Singing Church

“Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise”

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 21:20:00 +0000

Toward a Sacramental Theology of Congregational Singing

This is an academic paper on congregational singing that has its origins in presentations I made at the Annual Meeting of Theologians of Ohio (TheOh), Trinity Lutheran Seminary and Bexley Seabury, February 22, 2014, and at the City Ministry Spring Conference, Covenant Theological Seminary, St Louis, April 10, 2015. I have had some requests for copies and so I want to make it available here as my small contribution to the conversation about why singing in church matters. Here is a pdf version of the paper--remember it is worth what you paid for it and please use responsibly!

1. The Problem

In twenty-first century America, it is difference in musical taste not difference in doctrine that poses the greatest threat to congregational unity. Look up the service times of any large mainline Protestant church and you are likely to find multiple services offered on a Sunday morning. This is nothing new of course, churches have often had two or even three services on a Sunday morning with, for example, a simple service at 8 a.m. and all the stops pulled out for the 11 o’clock service. What is new is offering different services simultaneously. Consider this description from the website of a large Baptist church: "during the 9:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. services in the Sanctuary, the worship style is best described as “blended” - singing a mixture of contemporary praise choruses and traditional hymns. . . [There is also] a contemporary service called The Link at 10:30 a.m. in the Fellowship Hall." The Link is ‘a casual worship experience." These worship experiences--with names like The Well, The Crossing, and The Gathering--divide congregations over aesthetics. But this is more than a change in musical taste or a preference for comfortable chairs and jeans over pews and suits: this is the emergence of sub-congregations sharing the same church buildings. Put simply, musical preference is dividing churches.

Can we really think of the separation of the body between the hymns in the sanctuary and the contemporary worship songs in the fellowship hall as a rupture in the body of Christ? Is this not perhaps overstating the case? I do not think so. Even if these two worshipping groups celebrate the Eucharist on the same day--and many do not--they do not gather around a common table and share in the common cup and loaf. Ignatius, the first-century bishop of Antioch, would certainly have thought this a problem. In a letter written to the church in Philadelphia, he insisted that a church should not have separate sittings for the meal. "Be careful then, to observe a single Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and one cup of his blood that makes us one, and one altar."^{^[1]}

In many Protestant churches today, the greatest symbol of the Church’s unity--the Eucharist--is sundered over song choice and most people are unaware this schism has even happened. One solution would be to convince people that what we sing and with whom we sing is unimportant. To take this line would be to make a terrible mistake. The problem is not that these churches are taking congregational singing more seriously than their Eucharistic identity; it is that they are not taking congregational singing seriously enough. Rightly understood, congregational singing is a sacramental practice of the Church.

2. Congregational Singing as a Sacramental Practice

In Church Dogmatics, IV.3.2, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Karl Barth makes a curious statement. "The Christian community sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings . . . . What we can and must say quite confidently is that the community which does not sing is not the community."^{^[2]} Barth is suggesting that congregational singing is in some way an essential constitutive practice of the church.

This is the kind of language that theologians usually reserve for talking about the Eucharist; it is a sacramental way of talking.

Can we consider congregational singing a sacramental practice? If we do, what are the implications for those who study worship practices and for the liturgical practices of new paradigm churches? [3] To answer these questions I am defining a sacramental practice as a liturgical practice that participates in and points to a heavenly reality. This definition is rooted in the work of the nouvelle théologie movement of the mid-twentieth century that was led by the theologian Henri de Lubac. The theology is dense and technical but at its heart is De Lubac’s discovery that there had been a fundamental shift in sacramental theology in the West in the Middle Ages. Brian Hollon neatly summarizes this claim. "De Lubac suggests that prior to the twelfth century, the ultimate ‘truth’ of the sacrament resided beyond the sacrament, whereas after the twelfth century, the sacrament was its own fulfillment--it was the thing being celebrated."^[4] The unfortunate result, as DeLubac describes it is that "the Eucharist becomes a matter, primarily, of individual piety, and the church’s identity is tied increasingly to the present, visible institutional structures."^{^[5]}

Hans Boersma, in his 2011 book Heavenly Participation, insists that Evangelical Protestants have a lot to learn from the Roman Catholic nouvelle théologie if they are to escape a piety shaped by individualistic consumerism. They need to learn to reclaim this pre-modern worldview "in which the realities of this-worldly existence pointed to greater, eternal realities in which they sacramentally shared."^{^[6]} They must recover a sacramental ontology that sees that "human beings and the created order participate in the divine life."^{^[7]}

Boersma affords us a very helpful concept when considering congregational singing as a sacramental practice. While, as Robert Jenson explains, "in classic sacramental teaching a sacramental sign both is related to and is that which it signifies," nouvelle théologie reintroduces the stronger and more dynamic category of participation.^{^[8]} "Unlike mere symbols," Boersma writes, "sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point."^{^[9]} Thus a sacramental practice participates in and points to a heavenly reality.

Boersma’s project to reclaim a sacramental ontology for Protestants makes a significant contribution to an understanding of congregational singing as a sacramental practice. Reciprocally, understanding congregational singing as a sacramental practice can help the project of recovering a sacramental ontology for Protestants. That is a lofty claim to make for your average congregation singing on a Sunday morning, but consider the following:

2.1 Congregational singing participates in and points to the Song of the Trinity

In the orthodox tradition, the whole of creation is God’s song. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa described the cosmos as "a kind of musical harmony whose musician is God."^{^[10]} Contemporary orthodox theologians continue in this deep vein. David Bentley Hart calls creation the "Triune polyphony"^{^[11]} and even more poetically, Vigen Guroian refers to creation as "a Trinitarian love song."^{^[12]} This is sacramental ontology at work--the whole of creation is God’s song. What makes it sacramental is that it is an invitation to the church to join in.

The community created in song is a rich metaphor for exploring a theology, not just of creation, but also of the Trinity itself. Theologian and musician Stephen Guthrie, in his excellent book Creator Spirit: the Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human, writes,

Music, particularly shared song, seems to provide a powerful sounding image of [a particular] kind of community life. . . one where there is a distinction without the loss of unity, where there is unity without the removal of individuality, where the members of the community have their life in and through one another.^{^[13]}

This singing community of the Trinity sings creation and invites creation to sing along. Lucy Winkett, a canon at St Paul’s Cathedral, preached these words on Trinity Sunday in 2010: "The Trinity is not a dry doctrine to be thought about but a life to be lived. . . The song of the Trinity in eternity is a song even we can sing."^{^[14]}

2.2 Congregational singing participates in and points to the Body of Christ

St. Paul uses the metaphor of singing to express the unity the church has in Christ. Romans 15:5-11, contains the idea of the new reconciled humanity now praising God "with one voice." This new humanity now includes the Gentiles who "sing praises." This is not just a metaphor; it is Paul’s description of the surprising new social reality of the early church--Jews and Gentiles singing God’s praise together. Ignatius of Antioch toward the end of the first century picks up the same idea. "In your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. . . [So] become a choir, that being harmonious in love, and taking up the song of God in unison, ye may with one voice sing to the Father through Jesus Christ."[15]

This singing is not just a demonstration of a new unity as the Body of Christ; the idea developed that congregational singing may even be a practice of reconciliation. Basil the Great, preaching in the fourth century on the benefits of singing psalms said:

A psalm is a tranquillity of soul and the arbitration of peace; it . . . creates friendships, unites the separated and reconciles those at enmity. Who can still consider one to be a foe with whom one utters the same prayer to God! Thus psalmody provides the greatest of all goods, charity, by devising in its common song a certain bond of unity, and by joining together the people into the concord of a single chorus.^{^[16]}

Writing over seventeen hundred years later, Guthrie describes it this way, "When the church sings together, it announces the new community the Spirit has created in Christ. But the church’s singing not only announces this new community, it enacts it."^{^[17]} For Guthrie, the current divisive conversations over music and song choice are oddly reassuring. In the same way that arguments over the Eucharist--the sacrament of the church’s unity in Christ--became a force that tore apart "the garment of Christ’s body, which everyone confessed to be seamless (John 19:23-24) during the Reformation, so now it is arguments over song choice and worship style that turn a sacramental practice against the unity of the church."^{^[18]}

2.3 Congregational singing participates in and points to the Song of Heaven

This is perhaps the theological dimension of congregational singing with which we are most familiar. When we sing in church we join, as the Book of Common Prayer declares, "with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven" in singing praise to the ‘Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come" (Rev 4:8, NRSV).

Notice the journey: the direction of the song. It goes out and returns to God. It is the love song of the Trinity that, out of the abundance of love, sings creation into existence. God desires creation to join in the song and so the church picks up the theme and sings it in anticipation and participation with the whole of creation in praise of the Creator. This is what is happening symbolically and literally on a Sunday morning when congregations open their hymnals or gaze at the projected words on a screen and start singing.

