Is Christian music too predictable?

I'm preparing for a talk on music and theology (not particularly on Christian music, mind you, but on music in general and its place in creation). This very interesting quote from theologian Jeremy Begbie came up:

Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) is an enormous industry, and some would argue that it has succumbed in an alarming way to the co-opting of religion into the commercial interests of consumption, capitalism, and materialism.... It is disappointing, for example, to find an intense musical conservatism in much of the contemporary worship scene. (Resounding Truth, 256)

He admits that simplicity and accessibility is part of the point of church music, but goes on to issue a challenge:

Is the church prepared to give its musicians room to experiment (and fail), to juxtapose different styles, to educate themselves in music history, to resist the tendency to rely on formulas that "work" with minimum effort and can quickly guarantee seats filled in church -- and all this in order that congregational worship can become more theologically responsible, more true to teh God who has given us such abundant potential for developing fresh musical sounds? (Resounding Truth, 256)

Are we too conservative in pushing the boundaries of musical creativity? Or are we simply doing the right thing of serving the church where they're at (not getting stuck up our own guitarsenal developing music which is so complicated and foreign that your average pew-sitter cannot understand what's happening let alone join in)?

Making church boring is emotional manipulation

Chris Green has been giving the Annual Moore College lectures this year. In his talk today on preaching he pointed out that there are two ways of being emotionally manipulative.

The first is to whip people up into a frenzy, which is not motivated by the gospel but by the sheer emotional experience of the event.

But another group of people are guilty of manipulation in a different way. Chris recalls church experiences where a hugely powerful song has concluded and the service leader has failed to even note the emotional response which it has produced, saying "well done...and now the notices". This is deliberately quenching the emotional impact of the gospel, trying to make sure people don't respond as they would otherwise. It is manipulation.

I haven't thought about it this way before, but I think he's right.

I would go so far as to say that to deliberately try to pour cold water on people's whole-person-ed response to the power of God's word is manipulative.

Some examples of this kind of manipulation are
1. Choosing songs which are so bad that they take our attention away (if it were possible) from God's grace to us in Jesus Christ.

2. Planning services with no space for our response, so that no sooner have we surveyed the wondrous cross than some joker gets up and turns our attention to the location for the church picnic.

3. Being so casual that we are tempted to irreverence.

4. Being so focused on mutual edification that we conduct our entire service as if God were absent, and nobody thinks to actually do business with God.

5. Creating rules, or a culture, where common ways of responding to the emotional power of the gospel is discouraged (such as 'no raising hands in church').

Any others you can think of?

Only people who are skillful should serve

Here is a radical proposition for you: only people who are skilful should serve in music ministry.

I know it sounds a bit harsh. But I have a proof-text for it ... 1 Chronicles 15:22 has become my new memory verse:

Kenaniah the head Levite was in charge of the singing; that was his responsibility because he was skillful at it. (NIV)

Seems to make sense to me.

Now it's a little bit of a fudge, I know. For starters I don't believe in proof texting like this (we need to look at a theology of music and a theology of church and the gathering). And the NIV is rendering the Hebrew 'to understand' as 'Skilful at' which is fair enough in the context but other versions bring the point out slightly differently (The NRSV lowers the bar a little: "Chenaniah, leader of the Levites in music, was to direct the music, for he understood it." )

However I think we sometimes are too keen to include everybody in serving in the music team. Should someone who is tone deaf be 'allowed' to lead the singing? Well, no, not necessarily.

It might be a good idea to let them, for a range of political and pastoral reasons. Each church needs to work out what level of skill is required for the task at hand. My church may not need the same skilful musicians as a church of 20,000 people broadcast all over the world.

But I don't think we need to see a theological mandate for participation in the church music team by anyone and everyone who wants to 'use their gift'.

There IS a theological reason why everybody should SING together. But to think this means every singer should have a microphone is a confusion. It treats the band as the church, and puts a false wall between the band and the church (as if you are only participating if you are in the band). They are all participating as the one body of Christ (Gal 3:28) even if they don't have a microphone. We are all one, a body of believers without division, and yet we are also differentiated (1 Cor 12:29). 

