Dear Pastor: Music is not magic

You've quite possibly heard or seen it before.

"If we just (implement x kind of music), we'll (get result y)."

Though it seems most often applied to the x and y "do praise and worship music" and "get young people in church", it really can apply across a wide array of musical styles, each of which has an audience, so to speak.

"Big classical choral music"? "People with money." (The public radio approach, you might say.)

"Good ol' gospel music"? "Real faithful Christian folk." (Judgmental much?)

You get the idea, and you can probably fill in the blanks yourself, no matter how broad or limited your musical experience. Whenever churches go looking for a magic elixir to "revitalize" or boost their numbers, music in worship seems to be a really popular place to start.

And on some level, it can work. A newly-instituted contemporary worship service can draw in some of the curious. A big fancy choir can get some onlookers. I don't know of any church that has decided to go whole hog on the gospel song approach out of the blue, but they might just poach a few old-timers from some churches if they did.

So yes, as the title of this article wants to suggest, contemporary Christian music (or gospel song or "traditional" hymnody, whatever that means) probably is bringing Christians together.

It (whichever style you name) is also driving Christians apart.

Note that I have not read and am not at all referring to the content of the article (I assume I'll get around to reading it eventually, but I'm pretty sure it won't be before Easter Sunday). Since the article is in Christianity Today I can safely that their audience is not my audience, or at least my target audience. But the title itself, as a new iteration of this familiar old refrain, is enough to provoke comment.

And that comment is one rooted in nothing more complicated than human nature. Some will glom onto the contemporary thing, others will run from it as fast as possible. And you can go down the line through whatever variety of congregational song you please, and you can get the same result.

There is reference here to a hoary old trope of music as somehow a great unifier. That itself is probably some variant of the even hoarier old trope of music as a "universal language." Do yourself a favor and spend some time with a broader variety of musics from around the world before ever uttering that line, please? For that matter, spend some time with, say, Hildegard of Bingen and Anton Webern and see if that "universal language" idea still makes sense to you. Folks who try to talk the "universal language" thing are probably not widely familiar with a lot of things, or are mostly interested in pushing a highly Westernized version of those musics (this happens a lot in popular music, in which Western - read 'American' - influence is almost impossible to escape).

One could argue that the same thing has been true in what might be called the "global song of the church" as well. Those in various "mission fields" were largely fed translated versions of American or European hymns as the stuff of their worship. It took quite a while to get away from that tendency and to see the growth of more indigenous musical expressions of faith and gospel begin to grow. Even so, any degree to which the "brings people together" argument for global church song might hold water is going to be largely a colonialist legacy as much as anything Christian.

The same is going to be true across other styles as well. The contemporary Christian impulse has a huge component of stylistic export involved, with the style being extremely American even if its biggest producers come out of Australia.

Disturbing colonialist legacies aside, it really never is the music itself that "brings people together." Music is not magic, as the title here suggests. The uniting or dividing is done by people, just as pretty much everything that happens in or to the church, for good or ill, is done by people. If some number of people choose to come to a church because of its musical performance style (and some number in turn choose to leave or stay away), it's the people doing the moving and choosing.

It would be far more accurate to say that in choosing a particular musical idiom for your congregation, you're also choosing a potential "target demographic" that you hope to bring in. If you end up drawing more baby boomers or GenXers than millennials with your contemporary service, which could easily happen, that's another issue, but the choice to plant one's flag in a particular musical category is also a choice about who you want in your church. Frankly, it should be openly acknowledged as such. You'll get exceptions to the rule for sure, but be clear about exactly what you're seeking with your church's musical choices.

This frankly is not even about declaring such choices right or wrong. You do you, dear pastor. But be honest with yourself about exactly what you're trying to do when you make one musical choice or another, and don't expect music to be a magic elixir that brings the entire world (no exceptions) under your roof.

But what about the people who didn't go to the concert?