3. A Re-evaluation of Congregational Singing

If congregational singing is, in fact, a sacramental liturgical practice, why do we not hear sermons on the subject? Why is it so undervalued? Understanding the loss of sacramental ontology in the late middle ages helps explain how in the West congregational singing started to lose its connection with the idea of heavenly participation. It also helps explain why congregational singing is seldom understood (though often experienced) as a sacramental practice in its own right. The increasing insistence on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist in the thirteenth century meant an increasing separation from "the unity of the church as the mysterious reality (res) to which it pointed."^{^[19]} The theological tendency became not to consider congregational singing of value in its own right but rather to value it solely for its ability to enhance other liturgical practices. Palestrina explained in the dedication to his Second Book of Masses in 1567 his intention in writing music for the church was "to adorn the holy sacrifice of the Mass in a new manner."[20] Modern Catholicism more highly values congregational singing, as Vatican II explains, "the more closely connected it is with the liturgical action, whether making prayer more pleasing, promoting unity of minds, or conferring greater solemnity upon the sacred rites."^{^[21]}

This talk of singing in terms of its contribution to the liturgy creates the unfortunate impression that when the community sings God’s praises it is not an important liturgical action in its own right. Singing becomes a second-order activity. Consequently, Roman Catholic debates concerning music and singing tend to revolve around how choir directors and organists can institute music that works well with the liturgy or how best to teach the laity to sing Gregorian chant.[22]

What is missing here is the idea that the unity of the Body of Christ celebrated and constituted in the Mass is also celebrated and constituted in the songs of the people. Guthrie puts it this way: "Shared song . . . is yet another way that this common life becomes a part of lived experience. In song, the church shares not 'one bread' [1 Cor. 10:17] but one voice."^{^[23]}

In an equally unfortunate fashion, Protestant understandings of congregational singing are also affected by the legacy of this medieval shift in sacramental imagination. For most of the history of Protestantism, the value of congregational singing lay in its relationship with the Word of God, either in the songs being scripture set to music (think of Calvin and the Psalm singing of Geneva) or in the way the hymnody was a pedagogical tool for the reformers to pass on the revolutionary ideas of the evangelical gospel (think of Luther in Wittenberg).

According to Yves Congar, this way of valuing scripture has its roots in medieval arguments over the relative authority of scripture and the church.^{^[24]} His colleague DeLubac proposed the solution of re-sacramentalizing scripture in the context of the church.

If we consider Scripture from within and with the eyes of faith . . . and at the same time to remember that Christ was the Logos, that is to say, the Word of the Father, could it not be said that this body of Scripture appears truly as a body of Christ? And from there, does it not follow that this immanence of the unique Word at the heart of these multi-faceted words makes of them a real and living unity?^{^[25]}

If Protestants could develop this sacramental imagination as DeLubac suggests and actually raise their view of scripture, then the practice of singing scripture is far more than a pedagogical tool or a proclamation of truth, it is a participation in the living Word: the Word becomes song and dwells among us.

4. New Paradigm Churches

The Praise and Worship revival launched by the new paradigm churches in the 1970s and 1980s that led to the so-called “worship wars”, values congregational singing for different reasons. The songs are not to accompany and enhance the sacraments nor are they a catechetical tool. At the heart of the Praise and Worship revival of the 1980s was a recovery of intimacy with God in worship. The first generation of worship leaders insisted that the classic evangelical hymns were full of theology singing about God but were not singing to God. Thirty years later, according to worship historian Lester Ruth, the burgeoning hymnody in the CCLI charts differs from the evangelical piety of older hymns in another significant way. The songs express a realized eschatology absent in their Victorian antecedents: worshippers sing of experiencing heaven now, not at some future moment when they cross the Jordan into Canaan’s happy land.[26] They do not anticipate a time in the future when they will join with the heavenly host--that is experienced now in worship. In darkened auditoriums led by rock bands illuminated by theater lighting, congregations close their eyes, and sing, "Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see You." In this song by Michael W. Smith, John the Revelator’s vision of the saints praising God around the throne is not a prophet’s vision of a future for the communion of the saints, it is a possibility for individual worshippers on a Sunday morning. This is why music is so important to this movement. This is why so much money is spent on the live worship experience. It is also why it is so vulnerable to idolatry and commodification.

For all this new emphasis on the importance of music in worship, new paradigm churches are mired in the personal piety of neo-evangelicalism that is all but blind to the corporate sacramental dimensions of the liturgy. In these churches, the tendency is for baptism to be reduced to an opportunity for personal testimony and the Eucharist to be simply an occasional opportunity for personal piety. While this is true for most traditional low Protestant churches, what is new in new paradigm churches is the influence this individualistic piety has had on the practice of congregational singing. Rather than encountering the lusty congregational singing of the Wesleyan revival or of Ira Sankey’s gospel hymns, psychological anthropologist T.H. Luhrmann discovered in the Vineyard churches in Chicago and California that "worship is intensely individual even when everyone sings together. . . Worship time is understood to be private, personal, a time to commune with God alone while in the presence of others."[27] The music creates an immersive environment that isolates the worshipper and helps them to concentrate on having a personal encounter with God: a person with whom they can have a loving relationship and from whom they expect to hear.[28]

It is, however, impossible--though some try--to experience group singing solely as an act of personal piety. Whether they realize it or not, embedded in the practice of congregational singing is a sacramental theology of the real presence of Christ. When congregations sing God’s praise together the gap between sacrament and reality collapses. When we are, to use Charles Wesley's expression, "lost in wonder love and praise" we are caught up in the worship of heaven and we are surrounded by and participating in the sound of the congregation singing. We are inside the sign; we are participating in the reality of a sonic unity.

5. Conclusions

The high theology of congregational singing proposed in this paper offers interesting possibilities for those engaged in theological reflection on the lived theology of worshipping communities. If nothing else, it should cause us to pay close attention to the practices of congregational singing in the liturgical life of the communities we study. It may also afford ways of considering and evaluating the time and energy spent by congregations on their music whether the object of study is a cathedral choir or a contemporary worship service.

For those interested in following Hans Boersma’s urgent call for Protestants to recover a pre-modern sacramental ontology, the understanding of congregational singing as a sacramental practice may contain within it the possibility of a restoration of an evangelical sacramental imagination. In new paradigm churches and those others that adopt their practices, congregational singing is often the only vestige of a sacramental liturgy in a fragmented wasteland of purpose driven piety. Ironically, at the same time as the Praise and Worship revival offers the hope of the recovery of a sacramental unity for these evangelical churches, it is the very absence of a sacramental ontology in these congregations that makes the sundering of the Eucharistic body over song choice and worship style barely register as a problem. Because so many Christians experience this sacramental reality through their filter of intense personal piety, they are all but blind to the communal dimensions of the divine encounter present in the congregation’s praise of God. They are blind to it even as they encounter its emotional and spiritual power. All the pieces are laid out before them every Sunday morning but they are unable to put them together. The big picture of the sacramental reality of the Body of Christ present when the community of forgiven sinners and reconciled enemies sings God’s praises together is there but they cannot see it. Theologically unaware of the sacramental reality of the unity of the body present in congregational singing, they are unable to either protect or truly nurture its practice.

^{^[1]} Ignatius, To the Philadelphians, 4, in Cyril C. Richardson ed. Early Christian Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), p. 108. Emphasis added.

^{^[2]} Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley, 1st pbk. ed., vol. IV.3.2 (London ; New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2004), pp. 866-67. Emphasis added.

[3] The term “new paradigm churches” comes from sociologist Donald E. Miller. In his 1997 book Reinventing American Protestantism, Miller identifies the Vineyard churches of his study as examples of the ‘new paradigm’ churches that now dot the American ecclesial landscape. Stripped of most of the symbols and forms of traditional Christian worship, it is the music, Miller argues, that is the ‘triggering device’ in these churches for the movement from the profane to the sacred realm. Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the new millennium, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 91.

[4] Bryan C. Hollon, Everything is Sacred: spiritual exegesis in the political theology of Henri de Lubac, Theopolitical visions (Eugene, Or.: Cascade Books, 2009), p. 55.

^{^[5]} Hollon, Everything is Sacred, p. 56.

^{^[6]} Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: the weaving of a sacramental tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011), p. 2.

^{^[7]} Boersma, Heavenly Participation, p. 75.

^{^[8]} Robert W. Jenson, "The Church and the Sacraments," in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 212.

^{^[9]} Boersma, Heavenly Participation, p. 23.

^{^[10]} Commentary on the inscriptions on the Psalms 1999, 28; in Vigen Guroian, The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2010), p 5.

^{^[11]} David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: the aesthetics of Christian truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2003), p. 274.

^{^[12]} Guroian, The Melody of Faith, p. 13.

^{^[13]} Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit: the Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011), p. 85.

^{^[14]} Canon Lucy Winkett, Sermon preached at the Eucharist on Trinity Sunday (Sunday 30 May 2010), St Paul’s Cathedral. http://www.stpauls.co.uk/Worship-Music/Join-us-in-Worship/Read-Sermons/Archived-Sermons/Sermon-preached-at-the-Eucharist-on-Trinity-Sunday-Sunday-30-May-2010-by-Canon-Lucy-Winkett.

[15] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians, 4:1-2, in A. Cleveland Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. Volume 1: The Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Revised by A. Cleveland Coxe (New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), p. 49.

^{^[16]} Homilia in psalmum i, 2; PG xxix, 212, in Music in Early Christian Literature, edited by James McKinnon, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 65-66.

^{^[17]} Guthrie, Creator Spirit, p. 80.

^{^[18]} Boersma, Heavenly Participation, p. 84.

^{^[19]} Boersma, Heavenly Participation, pp. 57-58.

[20] Andrew Wilson-Dickson, The Story of Christian Music: from Gregorian chant to Black gospel : an authoritative illustrated guide to all the major traditions of music for worship, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), p. 75. Emphasis added.