So let those who are skilful at music (or at least 'understand' it!) lead the rest of us in singing joyfully to our God.

The ends justify the means

 When it comes to music, I’m with Luther: the ends justify the means.

It is interesting to compare the attitude of Calvin, Zwingli and Luther to using secular music styles in church. Calvin (1509–1564) refused to use either catholic styles of music, or the secular styles of his day (which he said were ‘lascivious, injurious, alluring’¹). He was afraid that ‘venom and corruption’ might reach ‘the depths of the heart’.² In a similar vein, Ulrich Zwingli held that ‘spirit and flesh contradict each other’.³ He was dubious about singing, preferring to sing ‘not with our voices, like the Jewish singers, but with our hearts’.⁴ In the summer of 1524 his followers smashed all the organs they could find, hoping to bring things back to pure worship.⁵

So against his reformation buddies, Martin Luther (1483-46) stands out. He was prepared to use any style of music that would help people engage with God: ‘For their sake [simple laymen] we must read, sing, preach, write and compose, and if it would help the matter along, I would have all the bells pealing, and all the organs playing, and let everything chime that has a clapper’.⁶ Rumour has it he used pub tunes – this is not quite right, but he certainly used folk music to drive the gospel messages home. (Incidentally, it is no accident that J.S. Bach composed his amazing Cantatas while working at Leipzig Luthern church). The key values were education, scriptural words, and communion between the church here and the church in heaven. Whatever would serve these goals would be employed in church.

1 Charles Garside, The Origins of Calvin's Theology of Music: 1536–1543 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979), 28.

2 Paul Westermeyer, Te Deum: The Church and Music (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 156.

3 Paul Westermeyer, Te Deum: The Church and Music (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 151.

4 Ulrich Zwingli, ‘Conclusion 45’ in Charles Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven: Yale, 1966), 45.

5 Paul Westermeyer, Te Deum: The Church and Music (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 150.

6 Flynn, ‘Liturgical Music’, 780

Unprofessional and proud of it

One of my friends was a (semi)professional comedian. I love his jokes. I saw him on TV once and he had the whole concert hall in stitches. But he could be terrible company sometimes. If, hanging out with friends, you tried to make a joke which didn’t go so well he would respond in mock condescension: ‘oh please Andy, leave it to the professionals’.

In some contexts professionalism is out of place. And my church is one of them.

The push to professionalism in our music has a long history. The middle ages had competing styles of music. On the one hand there was Gregorian chant, which was simple simple simple. This came from (I think) a suspicion of emotion and a desire to strip everything back so that the rational propositions of the Scriptures would be more clear to us.

On the other hand, other styles of music became way complex. Things got so out of control that people often couldn’t tell what language was being sung, and Pope John XXII got concerned that we had lost sight of the purpose of church music.¹

Originally, music had been a communal activity. While Tertullian hints that some songs were performed by good singers,² Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom and Basil the Great all give the impression that the focus was communal singing.³ Just prior to the reformation, this priority to the communal was in danger of being obscured. In the style of music called ‘Lector chant’ the crowd would merely sing the occasional ‘alelluia’. In the style called ‘Schola chant’ trained clergy would do it all. The average punters could not pull off the quality of music that was desired, and so they left it to the professionals.

I don’t dispute that the quality of music is important in church. I am not even against paying professional musicians to be involved in services, where the size and strategy of the church demands it. But whatever we do, I think the purpose of singing should remain firmly in our view. Employing professional musicians may help people to sing better in a large auditorium, because the pressures of performing in such a large space require a level of skill or commitment which is beyond most volunteers. It is no different, in my mind, to employing a full time minister to prepare sermons. But if the pursuit of professionalism actually disenfranchises the average people the pews so they don’t sing any more, then I think we have a problem. We don’t want to leave it to the professionals.

