In my life, I’ve learned and come to love some great hymns. But in the circles in which I mostly move nowadays, except for my immediate family, hymns are rarely sung, with only a few exceptions: one hymn in a service (invariably called a “great old hymn” even if it’s only late-19th-century, and rarely dating from earlier than 1850, let alone 1800) so as to avoid the criticism of “never singing hymns”; a hymn that’s been made a (usually small) part of a “chorus”; one that’s fairly recently hit the Christian pop charts in a “retuned” version (adding a refrain that’s given greater emphasis than any of the verses, for example); a few perfunctory hymns on “major holidays” (except for Christmas, when the carols are essentially always the same but are hardly “perfunctory”—but with “major holidays” including far more civil holidays than liturgical ones); and so on.
In this, as in many things, my instinct is toward conservatism in the Chestertonian sense (Chesterton said a conservative is one who “stands athwart History yelling ‘Stop!’”): our ancestors have given us, in hymnody, a vast wealth of glorious music and edifying verse (amid an even vaster quantity of merely pedestrian verse and less-inspired tunes, it must be admitted), so I see no good reason to abandon it all in favor of the merely new. This is not to say that nothing new is any good; there are several recent Christian artists whose work I’m very fond of, a few songs from the last few generations that I’ll admit as hymns (though, like “folk music,” I’d tend to say that in general nothing very recent should go in that category yet, as it hasn’t been through the “folk” or “hymn” “process” yet), and some quite recent “retuned” versions of hymns that I prefer to the traditional or original tunes. (I’m grateful to Greg Scheer, minister of worship at what was my “home church” while I was in college, for pointing me to the Cardiiphonia project.)
So I’m beginning a new series of posts here on this blog. In the coming months, on occasion (about once a month, I hope), I’ll give you a hymn I’m fond of, accompanied by some of my thoughts about (and sparked by) it.
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*Mega-likes* I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. Our church is like that, too. Except the weeks when our family leads worship. Then we do mostly all hymns. :D
Thanks, Faith; I hope you enjoy the subsequent posts.
At our church here (the phrasing I mostly use, since my church at college always felt more like “my home church” than the church at home), part of the trouble is that the demographic of the church that you’d expect to demand hymns largely (from what I’ve seen) thinks more of Gaither choruses than any other era of “hymns,” part is that the new (five years now, I think) pastor and the other vocal members of the music team favor “30 minute preparation” choir books and quasi-recent (and, more to the point, mostly inane—a point I objected to a year ago) choruses (and much of this is either gradual or presented as a fait accompli, and part of it is that the church has grown significantly of late, which has apparently been taken as a signal to tilt in that musical direction. Unfortunately, there are (from what I’ve seen and read and heard about denominational politics of the last few decades) very few strongly liturgical, strongly Biblical, theologically-Reformed churches in the country, let alone locally …
A worthy and fascinating endeavor. :D I’m looking forward to seeing which hymns are your timeless favorites, also!
Actually, for the most part I’ll be aiming for “excellent but obscure favorites,” though I may begin with some in the “timeless favorites” category since Lent begins this next week and the best ones I can think of for that are fairly well known.
But it’s worth noting that the two books that get most use in our family are “the Reformed hymnal,” actual title The Hymnbook, published by the Reformed Church in American and the Presbyterian Church of the USA (if I remember correctly) in 1950 or 1951 and Songs of Praise, a songbook (with a few hymns, but not intended as a hymnal) published by The Word of God, a “Christian community” (in effect a church, except that it insisted its members maintain membership in other churches, and many of its members were Roman Catholic) my parents belonged to in the ’80s, followed by “the Free Methodist hymnal”, Hymns of Faith and Life, published (I think) 1987, the year I was born … Oh, and “Hymns 2″, of similar antiquity but with far more limited selection, simply because we have three copies of it.