^{^[21]} Vatican Council II, "Sacrosanctum Concilium" http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html.

[22] For the official conversation see Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Musica Sacra: music at Mass, a liturgical and pastoral challenge; papers from the second study day on the anniverary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican City, December 5, 2005, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010).; for something more boisterous see Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can't Sing : the culture of Catholicism and the triumph of bad taste (New York: Crossroad, 1990).

^{^[23]} Guthrie, Creator Spirit, p. 80.

^{^[24]} Boersma, Heavenly Participation, p.61. Yves Congar, Tradition & Traditions: the Biblical, historical, and theological evidence for Catholic teaching on tradition, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (San Diego, CA, Needham Heights, MA: Basilica Press; Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 135.

^{^[25]} Henri de Lubac, Laurence Paul Hemming, and Susan Frank Parsons, Corpus mysticum: the Eucharist and the church in the Middle Ages: historical survey, Faith in reason (London: SCM Press, 2006), p. 87.

[26] Lester Ruth, “Similarities and Differences in Evangelical Song: Old and New”, presentation at Adult Forum, Duke Divinity School, October 6, 2013, https://congregation.chapel.duke.edu/index.php/worship-and-nurture/adult-education?id=432.

[27] T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: understanding the American evangelical relationship with God, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), p. 4.

[28] Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, p. 323.

Acoustics, Congregational Singing, and Carpet

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 04:29:00 +0000

The Sanctuary at Ashland's First United Methodist Church (AFUMC) certainly looks like it should be a great place for congregational singing. It is a big room with a high pitched wooden roof. But when I sing in the choir it is hard to hear what else is going on. It all feels a bit dead. When I sit out in the pews it is not an encouraging place to sing. When I play guitar as part of an ensemble, I play through the deadness hoping that the people in the sanctuary can hear a blend of the noise the instrumentalists are making.

The problem is--acoustically speaking--the space doesn't give much back. It is hard to hear yourself and it is harder to hear others.

What's the problem? It really shouldn't be this way.

When the congregation announced it was building a new church back in 1957, it had music on its mind. The Times Gazette reported on July 26 that “the chancel will be wide and open with room for 40 choir members on each side.” The sanctuary (including overflow seating in the narthex) “will comfortably seat 740.”

The current organ is particularly grand. Church historian Sidney Boyd recorded that First Methodist bought the “two manual Kimball” from Chicago in 1915. It was so large it completely obscured the stained glass window at the front of the old sanctuary . In 1949, the church spent $10,000 on a new consul separate from the organ so that the organ could be installed in the new church-- that's the equivalent of $100,000 in 2016! (Sidney Boyd, The Story of the First United Methodist Church, 1963).

Clearly the congregation spent huge sums of money so that the church--congregation, the choir, and the organ--would sound awesome.

But it doesn't.

Somehow the sound in the sanctuary, that should be so resonant, is muted and muffled.

The church has tried a number of solutions. A previous choir director area mic'd the choir and positioned monitors in front and to each side of them. After cluttering the front of the church with black boxes and wires, the problem remained unsolved. If the monitors were loud enough to overcome the deadening acoustic at the front of the church and satisfy the singers, then the congregation enjoyed squealing feedback. As an audio engineer explains: "The acoustical conditions of where a choir is will have a direct impact on the choir. You can’t ignore the acoustical environment of where the choir is because it will determine how they sound to each other and therefore how they will perform." In other words, amplification might help but it won't fix the problem.

When my wife took over the choir, we tried an acoustic solution--we ditched the microphones, and the monitors, and the cables and moved people and instruments around. I wrote about the experiment on this blog. It lowered the volume in the sanctuary and helped the congregation hear themselves sing -- but the sense of deadness and having to "push through" didn't go away.

I am not just being an acoustic snob here; this stuff really matters for the worshipping life of a congregation. I have been poking around the internet for the last couple of days and on an organ builder's website I found an excellent explanation of why acoustics matter in church.

Congregational Singing - Individuals want to join in singing if they feel the company of their fellow worshipers. Individuals will not participate if they feel conspicuous and alone. . .
Choirs - Individuals are more likely to join choirs if the room is acoustically suitable for their work. They won’t sing if they can’t be heard. The choir’s effect is greatest when its music sounds best.
Sermon - It is hard to hear a preacher whose energy is absorbed rather than radiated. It is artificial, and finally discouraging, to hear the voice only through loudspeakers. It feels more natural, and our response to the words is greater, if we can hear the natural voice.

The solution is plain, what you need are "solid walls, floor, and ceiling." What you don't want are "padded pew backs, padded walls, drapes, and carpet."

As you can see from the photograph, at AFUMC we have a massive thick and heavy set of drapes hiding the organ pipes and lots and lots of carpet.

Carpet, it turns out, generates amazing amounts of animosity from audio engineers. No superlative is left un-hurled in their attempts to get congregations to understand what a bad idea carpet is. Here are some of my favorites:

"Putting a choir on a carpeted floor is like pulling out their vocal cords." -- Art Noxon “Church Acoustics - Frequently Asked Questions”, Acoustic Sciences Corporation

"Wall-to-wall carpets kill congregational singing . . . As far as the choir area is concerned, I can think of no justifiable reason to have it be carpeted. If you ever expect music to be sung or played from the choir area, the only reason to carpet it is if your congregation's musicians are so bad that you really don't want to hear them." -- Evan Kreider “How to Deaden Acoustics and Seriously Damage Congregational Singing” American Catholic Press

"To sing in an absorbent room is as frustrating as to look at pictures in a room painted black." -- Ross King Co. "Acoustics for Worship Spaces"

And it is not just choirs that shouldn't be put on carpet:

"When a piano is played over carpet it dulls the sound. Try adding an office chair plastic carpet protector under the piano and you'll hear how it brightens up and starts to actually sound like a real wood instrument." -- “Church Acoustics - Frequently Asked Questions”

♪

One of the ways to gauge the acoustics in a space is to measure its reverberation time. Basically that is how long it takes a sound to die away. Your bathroom with its tile, linoleum and mirrors has a long reverberation time and your living room with drapes, carpet and cushions doesn't. That is why you sing in the shower.

One of the sites I visited had this information: "A pleasing concert hall might have reverberation that lasts from 1.6 to 1.8 seconds or so (with audience in attendance)." It turns out that Cleveland's Severence Hall's reverberation time is 1.7 secs with a full house. Of course a church's acoustic requirements are different than an auditorium:

An auditorium has only one acoustical function, and that is to project music produced on stage so that the audience can hear it clearly. A room used for worship, on the other hand, has two acoustical functions. The first is identical to that for auditoriums: to project the sound produced by the choir, soloists, instruments, and preacher. The second function is to provide an atmosphere which encourages and supports congregational singing. Both acoustical goals must be met if the building is to be successful for worship.

I love being alive in the age of Google -- I found a site that taught me how to measure reverberation time and suddenly I had enough knowledge to be dangerous. All I needed was my digital recorder, a free piece of software called Room EQ Wizard, a balloon and a pin! I quickly found a willing assistant and we set to bursting balloons all over town.

Drapes, carpets and cushions at AFUMC

Here is what we found:

Screenshot of Room EQ Wizard in action.

With the sanctuary empty, AFUMC has a reverb of 1.453 seconds. Standing at the front (where the musicians are) the reverb drops to 1.367 (my guess is that the reverb time is quite a bit lower on a Sunday morning with the congregation there).

What does this mean? After scratching my head over some complicated papers by acoustic engineers I found this chart that I could understand.

"What is a desirable reverberation time?" from Georgia State University's Hyper Physics site

So, even empty, by my amateur measurements AFUMC's reverb of 1.453 seconds falls into the "not a desirable place for music" category. And for the musicians at the front the 1.367 seconds of reverb puts us in the least desirable place in the whole sanctuary!

Perhaps my measurements were way off. I took my balloons to the university chapel which I know is a wonderful space in which to sing -- big hall, bare wooden pews, wooden stage.

BANG!

2.883 seconds

We are in "fuller richer musical sound" territory. I am starting to develop sanctuary envy.

♪

Shiny hard surfaces at CUMC

What can a church like AFUMC with its carpets, drapes and cushions do? The answer lies across town at Christ United Methodist Church. A few years ago they reappointed the front of their sanctuary. Away went the carpet and in came a laminate floor, and tasteful wooden choral risers. I have sung there on a number of occasions -- the choir has a full sound and the congregation sings with gusto.

On Tuesday afternoon I went in with my last two balloons (there had been 20 in the pack from Dollar General).

BANG! POP!

1.647 seconds
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Back at Ashland First, the old worn carpet at the front of the sanctuary is coming out. The new carpet has already been purchased. It will, I am told, blend well with the carpet in the aisle.

It is time for me to say the serenity prayer and hope God will give me the wisdom to know which carpets I cannot change. The problem is that I prefer my serenity with lots of natural reverb.