1 Evans, Music in the Modern Church, 27.

2 Flynn, ‘Liturgical Music’, 770.

3 John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 145’ at para 1469; Ambrose of Milan ‘Commentaries on the Twelve Psalms of David’ at para 1158; Basil the Great, ‘Homily on Psalm 1’ at para 1346, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources.

The song matters more than the words

Words don't just mean things, they do things!

Hypothetical scenario: you're leading singing at church and you need one more song than expected. You have two choices. One song has only a few basic lines about God's love, but it's sure to get people singing passionately. Another has five verses of theological firepower, but the melody is so daggy nobody can sing it with a straight face.

Gut reaction - which do you choose?

To help you decide, I want to suggest here that the propositional content of songs (what the words mean when you add them all together) is not the be-all-and-end-all of a song (because it is not the be-all-and-end-all of Scripture, or indeed any act of communication).

Of course, my title is deliberately provocative. (Made you look!) I’m not for a moment suggesting that the lyrical content is unimportant. I’m not asking for heretical songs, I’m not asking for vacuous songs. This is my tenth year of training and blogging and trying to get people to pay more attention to music ministry as a Word ministry.

But in doing so I also want us to avoid a reductive approach to words, and avoid divorcing words from music in a song. Here are my two points:

1. Words don’t just mean things, they also do things. They can do lots of different things. And I’m disturbed when I hear people assume that song lyrics can be reduced merely to true statements with a melody attached.
2. A song is not just words put to music, it is a new creation which is more than the sum of its parts.

Words do stuff

A youth group leader complains about a line which says ‘I will say blessed be the name of the Lord’ because she’s not sure whether that is a true statement about a future action he will in fact undertake.

A songleader changes the words of a popular song because it says ‘I’m dancing on this mountain top’ and he’s not sure that everyone in the church is, actually, dancing and even if they were the church is in a valley so mountain top dancing is probably inaccurate.

The problem with these examples is they treat words as if they can do only one thing. They either report a true fact, or a false one. But words can do other things, like encourage people to a future act, or bring a picture to mind which inspires a certain response.

This is a theological observation, not just something that applies to songs. It applies to the Bible. Kevin Vanhoozer is a brilliant evangelical writing on the issue of how to interpret the bible. His best observation is that communication is an action. God is speaking. He does thing with words. And he does different things with different words.

‘Because God does many things with words, our responses too will be varied: we must affirm the doctrine, obey the law, hold fast in hope to the promises, rejoice in the gospel.’ (Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scriptures and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2002), 39)

‘Do not steal’ is not true or false, it’s a command to be obeyed or disobeyed. ‘Do not take your Holy Spirit from me’ is not a comment on the perseverance of the Saints, it’s a prayer to be prayed. ‘Sing unto the Lord a New Song’ is not a command, it’s an invitation to sing with our eyes set on him.

Songs are more than the sum of their parts

 A  songwriter feels that there are not enough songs on the seriousness of judgment (which is true), so puts the phrase “everyone one of us deserves to die” (which is also true) to a boppy tune with large major chords and exciting off beat rhythm.

A youth minister rewrites the words to a well known song about sexual healing to make it teach profound truths about ‘spiritual healing’

The problem is with both examples that what the words might mean in a different context is totally being undermined by a mismatch with what the music means.

The lyricist of the classic song ‘Over the Rainbow’ (picture Judy Garland singing in the opening scenes of Wizard of Oz!)‘ puts it like this:

“Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.” (E. Yip Harburg)

Here I go... out on a limb

Our songs are meant to do something. They are not simply meant to be true words.

So what was my gut reaction to our big decision - simple truths joyfully sung, or theological firepower which nobody can standing singing?

Of course if songwriters are doing their jobs then you'll never have to choose between great lyrics and a great song. But hypothetically, I’d go for (I think I’m happy to say this … I know it’s going to irritate some people!) a song which joyfully inspires a congregation to sing a few simple truths about God together (‘Jesus loves me this I know...’) than a song which puts four volumes of the Church Dogmatics to to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’. There, I said it. Am I wrong? (Or am I just trying to make you think).

