might recall also that "Amazing grace" was also identified as a "Frankensteined hymn" because of the historical amputation of two of its original stanzas and addition of the current fifth stanza, making (unpopular opinion alert!) a bit of a theological hash of that hymn.

Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Dr. Frankenstein.

With a special event coming up in two weeks, I had an urge to use the old G.K. Chesterton hymn text "O God of earth and altar." I was mildly surprised to find it had not made it into Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal, and had to go looking in the 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal to find its most recent appearance in my experience. I had not realized that its appearance there was in a "Frankensteined" form, with an edit made in the second stanza and a new third stanza by Jane Parker Huber.

Two problems here. First, the Huber portions are under copyright, and getting that permission in time was probably not feasible. (The Chesterton text is public domain.) Second, those edits didn't really work thematically, in my humble opinion. Regarding part of the discussion in the previous blog entry, the Huber stanza is rather dramatically different from the original Chesterton stanzas in language -- Huber has, again in my humble opinion, always been a bit self-conscious about sounding "modern" in language and a bit susceptible to what might be called "hymn buzzwords," and that tendency grated against Chesterton's older poetic impulse.

To be honest, the copyright problem was enough to throttle that idea, but the second problem sent me off searching for Chesterton's original, or as close as I could find, which meant a visit to hymnary.org, which is usually a fairly trustworthy source for such things. It did not disappoint.

That hymn can therefore be examined here.

You can probably guess where the issues are. Chesterton's verse about "all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men" made sense enough in 1906, as women generally weren't voting at that time, but it simply doesn't work today - perversely, because women do not need to be let off the hook for cruelty. Everybody can be cruel. And that third stanza made sense at the time, I guess, but having to explain just the first line, "Tie in a living tether the prince and priest and thrall" would largely undermine the whole point of using the hymn. Finally, considering that the service in question is on the theme of peace, that line about "lift up a living nation, a single sword to thee" is probably a non-starter as well, unless I wanted to use it as an example of the mindset that got Britain into the bloody and destructive morass of the Great War just eight years after Chesterton penned these lyrics. And indeed, that idea might make it into the service somehow.

But instead, I did something foolish. I performed my own surgery on the hymn.

For the "cruel men," the line will read "from all the easy speeches that lead us wrong again." Not very Chestertonian, I'm sure, but I will say it does get at the point Chesterton was rightly making.

The new third stanza is as follows:

God, be our only Ruler, our Guardian and our Guide;No more let earthly rivals distract us from your side.Bind all our lives together, rebuke and save us all;O God of earth and altar, now hear our desperate call.

I will confess that I was self-conscious about trying to get a little closer to Chesterton's style here, though I won't claim to have succeeded. There is, you can see, some direct borrowing from Chesterton (such as "bind all our lives together" and the echo of the opening phrase) in hope of making the connection more viable.

So there's my confession: I'm bending ol' Gilbert Keith a little bit for my own purposes. My hope is that the adjustment is not too violent or ruinous to the hymn, and that it will work for the one occasion on which it is likely to be sung. But I am now guilty of (along with Jane Parker Huber, I guess) making a bit of a Frankenstein's monster out of this august hymn. Guilty as charged.

But we're still gonna sing it.

Sorry, Gilbert Keith.

Dear Pastor: Bad spaces and bad leadership

Having worked through most of John L. Bell's The Singing Thing it seems only fair to see it through, right? There's not too much left, and the points left to cover are worth thinking about.

Of his four reasons people don't sing, we have addressed the questions of vocal disenfranchisement (people having been told long ago they can't sing) and the effect of performance culture on the church (people believing they shouldn't sing because they don't sound like the person up front). The last two can be covered, I think, in one post here, not because they don't matter so much but because there may be less to unpack about these and, in one case, there may only be a limited amount one can do about it.

3) Acoustics, or the qualities of the space in which singing happens that enhance or dampen the sound the singers make. In many cases little can be done; the space was built decaces or centuries before and the necessary changes are financially or practically prohibitive. On the other hand, if the building is old enough, it may actually be of superior acoustic quality - those old European cathedrals are often acoustic marvels for having been built so long ago. (The things you learn when amplification doesn't exist...)

There are other factors that may more adjustable, depending on your circumstance. Does your congregation sit somehow facing one another, in an arc or some other shape that brings the folk into eyesight of one another at least a little bit? This could help. Do they sit in long fixed pews facing the front, towards the pulpit and possibly choir? Probably not good, plus it has the subliminal effect of suggesting that the choir provides the "real" music for the service. Is the space heavily carpeted? Ick.

How much can you do to improve your space's friendliness towards singing? I certainly can't tell you.

4) Bad leadership. Yeouch. The uncommitted band members who barely show up, the unprepared organist, the slovenly choir...it's the horror-show chapter. And this is the place where, if your church is infested with such a problem, you are inevitably going to be required to intervene. Sorry.

The book's final section addresses the ambiguities of congregational singing, things that are quite often not under your control or that of anyone else in leadership. People who have unnatural or irrational aversions to guitars or organs or pianos or drums, due to associations you cannot possibly know; the accrual of familiarity to a particular song or sound around which congregants put up walls to protect themselves from anything different or challenging; attractions and aversions to particular musical styles, harmonies, tunes, instrumental timbres; the ambiguity or unfamiliarity of certain hymnic language - words like "Zion" or "Ebenezer," or even more familiar words like "peace" - what does that really mean? Absence of war? A treaty or armistice? Shalom?; language archaic or new that puts off one faction in the congregation and attracts another; language for God or for humanity that is not exclusive; the list could truly go on for quite a ways. And some of them will simply call for someone (likely you) to lead your congregation to discern the way to go, and some of them will simply be vexations that you will face, and just have to find a way through them.

The book is worth having, although occasional parts of it may be a little outside the grasp of the non-musician. Bell generally does a decent job of explaining those parts, though, so that should not be a reason not to get it.

Turns out this is just part one. We'll get to part two at some point in the future.