Singing Advent Before Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 14:07:00 +0000

The congregation is ready to start singing Christmas carols but this is still Advent. The solution this week -- using the lectionary(ish) readings Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 3:1-10 -- is to write new verses to "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." This is my talented wife Libby Moore Slade's work:

A voice cries in the desert
“For the Lord, prepare the way,
Exalt the valleys, raze the mountains
crooked roads, make straight.
Exalt the valleys, raze the mountains
crooked roads, make straight.
O tidings of comfort and joy
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

The day the Lord is coming,
he’ll be like refiner’s fire.
Like strongest soap, he’ll cleanse
his people; he shall purify.
Like strongest soap, he’ll cleanse
his people; he shall purify.
O tidings of comfort and joy
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

John calls us to repent:
“The ax is ready at the root.
The tree it must bear fruit or perish.”
What then shall we do?
“The tree it must bear fruit or perish.”
What then shall we do?
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

We’ll turn our hearts to Jesus and
our lives will be restored.
His name it shall be Wonderful,
our Counselor and Lord.
His name it shall be Wonderful,
our Counselor and Lord.
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

"I feel like singing and they need to come help me!"

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 18:35:00 +0000

Post by Shae Reel- Johnson.

My friend Shae, who I know from my days in the University of Mississippi Gospel Choir, recently made this post to Facebook. Her daughter is in hospital and is going through a tough time. I wrote to Shae and asked if I could share this on the blog. She wrote back:

Yes sir you most certainly can!! Those are my miracle babies!! The boys are twins and they were born autistic. The doctors told us that they would probably not ever talk or function. They couldn't talk until age 4! They have always been able to sing praises to God tho!! Sarah was born five years later and she completed the sound!! They have been singing in harmony since she was 2!!

This testimony of family and of singing God's praises together moved me to tears.

It is the sound of community that defeats isolation.

It is the sound of hope that overcomes despair.

It is the sound of love that heals the sick.

As I preached the other week:

The Song became flesh and dwelt among us and the deafening silence could not overcome it.

Christmas: Singing the Story Together (and free album download)

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 15:59:00 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure of leading the singing and preaching at the Well--a mid-week worship service held in the chapel at Ashland University. Lights are usually dimmed and guitars and drums are usually cranked up as over 200 students sing contemporary worship songs. Last Thursday night was a bit different -- not only was their usual worship leader replaced by an old(er) religion professor, but I persuaded the sound team to use minimal sound reinforcement (omni-directional mics rather than running instruments directly through the board)--something Red Team has been working with for the last three years. My reason was to place the focus firmly on the singing. AU's Miller chapel has wonderful acoustics for singing and that's what I wanted. I rehearsed all the musicians once (but not all at the same time!) and we set off!

I have a few observations from the evening:
It is hard to think of Christmas without singing. It may get more commercialized every year, but we know Christmas should involve singing. This connects with my next point . . .
Christmas is about community - you can't really do Christmas on your own. This is odd because we certainly think we can do Easter on our own. No one says, "Poor Dr. Slade, he has no one to spend Easter with this year." Perhaps the Easter hymn "I come to the garden alone" is responsible. But Christmas, on the other hand is about community. and it is an intergenerational community -- we want the children singing and the grandparents too.
Contemporary Praise & Worship music doesn't satisfy the needs of even the most 'contemporary' congregation. People want to sing the familiar Christmas carols. This is worth thinking about because in many churches there is almost a complete absence of traditional hymnody the rest of the year. I would hazard a guess that these are some of the reasons:

Folks intuitively know that if you want to sing songs together then you need to sing songs that everyone knows. This requires a repertoire that you repeat.
We want to get in touch with our memories of Christmases past, particularly the Christmases of our childhood. For some reason at Christmas we understand what liturgical scholars insist we should do all the time: connect with the continuity of the church worshipping through the last two millennia.
Christmas carols are nearly all story songs and Christianity is, at its heart, the proclamation of a story: an outrageous and incredibly unlikely story. Interestingly the popular contemporary praise and worship songs do not (as a rule) tell stories, they proclaim emotion (worship, praise, adoration, wonder etc.). But at Christmas we need the story as well.
There are Christmas carols that rejoice in the revelry, feasting and joy that follow on the heals of really good news . . . I would hazard a guess that that is completely absent from any song in the CCLI charts!

One of my students captured a snippet of us reveling in the good news of the Christmas story - more hootenanny than Hillsong!

Speaking of the CCLI charts -- I did include its #1 song "10,000 Reasons" as it includes a theology of singing that I really like and I knew this congregation of students enjoy singing this song; however, I wanted to include more of the Story in the song for this carol service. My friend Pete Clapham in England helped me out by writing a new verse.

As shepherds heard
The angels singing,
Now we rejoice
And we join with them.
Ten thousand echoes
Of the heavenly choir
Swell to crescendo
“Peace on Earth today!”

---

Heart & Soul & Voice

(free download of the bootleg album recorded at the Well, Miller Chapel, Ashland University , Dec 4, 2014)

The Acoustic Band:

Nate Bebout - Guitar, Vocals
Ruth Chilcote - Vocals
Spencer Dolezal - Cajon and Loud Thumping
Jake Ewing - Banjo, Vocals
Jeremy Harrison - Grand Piano
Kaitlynn Jackenheimer - Vocals
Mary Kettering (Red Team) - Violin
Liz Sinchok - Vocals
Libby Slade (Red Team) - Accordion, Vocals
Peter Slade (Red Team) - Songleader, Guitar
Cory Smith - Ukelele, Vocals
Kiara Woods - Vocals
Sadie Zegaric - Vocals

Congregational Singing: Lightning Rod or Spiritual Discipline?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 11:47:00 +0000

Whether I felt like it or not, I have been attending Sunday morning worship at a range of different churches for over thirty years. I have sat through inspiring sermons and tedious sermons and sermons that did not even deserve the name. I have been in big churches, small churches, black churches, white churches, charismatic churches and un-charismatic churches, missional churches and "omissional" churches, churches that were thriving and churches that were disintegrating.

My point is that I have seen a lot of church.

One thing I have observed is that when a congregation feels it is struggling, when people feel unhappy with church, it is often expressed as dissatisfaction with the worship music. Worship music becomes a lightning rod for congregational discontent.

If young people are not coming to the church then it must be because of the music.

If I am not feeling inspired during worship, it must be because of the music.

Sean Palmer, a church of Christ minister in Temple, Texas wrote a very interesting piece, "Singing as a Spiritual Discipline" that identifies this very problem. He diagnoses this tendency as an expression of our individualistic approach to our faith.

Our corporate/common singing, regardless of the musical style of our congregation, is still viewed by too many as an individual pursuit. This is odd, because we can’t do corporate singing alone. We just wished the songs were picked and sang as if corporate singing existed for us alone.

Don’t believe me? Do you know anyone who left their church because of a change in “worship?” In truth, these changes are barely changes in worship. Most churches still celebrate the Eucharist, engage sermons, sing, pray, and – sadly – have announcements. What changes is the singing! And the reason people leave over “worship” is because they no longer “like” the singing…personally.

I would add that discontent strikes at music because that is an area that a congregation believes it can change. A church might be stuck with its pastor, with its aging demographic, with its poor location, with its dwindling finances, with its deficient theology, with its lack of commitment, but it can pick different songs!

Sociologist Gerardo Marti in his study of music in multi-racial churches, observed that in an exercise as fraught as nurturing a multi-racial community in which so many factors are outside the church leaders’ control, the pastor and the elders can control “the construction of participation through worship music” (15). Marti contends that this ability to control the musical content can lead to the mistaken belief that just by playing the right music the right way a church can determine the racial constituency of the congregation — a kind of “play it and they will come” mentality. What he discovered from his research in California was that it is the practice of making the music together, rather than the type of music being made, that actually proved to be most significant.

Perhaps drawing from his background in the Church of Christ where worship music is unaccompanied singing, Sean Palmer comes to a similar but more spiritual-sounding conclusion. His prescription for the problem: the church needs to rediscover congregational singing as a corporate spiritual discipline. Palmer suggests that doing so would have five consequences; I particularly like his first two:

We Wouldn’t Expect Immediate Results. No faithful practitioner of spiritual disciplines expects to walk in, practice a discipline for an hour, and leave humming a tune and tapping their toes. In the realm of spiritual practices we know that the blessing is found in the practice itself. You could practice contemplative prayer for years without any tangible outcome, uplifting feeling, or goosebumps, but you come to love and enjoy practicing the presence of God.

We Could Sing On Behalf Of Others. There are songs I hate, like “Amazing Grace.” I’ve never liked it, but I know “Amazing Grace” is tremendously meaningful for others. A friend recently shared with me the place of the song “Amazing Grace” in the recovery movement. The song means a great deal for members of AA and other recovery groups. Those folks are in my church. As a spiritual discipline, I can sing that song – though I despise it – on their behalf. I sing, therefore, not because it’s efficacious for me, but those around me.

I am reminded again of my favorite John Wesley quote:

“Sing all. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a single degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.”

“Directions for Congregational Singing” in Select Hymns, 1761.

Or put another way: When the going get's tough the church gets singing (together)!

Showers and Sanctuaries

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Wed, 21 May 2014 14:01:00 +0000

David Neff has some good words to say about congregational singing in an article over at Christianity Today. He is affirms what many of us know, that congregational singing is a central practice of the church. He offers this good advice:

Allow people to listen to themselves and their neighbors. Our voices should not be overwhelmed by the band or pipe organ. Some of the best congregational singing is a cappella, because unaccompanied singing lets us attend to the voices of our neighbors. In addition, our voices shouldn't be muted by dead acoustics. We are all tempted to sing in a tiled shower. Conversely, nothing discourages singing like an acoustically dry, carpeted worship space with low ceilings and padded pews

Hallelujah

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Fri, 09 May 2014 01:12:00 +0000

My friend Katharine Mitchell sent this my way. Enjoy.