Please manipulate my emotions

There is a great deal of suspicion of emotional manipulation. Sometimes I think that suspicion is justified. A friend told me a story about a church where the keyboard was hooked up to an electric shock machine, and just at the right moment the keyboard player would hit the button and people in the front row would be brought to their knees by the ‘electrifying’ power of the sermon.

But sometimes I wonder whether we are oversensitive to the power of music on our emotions, as if being moved emotionally by a song is less ‘worthy’ of us than to be moved intellectually by a sermon.

Consider the tension felt by the great father of the faith, Augustine. His conversion story was marked by an emotional musical encounter:

“I wept at your [God’s] hymns and canticles, deeply moved by the voices of your sweetly singing church. Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was poured out in my heart, whence a feeling of piety surged up and my tears ran down. And these things were good for me.”¹

Yet at the same time, the Platonism which Augustine’s culture had subscribed to made him suspicious of such animal attraction merely based on music:

“the gratification of my flesh – to which I ought not to surrender my mind to be enervated – frequently leads my astray ... when it happens to me that the song moves me more than the thing which is sung, I confess that I have sinned blamefully and then prefer not to hear the singer.²

For similar reasons, another thinker, Athanasius, decided that it would be better not to sing at all. For him it was important that the Psalms were recited not ‘from a desire for pleasing sound’, but as a more spiritual ‘manifestation of harmony among the thoughts of the soul’.³ Augustine, to his credit, didn’t go that far. But he did look down on the role of music, saying it merely enabled a ‘weaker soul’ to ‘be elevated to an attitude of devotion’.⁴

But I don’t think it is an admission of weakness in our soul to recognise that we are embodied: our thoughts and actions are influenced by what we eat, whether we have slept enough recently, and whether our brain chemicals are balanced. To recognise that music can have a non-rational effect on our souls is simply to recognise that we are human. Rather than be afraid of any emotional effect, we should seek out music which draws us closer to God and honours Jesus. Provided there is no deception, and the emotional power of the music is anchored in the truth, and we aren’t trying to substitute for the Spirit’s work in changing hearts, I can’t see the danger. If ‘manipulation’ means simply helping me to feel the weight of Jesus’ glory then please, go ahead: some days I could do with a bit of musical manipulation.

1 Augustine, Confessiones IX, vi, 14 in James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 154.

2 Augustine, Confessiones X, xxxiii, 49-50 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 154.

3 Athanasius, Epistula ad Marcellinum 29, PG XXVII, 40-1 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 53.

4 Augustine, Confessiones X, xxxiii, 49-50 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 154.

History: the ever present danger of baby and bathwater

The most interesting thing about early church singing is that almost without exception no instruments were used. They almost certainly sang – the bible talks about their singing in Acts 16:25 and 1 Corinthians 14:26 – but they didn’t use any instruments.

This is strange, because in Judaism there was singing with all sorts of instruments (See Ps 33, Ps 150). Two things influenced this almost total rejection of instruments:

First, Jewish practice by the time of the church had become centred on synagogues. Unlike the temple, which at its peak had probably hosted some pretty impressive instrumental worship, synagogues had much more stripped back unaccompanied singing with a focus on teaching the scriptures. Jewish Christians would have been used to this.

Second, instruments reminded Christians of something they deeply feared: Paganism. That’s why Clement of Alexandria (who lived AD115 to about 216) told Christians to ‘no longer employ the ancient psaltery, trumpet, timbrel, or flute’, which ‘inflame desire, stir up lust, or arouse anger.’¹ The only exception he allowed was for some instruments (cithara and lyre) at Christian agape meals. Likewise John Chrysostom (347-407) decided that it was only because of Old Testament people’s ‘dull temperament’ that God allowed instruments: as a concession, not an ideal.² Instruments reminded the early Christians of pagan worship of idols; they were so keen to distance themselves from it that they deprived themselves of something the Bible clearly celebrates.