My worship. MINE. (Another angle)

So it's been a little while since this post, in which the subject of a church offering multiple styles of worship service became a jumping-off point for thinking about the perception of worship as MINE (a la the Finding Nemo birds). There is another angle from which such a title invites reflection, one that touches both on a history of the hymnody sung in many of our churches and possibly certain current practices as well. In this case the problem at hand can be boiled down to three letters: "I," "we."

Worship is a corporate act: that is, the body of Christ is joined together to do worship. For all the folks who go on about how they "find God" in nature or music or whatever, that isn't worship, so let's not be confused here. The very point of worship, right down to the songs sung, is to join that body, that community together in praise of God, confession of sin, proclaiming and hearing the Word and responding to that Word, and being sent out from the gathering to do Christ's work in God's world. It's something we do.

Of course, there have been stretches of the history of the church where its hymnody and congregational song didn't always reflect this sense of the body gathered in worship. Take, for a few examples:

"Will there be any stars in my crown?"
"Face to face with Christ my Savior"
"On Jordan's stormy banks I stand"
"When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there"
"O that will be glory for me"
"When I can read my title clear"
"I am satisfied with Jesus"
"Make me a blessing" (Or, "Make me a channel of blessing" - both present)
"Must I go, and empty-handed"

You get the idea. This comes from the first hymnal of my childhood, a reasonably narrow range of that hymnal. There are, of course, other hymns directed at God without first-person singular or plural usage, and it should be noted that there are also hymns that do reflect a more corporate position ("We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves," "Light of the world, we hail thee," "O God, we pray for all mankind," "We've a story to tell," "We shall see the King someday," and of course "Shall we gather at the river" also appear.) But that's a lot of first-person singular.

And when that much first-person singular gets drilled into your head Sunday after Sunday, it makes a difference. Congregational song forms us, every bit as much as anything else we do in the church and maybe more given the insidious nature of music as what Frederick Buechner called a "subcutaneous" art, one that gets under your skin.

Now imagine such song getting under your skin for thirty or forty or fifty years.

If you want to talk about some of the things that challenge the church as it stands now, and the degree to which the "mine mine mine" mindset affects the church, this is a possible surreptitious culprit to think about. If we spoke before about the possessiveness that can form around a particular worship style or service, it's worth considering how much similar possessiveness can form around a particular church itself. Indeed, the two go hand in hand.

You end up with a church that gives off the vibe or mindset of "don't change anything as long as I'm alive." They can recognize that something's not right, can see that what used to work great doesn't work so well, what used to pack them in now pushes them away, and so forth and so on, but still "don't change anything as long as I'm alive." It's almost become a part of that church's DNA. That particular body both functions as a collection of individuals and as an "individual" fearful of anything that might disrupt each comfort zone. And all the individualized congregational songs, if we take the whole idea of music and its influence seriously, have to have had an effect on that church's (or that collection of individuals') mindset.

[Note: you will possibly remember that I am not of mainline origins, so my experience - you might think - is not relevant. True, I am not of mainline origins; however, you'd be surprised how much churches that get counted as "mainline" now have rather substantial histories of much more "evangelical" approaches to worship, especially to congregational song. Maybe not in downtown Philadelphia, but, across (ahem) certain regions of the country, ... we'll just say that Southern Baptists and Presbyterians didn't necessarily sound all that different when it came time to sing.]

Now, here's the question: how much of that "I-me-mine" mode of thought still exists in congregational song? Others will have to tell me how much of that characterizes "contemporary" worship. Most hymnody that has come out of the mainline has gotten better at emphasizing the "we"-ness of worship, and other sources such as the Iona community are pretty good at keeping song corporate. (Still, some newer hymns do slip into the individual - "O Christ, surround me," Glory to God 543, comes to mind.)

But it's a thing to be aware of. Are we forming the body of Christ, everyone all together? Are we singing "we" when it's necessary to sing a first-person pronoun? There is some - some - space for congregational songs from an individual position, but it shouldn't be the bulk of the repertoire. A church full of Finding Nemo birds doesn't end up being a church with much future.

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."