My worship. MINE.

As has been mentioned on occasion here on this blog, I really try to stay in my mainline lane. This is in part because the mainline, as more or less always, needs to get its act together; in part because I'm not an evangelical, and my memories of when I was one aren't pleasant; and in part because as the two branches of the church currently stand I have a tough time even finding any kind of basis for even a starter conversation, particularly on the subject of music and worship where I have chosen to place myself.

(I also tend to avoid Patheos, most of the time, since they somehow decided an unrepentant Mark Driscoll was a good person to add to their roll of bloggers. Oh well.)

This particular post, however, somehow got brought to my attention (I blame Facebook). And while there are points here or there with which I can find some sympathy, and I'm an acknowledged non-fan of the so-called "contemporary" worship business, I'm a little bit uncerain whether the author here is overlooking something pretty basic about how large numbers of Christians of whatever make or model tend to approach worship.

As you can see, the author finds problematic the somewhat common practice of offering multiple worship services in varying "worship styles" (which he calls "cafeteria worship"; more on that later). To be precise, he contends that it is killing the church (which he almost immediately calls an oversimplification, to his credit).

I think on some level, while I can understand such frustration, the contention ignores something pretty basic. I don't know if it's "killing" the church to do multiple services in multiple styles, I am also dubious that it is particularly growing the church either, on the macro or micro level. For one thing, on the local level, it's pretty hard for any one church to actually be good at multiple styles of worship. The skill sets are not necessarily the same across the three. In such experience as I have, one of the worship services feels "native," for lack of a better word, while the other(s) feels like it's being done by people who don't really know how.

So, to address this, new folks are brought in. In this case, let's say it's an experienced "worship team" brought in to lead the contemporary service. Presumably under this leadership, it gets better. The pastor may still be involved, but it's pretty unlikely that she or he is actually overseeing this service, as that's not to be how it works when you've brought in a worship team. In a larger church, maybe one of the associate pastors ends up with primary responsibility for that service. Good for him/her, perhaps, a chance to lead more often. But as the two (or more) services grow more distinct in leadership and direction, guess what? For all practical purposes, you've got two (or more) churches. Give it enough time and the folks in one service don't even know the folks in the other.

And more, it isn't merely about worship being reduced to "my story," as the author puts it. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with the claim so much as I think it doesn't go far enough. Worship isn't merely reduced to "my story": worship is reduced to "mine."

A little experience here: a church in my past got into a heated disagreement over proposed changes to the two worship services needed due to personnel changes and slight decline in attendance. Make the changes to the other service. Don't change MY service. This was a very frequently repeated defense as the disagreement grew. MY service. MINE. All I can hear in my head is those birds from Finding Nemo. MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE MINE...

Here's the kicker: the two worship services were exactly the same. All the way through. Even the poor choir sang both services, although the membership represented in each was different (and this was apparently part of the problem, one "branch" of the choir was losing too many members to keep up the pace). But no one could countenance a change to MY worship.

As you might guess, MY worship isn't really worship, or virtually cannot be. It doesn't go outward at all. It is constrictive to the soul, but then there's a pretty good chance that the effect works in the opposite direction; constriction of soul rigidifies worship, or capacity to respond in worship, until the only worship acceptable is MY worship.

(Oh, and attempts to blame such rigidity on, say, reliance upon liturgy as a structure for worship - which I have heard lobbed around - make about as much sense as insisting that all humans must alike because we all have skeletons. Don't be fatuous. "Free" worship can get just as samey as anything liturgy-based.)

In short, while disuptes over musical styles often take the blame for disputes over worship, the root is much deeper in most cases. At that root, we will find that, no matter our tradition, we are at odds with one another over the very question of what worship is and what it is for. Until we are coming together on why we are even there on Sunday morning or whatever time we gather, all the musical questions in the world won't get us anywhere.

Don't blame the music, whatever style it may be. We're going to have to look deeper and ask more challenging questions. And there's no guarantee, even if we do find a way forward, that such understanding will stop a church's or the church's "decline" however one is defining that.

Ultimately, we might as well put our energy and passion into, oh, I don't know...worshiping God.

An excellent new/old hymn

While I'm still in the grip of some obnoxiously persistent bug or crud or whatever this is, today had one particularly fine hymnic pleasure. I had forgotten that for today's service, I chose the penultimate hymn in PC(USA)'s Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal. It is quite possibly my favorite hymnic thing to have happened in my lifetime, definitely one of my favorites if not.

Hymn #852 (yes, there are 853 hymns in the collection) is a text from 1991 by the Canadian hymn writer Sylvia Dunstan (1955-1993). "When the Lord redeems the very least" takes much of its substance from Psalm 126, while also alluding to a substantial number of other scripture texts as well, sometimes almost by accident simply because it touches on themes that come up an awful lot in scripture. That first phrase gives you a clue about its theological intent, and some selected other bits of the text will give you a clue as well: "when the hungry gather for the feast..." or "when the earth is given to the meek..." gives another peek. Tying such phrases together as well as leading the refrain is an equally key phrase: "we will rejoice." Notice the plural pronoun. It is conspicuous enough, and markedly more so when one is experiencing the hymn in its chosen musical context.