Hymns & Friends

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:12:00 +0000

Church musician and fellow traveller Wendell Kimbrough has posted his new album Hymns & Friends over on bandcamp -- you can stream the whole thing and even pre-order your own copy. Wendell is the musician at the Church of the Advent in Washington D.C.
I love what he says about the hymns he has recorded:

I have heard 20-something young professionals and retired grandparents sing these songs with equal love and enthusiasm.
The hymns on this album also transcend musical styles. Their basic components—text, melody, and harmony—are so well built that they can be led by choirs and pipe organs or by guitars, bass, and drums. When sung in the Spirit’s power, they can shake the walls of cathedrals or bring a living room full of people to a foot-stomping crescendo.

Now that's what I am talking about!

Getty's tips on Congregational Singing

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 19:40:00 +0000

Contemporary Hymn writer Keith Getty offers some advice on congregational singing in a blog post Five Ways to Improve Congregational Singing. He has just returned from a tour that involved meetings with pastors and worship leaders. Reflecting on this he makes the observation that I myself have made and that never fails to amaze me:

In each of those leadership events, I posed the question, “What are the things you ask yourself on Monday morning, in reviewing Sunday’s services?” Generally, the responses centered around production values, stylistic issues, people management, pleasing the pastor, or finishing the service on time. I do not recall that any one asked, “How did the congregation sing?”
It seems curious that in a generation that has produced innumerable conferences, articles, blogs, and even university degree programs on “worship,” the topic of congregational singing hasn’t been raised more often.

He then offers his five suggestions--check them out for yourself. He concludes with this suggestion:

Why not in 2014 begin the Monday morning review by asking, “How did the congregation sing?” and, “How can we help them do it better?"

Good questions Keith!

Pete Seeger: "It sounds so good when you all join in."

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 15:41:00 +0000

Singing "If I Had a Hammer" at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Rally in Greenwood, MS, 1963.

I woke up this morning to the news that Pete Seeger had died. He is, perhaps the biggest influence on me as a singer and leader of songs. If you have time, I recommend you watch the documentary film Pete Seeger: The Power of Song; it is a tribute to his life and will inspire you to song and action.

As I bounced around the internet watching YouTube clips, I found this example of the song he made ubiquitous: Michael, Row the Boat Ashore. Just watch the joy in Seeger's face when the audience really starts singing and he can step away from the microphone and join with them as their voices resound off the walls.

I found myself reworking In paradisum from the requiem mass. It is my prayer for Pete Seeger:

Pete, may singing angels lead you into paradise; upon your arrival, may the martyrs join the song and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem. May the choirs of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, once a poor man, may you have harmonious rest.

Matt Redman and the theology of '10,000 Reasons'

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 18:12:00 +0000

We are preparing to introduce Matt Redman’s song “10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord)” to our congregation this Sunday. This song is number one in the CCLI charts which means it is currently being sung in more churches than any other contemporary praise song (it also won two Grammies back in February)--so we are a little behind the times here a Ashland First United Methodist!

"10,000 Reasons" has a satisfyingly singable chorus echoing the familiar and often sung opening words of Psalm 103: "Bless the Lord, O my soul." The verses are less singable: the melody is not as strong as the chorus and contains irregular syncopation to accommodate the lyrics. This will not be a problem for Redman fans as they will have it memorized from the recording but it will be tricky for the uninitiated.

Redman and his Swedish co-writer Jonas Myrin, as Redman explained, have written a song “about the many, many reasons there are to worship God.” The second verse, drawing inspiration from Psalm 30, claims there are “ten thousand reasons” to sing God’s praises. The number ten thousand is familiar to practically anyone who has ever drawn breath to sing in church. It is from the "ten thousand years" in the last verse of “Amazing Grace” (a verse not in John Newton’s original hymn) and Redman explicitly quotes it in his final verse. He acknowledges giving “a nod to the old hymn” in an interview about the hit song.

So my first impression was that here is a singable song with some familiar words: this is a good formula for congregational singing.

There is, however, something much more theologically profound going on in this hymn than Redman alludes to in his interviews or in his downloadable devotional guide to the song.

Consider the opening lines of the first verse:

The sun comes up, it's a new day dawning

It's time to sing Your song again

The singer is not claiming it is time to sing my song of praise to God again: the singer is addressing God and declaring his or her intention to sing "Your song." What is God’s song that we are supposed to be singing?

I have been reading Eastern Orthodox theologies of church, liturgy, and singing for the last few weeks and this question seems a familiar one.

There is a very old Christian understanding--still alive in the Eastern Orthodox tradition--that creation is constantly sung into existence by God. Back in the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote in his Commentary on the Inscriptions on the Psalms (1999.28) that the cosmos “is a kind of musical harmony whose musician is God.” The whole of creation is God’s song.

In his book The Beauty of the Infinite, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart writes, “As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God’s eternal, Triune polyphony.” The song of Creation is the song of the Trinity.

Theologian Vigen Guroian, in his lyrical book The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key, declares “Creation is a Trinitarian love song.” This love song is a song of wholeness and righteousness, a song of creation and recreation, a song of justice and reconciliation. Gurion explains that it is our lives that are (or should be) part of God’s song:

Doing God’s will is not merely morality. . . it is joining in song to sing God’s hymn of Creation so that all things may be perfect. Short of this participation in God’s Trinitarian love song, we cannot hope to comprehend the deep, deep meaning of Creation and our common destiny with it (15).

So this is the song that--according to Redman and Myrin--we should wake up every morning determined to sing.

But we live in a world that rarely seems like a great harmonious love song. Guroian writes, “The constant cacophony of a fallen Creation interrupts the melody of faith and drowns it out almost everywhere.” It was the Incarnation, when “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (Jn 1:14), that restored the melody. Guroian explains, “In Christ, in his perfect humanity, the church, the temple of Creation, is rebuilt and the song is renewed.”

I found a similar stream of theology in contemporary Roman Catholic thought. In a paper delivered at the Vatican on the fortieth anniversary of the changes brought to music in Catholic churches by Vatican II, Giordano Monzio Compagnoni explained the centrality of Christ to the singing of the Church:

Christ [is] the real singer in the hymn of praise to the Father; he who through his Incarnation not only introduced on earth the hymn of praise that is offered in heaven but, most importantly, associates with him in this song the Church, which in this way becomes a continuation of him and is called to preserve and enrich that hymn. Therefore within the Church that “prays and sings”, Christ is present.

This is where we come in. Jesus taught the disciples this love song of the Trinity (Jn 13:34) and the Holy Spirit continues to remind the Church of the tune (Jn 14:26).

A mental image of Jesus as the great song leader springs to mind. Before I know it, my brain has Sydney Carter’s hymn playing in heavy rotation--only instead of dancing we are singing:

Sing then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Song, said He.

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I'll lead you all in the Song, said He.

Of course, for the Church to sing Jesus’ song with our lives is no easy task. To be able to sing this love song of the Trinity anticipating the New Creation is beyond our strength: it requires God’s grace. And so in Redman and Myrin’s song, the disciple’s intention “to sing Your song” is followed by the prayer:

Whatever may pass, and whatever lies before me

Let me be singing when the evening comes.

Redman and Myrin, by embracing the old Protestant hymnic tradition of anticipating their own demise in the last verse (And on that day when my strength is failing/ The end draws near and my time has come), show us that the disciple's call is to sing God's song not just to the end of the day but for the rest of our lives. The Song does not end there: death does not silence it. This is our great (eschatological) hope, that God will sustain us until the New Jerusalem. Then all Creation will be made new and (for ten thousand years and then for evermore) we will continue singing the hymn of praise “with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven.”

Chris Tomlin's Lessons for Worship Leaders

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 15:06:00 +0000

“This is about all of us singing”

On Wednesday, Oct 16, I went to the Q-Arena in Cleveland to hear Chris Tomlin. He is by far the biggest artist in the contemporary Christian Praise & Worship industry. Back in 2006, TIME magazine announced that he was “ the most often sung artist anywhere.” CNN recently backed this claim with their own math:

In 2012, Christian Copyright Licensing International paid out $40 million to artists and musicians, and Tomlin got a healthy slice of that pie. Churches around the world used 128 songs he wrote or co-wrote last year, [Howard] Rachinski [CEO of CCLI] said.CCLI estimates that every Sunday in the United States, between 60,000 and 120,000 churches are singing Tomlin’s songs. By extrapolating that data, Rachinski says, “our best guess would be in the United States on any given Sunday, 20 to 30 million people would be singing Chris Tomlin's songs.”

As the most successful songwriter and worship leader in the church today, a master of his craft, I want to present some of the lessons for church musicians that I drew from watching him work.

1. Being a musician and worship leader is about Congregational Singing

Despite the rock concert aesthetic of Tomlin’s show -- the big stage, light show, massive PA and strange skippy dancing around -- as the words to the first song appeared on the huge video screens, it was obvious that we were expected to sing.

Talking to Worship Leader magazine about his new album, Tomlin said “songs of worship are meant for community and are meant for the people coming together to sing.”
In a sound bite from a televised interview on CNN, Tomlin said: “I strive to write [songs] that people can sing, that people want to sing, and that people need to sing.”

2. You need to encourage the congregation to sing

Sing with me!