Musicians use the term ‘a cappella’ to refer to unaccompanied singing. This literally means (in Italian) ‘in the chapel style’, because of the way Christians sang together for hundreds of years.

The lesson for us here is a simple one: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. In distinguishing ourselves from the world, and the practices we disagree with, we need to be careful not to sell ourselves short, and deprive ourselves of something great.

That said, there is nothing wrong with great unaccompanied singing. But it is a good lesson to be aware of how we tend to hold art forms guilty by association. I’ve heard people say that we can’t use a certain style of music because it is ‘pagan’. I’ve heard church services criticised for being ‘too much like a rock concert’. No doubt there are things about pagan music and rock concerts we want to reject, but I suspect we often do so too quickly, without doing the hard work of filtering through what is good, bad and indifferent.

1 Clement of Alexander, ‘The Tutor of Children’, in Lawrence Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2009), para 832; Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, 73.

2 John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 149’, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources, para 1470. Likewise Nicetas of Remesiana, ‘On The Usefulness of Psalmody’, para 3197.

On Hymns

I'm going through some of my grandfather's old papers at the moment for a history project (which involves researching our heritage through primary sources), and I've come across some gold nuggets on hymns. Check out these thoughts:

- 'Not all rhyming verses set to music are hymns, even if printed in a hymn book. Some hardly deserve any place at all in corporate worship. But mark well those which exalt God and his Christ in direct praise and adoration. This is the kind of hymn the Christians of Pliny's day addressed to Christ at day-break.'

- 'the selection of hymns, in general, needs to be undertaken with regard for the place in the service where they come. We sing far too many hymns Three is a maximum for most services. It is too easy to destroy coherence in a service, and to distract from what has just been said or read, by an ill-chosen hymn. There is a place for hymns of recitation, declaring the mighty deeds of God, and hymns expressive of trust and hope and of mutual exhortation. Butt heir selection requires sensitivity and skill. Only the minister who orders the other details of the service can really select the hymns. The responsibility cannot be delegated to organists.' [grandpa was an organist, and a minister, so I guess he can say that!]

These quotes are from the 70s -- when liturgical reform was at its peak in the Anglican Church of Australia. Do you think we've gone backwards or forwards in the planning of our average services? I know at my church the organist does choose the hymns (her name is Nola and in her day she was a monster pianist). But she chooses them with such care and skill that I've often finished preaching a sermon, then found a hymn placed straight after it that says better than I have everything I wanted to say! Is that your experience?

Fix the attitude not the altitude

A dear friend asked me today whether I could put together some thoughts on positioning the band off the stage (lowering the altitude) in order to stop people giving them too much attention.  

I’m aware that at many churches there has been a push to shove the band off stage – out of sight, out of the limelight, thus reminding the crowd (and, I suspect more pointedly) the musicians that it’s not about them. I think this comes from a beautiful desire for equality in the gathering – not wanting to exalt guitar playing members of the band above punters in the pews. In my time as a church musician I’ve been moved to the side of stage, moved to the back of the stage, moved behind the stage, moved below the stage, moved to the side of the crowd, and (even!) moved to the back of the auditorium. ‘It’s not a rock concert!’ was the rationale. Sure. I guess that’s true.

I’ve always dutifully complied with these requests from those over me in the Lord, and if you’re a musician and you’re told to go, and you can’t gently persuade your leaders otherwise, then there is no question: you should go. However I think the idea is practically and pastorally misguided, for a couple of reasons.

Pastoral Reasons:

First, out of sight means the band is unable to lead the congregation effectively. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the preacher should preach from behind the crowd, for the simple reason that people look to the people up front for leadership and communication, something which is hard to do without the possibility of eye contact. It’s no different in music – through body language, verbal cues, attitude, and movement every member of the band who stands up front is a leader. The choices are lead well or lead badly; not leading is not an option.