You see, Sylvia Dunstan composed this particular hymn to be paired with the tune of the old gospel song chestnut "I'll fly away." And the verse is just so, that the word "we" in the hymn falls exactly where the old gospel song would have you singing "I'll." That's one slick bit of theological commentary.

The inward, individualized, escapist longing of the original gives way to the corporate, immediate, rooted longing for God's kingdom now. All of those now-and-not-yet bits of the gospels find a home here, really.

And for those wondering, all of the nifty harmony bits are carried over in full.

The pairing was apparently deliberate. According to Carl Daw's Glory to God: A Companion, Dunstan deliberately set out to create theologically substantial and sound texts to go with favorite gospel song tunes (this is the only one I've come across so far). It's almost like a dare. You say it's the music you like? Fine. Here's the music. Even the harmonies. And I'll absolutely stand behind this text theologically. Go on. I dare you.

If the mainline is ever going to find its voice in worship and song, it's going to have to be a corporate voice, worshiping together. The occasional more individual text can work, but a steady diet of I/me/my hymns kills the corporateness of worship in song. Anything that pulls us together and pulls us towards those to whom Jesus keeps expressing favor is a good thing. If it sends the congregation out on a rollicking high note, that's fine too.

So there was my hymnic high point for the day. Try it sometime. I dare you.

The text is copyright, so any more and I'd be in trouble. I might be anyway.

Say what?

Note: blog entries will be more sporadic for the time being as I'm at a state of consolidating and editing before worrying about new content. In the meantime, posts will typically appear when something provokes a strong response, like below...


So despite feeling basically sick and gross since a colonoscopy Thursday (those of you under fifty, your time's a-comin'...), my wife talked me into going to a concert this afternoon at the local downtown Episcopal church, one that puts on concert events every month-plus or so. The particular event this afternoon, apparently an annual affair, was a Three-Organ Spectacular! Indeed, two extra organs were brought into the church and installed for the event to go along with that church's own very fine organ. My wife wanted to go in order to hear the main choral work on the program, a Mass for choir and two organs by Louis Vierne. (She sings in the local community chorus and one of her chorus friends also sings in this choir.)

The Vierne, which I didn't know, was good, and reminded me I should seek out more Vierne. That was in fact the only choral work on the program, which was otherwise studded with a variety of original pieces and arrangements mostly making use of multiple organs, naturally.

The final of two deliberate crowd-pleasers at the end of the concert was an arrangement of an arrangement. Choral singers are probably familiar with Peter Wilhousky's blowout arrangement of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," here rendered for those three organs plus a few pieces of percussion.

Oh, and a male quartet. Those four singers rendered the final stanza of the hymn, which (you might remember) is thus:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me.
As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,
While God is marching on.

In this case I'm not going to pick on the notion that women, apparently, are meant to be left in bondage (though that's very pick-on-able). Nor am I going to go on about the weird fetish over the word "bosom." (I mean, ... huh?) Others can whale away on the whole militaristic image of God, even acknowledging that the hymn itself dates from the year of the beginning of the American Civil War.

No, I want to pick on that first line.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea

Read it again.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea

The thing is, that line kind of slips by when one is singing the whole hymn. By that time you've already been confronted with so much ... for now, we'll go with dated language and imagery that you have either (a) swallowed it all, (b) just resigned yourself to getting through it for now, or (c) checked out completely. As a result, the utter weirdness of this line might not jump out at you.

I have no idea what Julia Ward Howe was thinking. I don't know if this was what just jumped into her head and it fit the poetic meter she was working and, hey, why not? I truly have no idea.

Was there some little-known tradition about Jesus being born in a lily patch? Is this something like the holly and the ivy that somehow becomes a British Christmas carol?

The "Christ was born across the sea" part is correct enough. One can argue about how these pretty poetic lines of odd religiosity actually connect to the militarized final lines. But this ... this is just a strange image with no apparent connection to reality. I truly have no recollection of either Luke's or Matthew's nativity narratives mentioning lilies. Even if one wants to rationalize lilies for whatever, don't those normally connect to Easter instead of the Nativity? Where do these lilies come from???

My point (and I do have one) is this: we swallow all sorts of strange stuff when it comes to "favorite" hymns. Christmas carols (such as the aforementioned holly and ivy business) are full of it, but Easter hymns can go there too (although at least some metaphorical connection can usually be made). "But it's harmless," you might say, and maybe you're right, but are you sure? How often does our brain come up against such a thing and try to lodge a protest only to be shut down because that's my favorite hymn, dammit and it happens enough times that we eventually start to lose any critical faculties about hymns at all?

As you might guess if you read this blog, that's not something I'm in favor of. When something sounds strange or off, don't dismiss it. Go back over it again. Think about it. Interrogate it with scripture. To borrow from the modern vernacular, if you see something, say something.

Our congregational song gets soft and mushy if we can't manage to listen to it with a sound mind.

N.B. For the record I did do a Google Image search for that line. Plenty of Civil War imagery, plenty of pictures of Julia Ward Howe, and plenty of lilies, but none with Christ being born in the beauty of them.

Now imagine Christ being born in the midst of this...

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.