Many things in the show let us know that we were not singing-along to the songs but that the songs were for us to sing. Throughout the evening Tomlin encouraged us to sing. This should come as no surprise from the man whose biggest hit “How Great is our God” includes the injunction “Sing with me!” in the chorus.

How did he encourage us to sing? Well in a few different ways:

3. You need to choose/write singable songs

Whether you like Tomlin’s style of soft pop/rock anthems, you have to acknowledge he writes a catchy singable chorus. He told CNN “I'm trying to think, how can I form this so that everybody, people who are tone deaf, who can't clap on two and four, how can I form this song so they can sing it, so that it is singable?”

Two days after the concert, the chorus to “Indescribable” is still stuck on constant play in my head.

4. You need to teach them the new songs (and worship God while you do so).

For me the most interesting moment came early in the night. Like in any rock concert, Tomlin played the material from the new album early in the evening. “I promise to you at some point we will sing ‘How Great is Our God’” he says to reassure us.

He then eases into the new song “Lay Me Down” singing the chorus with muted accompaniment.

“I lay me down I’m not my own . . . “

At the end of the chorus he addresses the crowd. “This is a new one so we’ll do it again.” And the band repeats the chorus.
This is a revealing moment. Tomlin clearly understands himself primarily as a song leader. He wants the audience to sing along to every word and he is following the basic rule that when you introduce a new song to a congregation you must teach it to them. The band then ploughed ahead into the Mumford & Sons-y foot stomping guitar strumming number with the congregation singing along lustily.

5. You must make space for singing

Of the sixteen songs Tomlin sang that night, ten were specifically arranged to accommodate and encourage congregational singing. (And three others had intentional audience participation - dancing, waving flags and bouncing balls!)

a) in arrangements

Chris Tomlin’s band is loud and the crashing wall of ringing guitar that kicks in on the choruses of the U2-ish praise rock anthems is overwhelming. (Just listen to the chorus of Awake My Soul, or Whom Shall I fear [God of Angel Armies]). Even in these full on rock numbers, Tomlin created space in the arrangements for the congregation to hear ourselves and that clearly signaled to us that we were expected and needed to sing.

There was significant dynamic range even in the loudest songs but his most obvious device to get us singing was stopping the band completely. The second song of the night--the Coldplay-esque I Will Follow--had crushing power chords and pounding piano in the chorus but Tomlin inserted an acapella final chorus (immediately followed by a drum solo!).

But singing to this level of noise is not satisfying for a congregation and Tomlin the song-leader knows it.

b) by dropping the volume

Of the sixteen songs in the set, six of them were played by smaller acoustic ensembles (2 acoustic guitars, solo piano, acoustic guitars and cajon) --and these were the moments of greatest singing and emotional connection between artist and audience.

Talking to Worship Leader magazine about the hymn “Crown Him With Many Crowns” Tomlin reflects--perhaps unintentionally--on congregational singing and the volume of the band:

‘Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but it’s own.’ It just cannot be written any better than that. When I think about what we’re doing as worship leaders, when we’re bringing a song of praise, a heavenly anthem of praise, it drowns out all music and drowns out all other noise … That’s why there’s so much peace when people come to sing; God drowns out every other competing thing.

I think worship leaders (and church sound engineers) need to ask themselves, ‘Who is being drowned out?’

6. You should love the voice of the Church (more than your own)

It was fascinating that Tomlin, the king of the contemporary praise song, used old hymns, “Nothing but the blood of Jesus” and “Amazing Grace,” to create the emotional touchstones of the evening. After leading us in a simple arrangement of “Nothing but the blood,” during which he stepped away from the microphone, Tomlin said “There is no other sound like it on Earth: when the people of God sing the praises of God. It is a special thing.”

In his recent interview with CNN Tomlin reflected on his concert at Madison Square Gardens and his desire to step away from the microphone:

It was just so beautiful, because I feel like it says something. It's not just like, ‘Hey, listen to me sing.’ This is all of us together. I think when you step back from the mic and it is not about you - and yeah, the light may be on you, but this is about all of us singing. This is about a bigger story, it's about a greater story. It's about a greater name than my name. My name is on the ticket, but this is about a greater name.

First Hymnal for Atheists

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Thanks to Lori Brandt Hale for sending this my way!

Report from the Field: RUF & Rivers Hill, Oxford, MS

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 13:17:00 +0000

This is the fourth (and final) in a series of blog posts I wrote for the Project on Lived Theology on my two-week lived theology road trip from New Orleans to Memphis. To read more of my posts, click here.

From Jackson I drove north to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi and a number of my old friends. That Wednesday evening, I slide in to a pew at the back of the campus chapel for the weekly gathering of the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF). The new chapel building is rapidly filling with conservative white Presbyterian youth. Women in shorts, makeup and silk-screened T-shirts reading “Tri Delta Crush Party” and “Alpha Gamma Delta Swap” pass me as they find their seats. The men are wearing a uniform of baseball caps and check cotton shirts.

“In the week of rush we will not meet on Wednesday” is one of the announcements--I am back in the world of the Greeks

RUF is the campus ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)-- a southern Presbyterian denomination firmly maintaining its particular brand of patriarchal Scottish Calvinism. Why was I there? Because I was curious to experience RUF hymns in their natural environment. As I mentioned in a previous blog, RUF has developed what it considers to be its own genre of hymnody: they take old hymns and set them to earnestly strummed new tunes. They call it the “ReTune” movement. (See and hear what they want to sound like here)

This evening in Oxford we sing five hymns printed on a single page hymn sheet. Yep, I said hymn sheet. You don’t have to have attended many white evangelical worship services to realize that this is an in-your-face countercultural statement. Where are the projectors and screens? I notice some more subtle eschewing of the contemporary worship culture. The lights were up in the sanctuary: no worship mood lighting here. The young men arrayed at the front are playing acoustic instruments (two guitars, a mandolin and a djembe) but there is no “worship leader”--usually a good looking young man with a guitar--introducing the songs and leading the singing. In fact, the two mic’ed singers--a man and woman--are situated off to the side.

The congregation of well groomed and well mannered students sing out in unison--even when a couple of the new tunes seem lackluster. This is their music and they are committed to singing it.

This wholesale retuning of hymns started at Belmont College in Nashville in the 1990s with RUF campus minister and musician Kevin Twit. I sat down with Kevin over coffee and oatmeal in Nashville earlier this summer and he explained to me why he encouraged his students to reclaim the hymnody of some eighteenth century evangelical poets who struggled with bereavement, disappointment, depression and suicidal tendencies (see the biographies of Anne Steele and William Cowper if you think I am exaggerating).

“I would sit here at this table and talk to students who had grown up in churches about doubts they were experiencing, and they would conclude that they must not be a Christian.”

Twit was talking about what he sees as the tendency in popular evangelical spirituality to believe “that the assurance of salvation is made the basis of salvation.”

“And I would say, ‘Well, have you read the Psalms?’ and generally, no, they hadn't. And it slowly dawned on me that it was the songs they were singing that were really the main influence on what they felt the Christian life should feel like.”

Twit's solution? He started putting old (and often forgotten) hymns into the student’s hands.

“There was a sense that what is working for these baby boomers is not working for my college students.” Back in the 1990s RUF's women musicians were “listening to Alanis Morissette--an honest expression of anger in music--and wondering why the church can't speak truthfully and honestly about that. And so when I find Anne Steele and hymns like ‘Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul.’ I thought, Oh my gosh, this is the angst that my students feel and they have got no way to express it."

Of the five hymns we sing at RUF in Oxford this evening, all come from the so-called RUF Hymnbook, a free online database of songs, chords and lead sheets. Three are from the early eighteen hundreds but it is the last hymn, “Rock of Ages (When the Day Seems Long)” that communicates to the students what the RUF Christian life feels like: God's faithfulness despite our feelings.

Rock of Ages, when the day seems long

From this labor and this heartache, I have come

The skies will wear out, but you remain the same

Rock of Ages, I praise your name.

Kevin Twit wrote the tune and Sandra McCracken, one of the original Alanis Morissette listening RUF students, wrote the words. The students sing the chorus with purpose and passion. At the front, a young man wails on his mandolin.

The following Sunday I went to Rivers Hill church of Christ in Oxford Mississippi. No mandolin pyrotechnics here. Rivers Hill is a small African American congregation that does not hold with musical instruments or even clapping to accompany the singing on Sunday morning. I had first gone to this church in 1997 when, in the interests of research for a paper on youth choirs, I had cycled up the long hill out of town to attend services.

Communion at Rivers Hill, September 22, 2013

This morning, I arrived in time for Sunday school. I sat in the the small sanctuary in the comfortably padded pews. There is no natural light and my eyes are drawn to the large window shaped hole in the front wall through which, shimmering in fluorescent light, is the image of a waterfall. It is the baptistry.

I was hoping to find some of the people I had interviewed sixteen years ago but more important to me was to hear again the singing of this congregation. (Listen to a recording I made in 1997 of the Charles Tindley hymn “Trials Dark on Every Hand”)

As the service started, I was not disappointed.

“Brother Duke, please lead us in a song.”

A young man steps up to the podium and mutters something in a low voice. The only thing I hear is “six hundred and eighty”--and then starts singing.

“There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,

Singing . . .”

And the congregation pick up with the line “No not one! No not one!”