Paul encourages the Corinthians to imitate him, and to learn from him via Timothy of his good way of life. (1 Cor 4:16-17). Therefore if you love your church then put good role models on stage!

Second, if the attitude of the musicians is a problem (i.e. if they really are getting a big head because they’re up the front) then you should address their attitude. Spend the time actually pastoring your musicians, rather than trying to train them like you would a puppy (‘outside! Outside!’). If they are egotistical maniacs, then you’ll need more than a stage layout to fix that. You don’t solve the problem of an egotistical preacher, bible reader or prayer by making them preach in funny positions. If leading singing is a word ministry (and I hope our message is getting through on this...it is!) then Godly character should be a pre-requisite for service.

(But it’s worth adding that in my experience musicians are rarely the egotistical stage-hogging maniacs that non-musicians project onto them – more often I find they are perfectionistic, sensitive, depressive personality types, who are easily wounded by criticism and tragically often have a low sense of self worth. But you don’t know that unless you actually bother to know them and care for them as people.)

If after getting to know your musicians you're still worried about their vainglory, then (rather than trying to make an upfront job into a behind the scenes job), why not give them a truly behind the scenes job (like cleaning, filing music, doing sound, etc)?

Practical reasons:

Third, messing about with stage layout creates a challenging musical environment which is beyond most of us. Teaching musicians to communicate with each other through eye contact and signals is hard enough without shoving them all into awkward positions. A number of times in church band training we’ve helped the rhythm section lock in more tightly simply by fixing their positioning on stage, only to be told that when Sunday comes they’ll have to go back to square one.

Fourth, messing about with stage layout is a disaster for acoustics. Unless you have a state of the art foldback system and you’re playing in a football stadium, chances are most of the sound is being generated by acoustic instruments and on-stage amps, with reinforcement from the PA for the vocals and piano and acoustic guitar. Strewn all over the room, the sound is coming from multiple sources, with uneven balance, making it impossible to create a good mix for the crowd. You might as well give up trying to teach musicians to manage their on stage volume to create a good stage sound, because you’ve made the stage environment so unnecessarily complicated. 

So please if you think you have an attitude problem in your crowd, or (worse) in your band, leave the altitude alone - and focus on the attitude. Good leading, from a humble heart, in full view of everyone will build up your church far more than bad leading, from a proud heart, somewhere to the side of stage. But whatever you do, whether in full view or out of sight, do it all for the glory of God (1Cor 10:31).

Worship: Like running a cold bath

Okay, work with me here on this analogy. I recently got my bath fixed which is great news for everybody. I'm reminded that there's an art to running a bath - not too hot, not too cold. The temptation when you realise that the bath is going to be too cold is to slam on the hot water, but of course that just makes the opposite problem. Getting the optimal temperature requires small adjustments, not over-reactions.

By analogy, it seems that improving worship music is an exercise in balance. Usually when something goes wrong in church, it's not that people have set out trying to be destructive. It's usually that we were trying to improve in another area, and just got things out of balance. Perhaps we wanted to bring in new songs to keep our repertoire from being stale, but brought in too many too quickly and now people can't sing along. Perhaps we wanted to raise the quality of our music to the Glory of God. But instead we put too heavy a load on our already busy musicians. It's all about balance. 

But so often when we realise something is wrong, we express it in terms of absolute criticisms, not relative criticisms.

Karl Barth, one of my favourite German theologians, writes about this in relation to the subjective/objective question in worship. He describes how people responded to the overly subjective wishy washy hymns which started dominating in some protestant circles in the 17th century. They criticised 'I-hymns' as being overly subjective, and insisted on 'we-hymns' or 'he-hymns'. They made absolute their criticism. But as Barth writes 'it is obvious from the presence of the I-Psalms in the Bible...[that this] can only be a relative and not an absolute criticism. It cannot try to eliminate or suppress altogether either the I-hymns or the I-piety' (Church Dogmatics, IV.63.I p755). You can't eliminate 'I' from our worship, because the wonder of the gospel is that what God did he did for me.