The men carry the tune and some strong altos push in with their rich close harmonies.

We are singing a revival hymn from 1895 that has been transformed and rearranged by this black congregation. It is printed in Praise for the Lord, a church of Christ hymnal, though I don’t see many people paying much attention to the book. Indeed, what I am hearing has significant differences to the notes on the page including the sung exhortation “singing” that precedes every exclamation of “No not one!” (listen here).

There are around sixty in the congregation with two pews at the back full of college-age students.

After the service Douglas Hill, the grandfather of the young man leading the singing, invites me out into the country to eat lunch with his family. Upon arrival I see cars and trucks parked in the yard and the along the road. Several canopies are set up on the lawn and Douglas Hill's daughter in-law is busy carrying trays of food out to a table with catering sized stainless steel warmed serving dishes. I quickly realize this is no regular Sunday meal, this is some kind of unofficial family reunion (I am sure it is unofficial because there are no T-shirts celebrating the event).

I am on my best behavior.

We sit outside in the shade and eat catfish, greens, spaghetti, cornbread followed by pecan pie and banana pudding. Cousins re-introduce themselves and the banter flows as sweet and strong as the ice tea.

As the picnic winds down, I get out my digital recorder and chat with with Miss Opeline Kelly, Douglas and his wife Lolula Hill about their memories of the early days of the congregation: they are three of its oldest members.

Miss Opeline corrects me. “I am the oldest in the gospel.” By which she means she was the first to be baptized.

The churches of Christ have a particularly high view of baptism. Douglas Hill explains this to me: “Baptism is a part of salvation. 'Go ye in all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' and 'He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.' Not baptized because you are already saved.”

Back in 1959, Opeline Kelly--rather like the RUF students in Nashville forty years later--had been unable to relate to what she had been told Christians should feel. “In the Methodist church we were just taught: ‘You've got to sit on the mourners bench until you feel something.’ I didn't know what you were going to feel, so I was sitting there waiting on it.” This had proven unsatisfactory, “Weren't nothing to feel!”

Opeline found the straight forward gospel of the church of Christ appealing. “They talked about the death, burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” She had been sprinkled as a Methodist then immersed as a Baptist, now she responded to this gospel and travelled to a black church of Christ congregation in Water Valley to be baptized (their own building, a converted house, did not have its own baptistry).

A year later, Lolula Hill took the same journey to Water Valley and baptism. As she came out of the water she heard the unaccompanied voices of the congregation singing “Are you washed in the blood?” Now a baptized Christian, Lolula joined her voice with the saints.

Lolula had grown up in a lively Pentecostal church with pianos, guitars, tambourines and, if you did not have an instrument, “they'd use their hands for clapping.” Accepting this new unaccompanied and undemonstrative musical style did not come easily. “When I came into the church of Christ,” she said, “I thought this is the most dead thing that I've ever seen! They were sat up in there just like a pressed board sitting there. And no life to it whatsoever.”

“So How did you come to love it?”

Lolula and Douglas Hill

“Just hung on in there. Just being there every Sunday”

It is this commitment to this community--the baptized saints--that gives this congregation its sense of ownership of these songs and keeps this tradition alive. So often church music surrenders its distinctive sound in the interest of professionalism, to keep the young people coming, or the desire to attract outsiders. It is in this context that I believe the connection between baptism and a distinctive hymnody is significant. If baptism marks the new community of the church, then its hymnody is the sound of baptism. It is the sound of the community of forgiven sinners and reconciled enemies singing a new song together.

This is a powerful thing.

Recalling his own baptism in 387 C.E., St. Augustine writes in Confessions:

The tears flowed from me when I heard your hymns and canticles, for the sweet singing of your Church moved me deeply. The music surged in my ears, truth seeped into my heart, and my feelings of devotion overflowed, so that the tears streamed down. But they were tears of gladness” (Confessions, IX.6-7)

Report from the Field: Redeemer Pres, Jackson, MS.

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 13:21:00 +0000

This is the second in a series of blog posts I am writing for the Project on Lived Theology. They are reports and reflections on my two-week lived theology road trip from New Orleans to Memphis. To read the first post “New Orleans and CCDA”, click here.

I crossed the Pontchartrain and drove on up to Jackson, Mississippi, in time to go to Redeemer Presbyterian Church for Sunday morning worship. Redeemer is a fascinating and unlikely congregation. A church in the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), its existence is the result of a church split nine years ago in a North Jackson congregation called Trinity Pres. In the 1950s, when Trinity had started, Northside Drive had been a white neighborhood. By 2004, it had “transitioned,” as they say, into an African-American neighborhood. The split in the church may not have been directly about race, but race had played a complicating factor — it was over whether the congregation should stay and work in the neighborhood or move four miles down the road (and across the highway and color line) into a bigger facility.

Redeemer’s website diplomatically summarizes the resulting split:

When Trinity had outgrown the facilities on Northside Drive, it elected to move to a new location on Old Canton Road. This opened a unique opportunity for a portion of the Trinity family to remain at the Northside location in order to continue ministering to the Broadmoor and Broadmeadow neighborhoods.

Over on its site, Trinity Pres’ has a very detailed justification for what happened:

Trinity had reached a point in its demographic niche where future growth and impact in the African American community – the predominant community at its’ Northside Drive location – necessitated African American leadership. The elders became convinced that the location of the church demanded an African American pastor on staff and an integrated body of elders and deacons. The move to Old Canton Road would open the way for a black church on Northside Drive with indigenous leadership.

So to summarize: those who left (the congregation) stayed (in the building) and those who stayed, left!

Mike Campbell preaching his first sermon at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, October 10, 2004.

I had been in Jackson during the Trinity/Redeemer split back in 2004 and I had gone to see Mike Campbell–the African American minister called to Redeemer–preach his first sermon, and now I was fascinated to see how this new congregation was doing. I was particularly interested to see how they were developing a music program to lead worship in this intentional interracial congregation.

Sociologist Gerardo Marti in Worship Across the Racial Divide (OUP, 2012) observed that “Integrated worship is fundamental to the vision of a truly multiracial church“ (4). He also observes that in an exercise as fraught as nurturing a multi-racial community in which so many factors are outside the church leaders’ control, the pastor and the elders can control “the construction of participation through worship music” (15). Marti contends that this ability to control the musical content can lead to the mistaken belief that just by playing the right music the right way a church can determine the racial constituency of the congregation — a kind of “play it and they will come” mentality. What he discovered from his research in California was that it is the practice of making the music together, rather than the type of music being made, that actually proved to be most significant.

“Music alone does not integrate people. The force of the music does not come through its professional quality but rather through the relational connections members share. . . The relationship not the music is celebrated. The music gives occasion for building relationships” (Marti, 176).

Over lunch on Monday, Redeemer’s minister Mike Campbell told me of the church’s dramatic numerical success. Starting with around 100 people for the Sunday morning service, they now have 650-700 attending two morning services. The number of African Americans has also increased from less than 10% in 2004 to around 25% today. So many people are attending that Redeemer had to extend the sanctuary and build a wrap-around balcony.

Paula Granger and Symeon Robins lead choir practice in Redeemer’s expanded sanctuary.

The sanctuary was not just reconfigured to accommodate more people — the pulpit and the pipe organ have gone — in their place is a space that accommodates the choir, a band– including a Hammond B3 and drums off to the side isolated in a small plexiglass room–with the preacher and assistant pastor sitting at the front of the platform facing the congregation. Suspended over them all is a large celtic cross.

Redeemer has decided to invest in African American gospel musicians to lead the music and choir–Paula Granger is the director and Symeon Robins is her able assistant on keys. The music itself is drawn from distinct musical traditions present in the congregation and led by different members of the music ministry. This particular Sunday, Ryan Dean –the white youth pastor–leads most of the songs with his acoustic guitar. His vernacular is Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) but you can feel the gears shift as the songs change from CCM (“Blessed Be Your Name”) to Gospel (“Highly Exalted”) to Reformed University Fellowship (“The Sands of Time are Sinking”).

As the genre changes the quality and style of the singing changes. CCM is sung in a breathy style with very little volume — it is the music of a personal relationship with Jesus and the singers don’t need to project the sound much further than the space just in front of their lips (after all, Jesus is closer to you than you are to yourself). The effect, even when a song is well known and loved, is to create a warm melodic murmur that can be heard over the band and the amplified singers if you focus your attention on it. But as soon as the choir switches to singing gospel the volume of singing jumps dramatically — gospel singers project to the back of the room and the African Americans are enjoying singing out. The final hymn is a favorite of the Reformed University Fellowship Hymn Book and all of a sudden the white women are singing like the sirens from O Brother, Where Art Thou. Bluegrass, unlike CCM, is a style of singing that encourages projection. These conservative Southern Presbyterians claim this musical product of its student ministry as a distinctive worship genre. They take old nineteenth century hymns (the more emotionally tortured, the better) and set them to new tunes written in a Nashville Americana folk style — think Buddy Miller and the Civil Wars meets the Avett Brothers with a dash of Emmylou Harris.

I am intrigued by the different voices of the congregation–the way the different church traditions are so identifiable not simply in the songs people sing but in the very way they sing them together. In the book Creator Spirit (Baker, 2011, 80), theologian Steve Guthrie points out that St. Paul calls Gentile Christians to sing God’s praises with the Jews in the church to demonstrate the new reality of their unity in Christ. They are to sing with “one voice”(Rom 15-5-11).