I think there are many areas of contemporary thinking about church life that need us to be more relative and less absolute - in many areas it's a question of balance, not blanket statements.

So the challenge (for me) is to try to approach disagreements about how to do church music as if we're running a bath. If I think that a church service is getting too cold, before turning off the tap completely I need to ask whether the way I intend on going is going to get too hot if we're not careful. This helps too when taking criticism - normally when someone raises a criticism they are not just being nasty - there is so longing or desire behind their complaint. If they hate contemporary music, then what is it about hymns that they love - perhaps I can learn to share their love as well, and we can run a more balanced bath?

On Hillsong's lyrics and theology

Really interesting article this month from Eternity magazine on Hillsong's lyric vetting process. I remember being quite surprised talking to Hillsong songwriters about how hands on their pastors are in the songwriting process.

Senior associate pastor Robert Fergusson writes:

“It’s a huge act of trust and submission, for someone who writes international award winning songs to submit their songs to us … it’s a great act of humility. I’m constantly honouring people like Darlene Zschech and Reuben Morgan who are happy to do this.”

It's a reminder to us here at Garage Hymnal (who are by no means international award winning songwriters!) to make sure we're humbly seeking feedback from godly people on our lyrics (thanks to Mark Peterson, Rob Smith, Philip Percival, Bart VandenHengel, Cedric Tang, Dave Parker and others who have offered suggestions on our last few albums). [update: I very carelessly left Peter Rodgers of this list, many apologies!]

http://www.biblesociety.org.au/news/inside-hillsong-music-120202-1 

Small Churches: A Cappella

Continuing our focus this month on small church music, I've been thinking of ways of leading which don't require massive musical resources.

The most obvious one is - a cappella! This means literally 'in the chapel style', because for many many years Christians sang without any form of accompaniment at all and so this became a distinctively 'chapel' style. Partly a reflection of Jewish synagogue practices (musical instruments were for the Jerusalem temple, not for your local synagogue), partly an attempt to define ourselves against our pagan neighbours, many early Christian leaders advised against using instruments at all:

Clement of Alexandria (115–c216) said to ‘no longer employ the ancient psaltery, trumpet, timbrel, or flute’, which ‘inflame desire, stir up lust, or arouse anger’ (he did make concession for the use of cithara and lyre at agape meals though because of the instruments mentioned in the Psalms).[1] John Chrysostom (347-407) knew that the Psalms mentioned musical instruments, but thought they were only given as an accommodation to Israel's ‘dull temperament’.[2]

The church now has had a bit longer to think this through, and has mostly come to the conclusion that we can have instruments without backsliding into Paganism (although electric guitars are still a bit suspect, I think). But that doesn't mean that we always have to use instruments!

Some of my fondest memories of Moore College chapel were when nobody organised an organist and so we stood in the beautiful old chapel building being led through the hymn book by Michael Jensen a cappella.

A Cappella music brings the voices out in a beautiful simplicity, making the the focus the people around you. It works well in small rooms, or in big reverberant rooms (not so much in an acoustically dry warehouse). Here's a nice example of a church which doesn't use instruments, but does use harmony and dynamics well:

The trick to a cappella is:

• - start with songs that have a strong, well known melody. Hymns are great, but so are many contemporary tunes. 
• - have somebody with a loudish voice and a good sense of pitch and time lead the crowd without a microphone. They need to give a starting note for each entry, and navigate any nasty pauses (crowds of untrained singers tend to collapse bars of rest down - so a one bar pause becomes anywhere between a millisecond and half a bar ... and everyone comes in whenever they like!)
• - as the leader, have a sense of the dynamics of each verse - particularly if you're doing a hymn! You don't want to belt out verse after verse at full blast. You can even direct half the crowd to sing one verse and the other half another. Or ladies/gents, solo/chorus... there are many possibilities.
• - start with a tuning fork to make sure you don't do the song in an impossible key! Or at the very least sing the song through in your head through all the sections to make sure the bridge isn't too high.
• - to teach a new song, distribute youtube links of the song for people to listen to. Or, for a less technological solution, sing each line antiphonally (call and response).
• The main thing is not to see a cappella as what happens when all else fails - it is a unique and legitimate art form in itself. It has many benefits over instrumental music. For instance, it opens up the possibility of harmonies in the crowd - in hymn singing we often force everybody to sing the same melody line, which makes it hard for sopranos, altos, tenors and basses to all find a range they're comfortable with. In traditional hymn singing, the tenors don't sing the same line as the basses, and everybody plays their own part. If well done, harmony can remind us (as Chrysostom puts it) of our membership of one body:

• Our tongues are the chords of the cithara which come forth as a diverse sound yet form a divine harmony. Women, men, the aged, youth, are all certainly individual persons, but they are not individuals when they sing hymns, for the Spirit, governing the voice of each, brings about one melody in all.[3]

• Some of our tunes which are worth having a go a cappella might be:

- We Praise You

- Father's World

- All That I Am

- Fairest Lord Jesus

- He is Holy

- Come Lord

- Holding on to me

- Stand Firm

• Any others that you've tried and have worked? How did you do them?
• I'll leave you, for inspiration, with the wonderful Australian a cappella group The Idea of North. It's not congregational, but it's a beautiful hymn!!
  

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  [1] Clement of Alexander, ‘The Tutor of Children’, in Lawrence Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2009), para 832; Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, 73.

[2] John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 149’, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources, para 1470. Likewise Nicetas of Remesiana, ‘On The Usefulness of Psalmody’, para 3197.

[3] John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 145’, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources, para 1469. 

Why do we have to have bad sound?

A little warning - this is going to be a tiny bit of a rant. You see, I was at the wedding of a dear friend yesterday in a Sydney church. It was a wonderful service. The songs were well chosen and the service superbly led. The preaching was clear and biblical. The decorations were beautiful. The crowd was happy to be there, and happy the rain had held off. A wonderful celebration, which nothing could have spoiled.

But during the vows, we did have to put up with some pretty woeful sound. "I Jack*...[feedback]...in the presence of God [squeal] take you Jill [static then squeal] to be my wife [low roar then shreak]...". In fact, it was so bad that the always good humoured groom mentioned it later in his speech (through a much better microphone) at the reception when he reflected on the "vows we made to each other through that dodgy microphone". 

 The poor sound guy was struggling the whole time to make it work without feeding back, but the system (cheap, underpowered, badly installed) was always against him. There was nothing we could do but laugh about it.

 Can somebody explain to me why we have to have such terrible sound at so many of our churches? If church meetings about at least partly about hearing God's word, then it seems a little silly to skimp on the very equipment which makes things (like vows, or a bible reading, or the words of a song) audible to lots of people at the same time.

 I don't think it's an isolated problem. There must be something going wrong in terms of process for so many churches (with apparently the resources to pay for carpets, hall redevelopments, rectory upgrades and central heating) to end up with sound systems which plainly are not up to the task.  What is going wrong, time and time again?

•  - Is it a problem of process? (Perhaps a well meaning but unqualified parishioner taking control of the system and not allowing outside help?)
•  - Is it a problem of the right consultants or suppliers? (I hear too many stories of companies with excess stock of a particular device offloading it at way too high prices to gullible churches)
•  - Is it a problem of the brief? (I worked on one project where the system designer wanted to spend most of the money on choir mics...for a church that didn't have a choir)
• - Is it a problem of values? (I heard one minister describe how it used to be a source of pride for his church that they had a bad sound system - because it proved just how focussed on the scriptures they were, not the flashy show!!!)

 On the flipside, I wonder - has anybody's church managed to get decent sound for their gatherings without taking out a second mortgage on the rectory?

 Over to you, blogosphere....

AJ

 

*- not his real name, of course.