After the service Candace and Symeon Robins take me to The Cock of the Walk restaurant. As we eat fried chicken, catfish, hush puppies and greens, I discover that Redeemer isn’t trying to develop a single voice — a musical expression distinctive to the congregation. “We want to be authentic to each genre,” Symeon explains. I can’t decide how to think about this — I am not sure if I am only hearing people sing their own music and being silent on the rest or if I am hearing the distinctive songs of different traditions meeting together on a Sunday morning.

On Tuesday night I come back to Redeemer for choir practice. I stow myself on the back row with the basses where I can’t do too much damage. There are 26 people in the choir stands this evening and fifteen are African American — a proportion much higher than in the congregation (Marti calls this tendency “conspicuous color”). We work hard for 90 minutes and then join hands as we pray together. As I say good bye to Symeon and Paula and we hug I experience something of what the sociologist Marti observed when he wrote that “music gives occasion for building relationships.” But the same could be said of any social event–sociology can only take us so far. Theology gets us further:

“Music cannot summon up from within itself the power to ‘break down the dividing walls’ and ‘abolish the hostility between us’ (see Eph 2:14). This is the work of God. Nevertheless, as with bread and wine, as with the waters of baptism, or as with sexual intimacy, music is one means by which God may teach us community and make it a lived reality among us” (Guthrie 91).

Report from the Field: The Chattahoochee Musical Convention

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 14:20:00 +0000

photo: John Kelso

On the Saturday preceding the first Sunday in August, I found my way to Wilson's Chapel a few miles south of Carrolton, Georgia for the Chattahoochee Musical Convention. As Wikipedia will tell you, this is "the oldest surviving Sacred Harp musical convention, having been founded in 1852."

I couldn't find much information online other than it took place in August on "First Sunday and Saturday before - Chattahoochee Musical Convention, Wilson Chapel, Southeast of Carrollton GA. Turn left off Hwy A-27 at Cross Plains Rd. to church." So you can imagine my relief when I saw the sign that said "sing" at the entrance to a gravel road. And sing they did!

There were a good number of singers filling the wooden pews in the wood paneled sanctuary of Wilson's chapel. Three window AC units hummed and the ceiling fans whirled signaling just how warm they expected it to get.

I wasn't new to the idea of shape-note singing, but this was my first time at a sing. "Well you chose a good one." more than one of the participants said with a shake of their heads. They were clearly thinking "rookie!" The first problem I had was that I had never been to a shape-note singing school and so I hadn't learned how to sing the notes -- an important skill as the first run through any hymn the participants sing the names of the notes. These names--signalled by the shape of the note--correspond to their relative intervals (not their place in the scale). If Julie Andrews had sung Sacred Harp, the Sound of Music would have been very different. Fa would have been a deer as well as a long way to run, sol would be a drop of golden sun and a needle pulling thread, and la would be the name she called herself as well as a note to follow sol. Perhaps what might have proven most confusing for the Von Trapp progeny is that mi is now a drink with jam and bread!

Confused?

That's how I felt.

As I sight-read my part, I started singing the notes to "ha" and hoped the basses around me assumed I had a speech impediment. I added one shape at a time (I started with "la") and after about 40 minutes, through a feat of concentration that made my brain sweat, I had it good enough for the slow passages--I never did manage the fast runs.

We started singing at 9:30 in the morning and sang for four hour-long blocks with a break before the last one for lunch. Over this period we managed to sing EIGHTY-SEVEN hymns - that is approximately twenty-two hymns per hour (22 hph). This is a fantastic feat of vocal endurance for your average choir -- but this is no average bunch of singers -- they sing at the TOP of their lungs from the first la to the last fa. I had decided that I was not going to record anything or take notes - I was just going to experience the sing. The fact is that the hymns came so fast and my concentration level was so high, that I barely had time to raise my eyes from the pages of the hymnbook. But I broke my vow just once when someone stepped forward and called "417." This hymn -- Weeping Pilgrim-- is an unusual tune as it changes time signature and tempo between the verses and the refrain. It should be noted that the singing here is more restrained than for many of the 87 hymns we sang that day.

Over lunch I met John Kelso, a talented photographer and keen singer from Atlanta. He has a remarkable series of photographs of Sacred Harp singers he has titled "I want to die shouting."

Dinner on the grounds of Wilson Chapel

Report from the Field: New City Music Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 19:20:00 +0000

I recently returned from an eleven-day singing tour of the South with my head full of tunes and ideas about congregational singing. This is all part of my semester-long study leave from Ashland University and research for THE BOOK.

When I tell people about the book -- “It’s going to be about congregational singing, church and reconciling communities.”-- I tend to get a polite look of disinterest. It is as if I am saying, “I am writing a book on knitting and theology.”

So it was with great relief that I found that at the New City Music Conference in Chattanooga my sentence-long book proposal was met with understanding and interest.

What is the New City Music Conference? This will take a bit of explanation.

New City is a church founded in Chattanooga in the 1970s by Randy Nabors, a white conservative Presbyterian pastor with assistance from James Ward, a talented young musician. An urban ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America, New City has become the flagship of a small but vibrant multicultural worship movement in this predominantly white and southern denomination. This single congregation has become the hub of the New City Network: a loose connection of urban congregations interested in “cross cultural ministry.” From my observation, this seems to include congregations that are deliberately trying to be multiracial as well as congregations ministering to particular refugee communities.

The Conference Choir practice with Jim Ward-- New City's
musical godfather--on keys. This is the first time I have sung
gospel music from a score -- it was tricky -- a lot of syncopation
and repeats

These churches have developed an ethos of worship music that attempts to be an authentic expression of the particular congregation’s ethnic sensibilities. Every couple of years, musicians from the New City Network gather together to share their songs and worship together and I was lucky enough to be there this summer.

I sang in Spanish, Swahili, French, and English.

I had wonderful conversations with many musicians.

I am still processing the experience.

You can find many offerings from the conference over at the New City Music website -- it is well worth exploring.

Here is one sample -- a blues lament written for the conference by Kirk Ward. Kirk (son of James Ward) is a musician at New City Fellowship - University City in St Louis. He has written about this song over on his blog "Worship in the City." The lead sheet is available here.

Hymns from School

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Wed, 29 May 2013 17:11:00 +0000

In this recent piece on NPR, Brian Eno (Roxy Music and U2 producer) makes a case for the importance of a capella singing. He observes that it has "civilizational benefits"

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

He thinks this is so important that he states,

that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

What is odd is that I grew up in a British educational system that had congregational singing at the start of everyday in our school assemblies--I am sure Brian Eno probably did too. We sang a bunch of Victorian and Edwardian hymns as well as the hymns of the folk revival in the state and private schools I attended. We had all the militaristic imagery that helped build a bygone empire (Stand Up, Stand up for Jesus, Onward Christian Soldiers) as well as the strange hymns to British nationalism which simultaneously filled Kitchener's Army and seemed to mourn the terrible losses of the First World War (Jerusalem, I Vow to Thee My Country). We also sang of other people's wars (The Battle Hymn of the Republic) as well as sustained fantasy violence (the hobgoblin and foul fiends of To be a Pilgrim).

We sang of God's creation with Victorian sentimentality (All Things Bright and Beautiful). We observed the sacred and academic year; I particularly remember the advent hymns (O Come, O Come Emmanuel, Hills of the North Rejoice) though Easter was well represented as it fell during the school year (There is a Green Hill Far Away, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross). We asked for forgiveness from our "foolish ways," in Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. And we sang our liberal Protestant concerns in Sydney Carter's When I Needed a Neighbor (were you there?) and for a good work ethic in Lord of All Hopefulness.

Many hymns used at school accrued alternative lyrics ranging from silly ("Most highly flavored gravy, Gloria!") to the pornographic (no repeatable examples).

Even if Eno seems unaware that group singing used to be a regular part of the school day, given my passion for group singing and the fact that I am now seeking to research and write on the subject, I would have to agree with him and say this was the most important thing that school did for me.

Let the Fieldwork Begin!

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Sun, 26 May 2013 23:28:00 +0000

With the end of the school year, I am excited to have a semester of study leave from Ashland University. This is being supplemented by a writing grant from the Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology. All of this means that for the next year I will be hunkering down to research and write a book on congregational singing, church and reconciling communities.

Isaac Wardell of Bifrost Arts.

This week I have been in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Isaac Wardell, the founder of Bifrost Arts, was kind enough to let me interview him and ask him all kinds of questions about his passion for encouraging congregations to sing. There is a great article about Wardel's work called "Bifrost: Enriching the Church and Engaging the World. . . Through Singing." You can see from the title why I am interested learning more from him. He has written a set of Sunday School materials on corporate worship -- I recommend you download a free copy of his Liturgy, Music and Space.

This morning my family attended Trinity Presbyterian Church and heard the fruit of the congregation's labors. In the resonant modern sanctuary the worship team led the large congregation with its volume set at the acoustic level of the 9ft Baldwin grand piano.

At the service I participated in this morning at Trinity, the connection between the sacramental life of the body and congregation's singing was very strong. We welcomed the newly baptized into the Church with a cappella singing (Amazing Grace) and as we moved forward to share in the sacrement of the Lord's Supper the band dropped away again as we sang "I Love You Lord."

In the article about Bifrost I already mentioned, the minister of Trinity Pres, Greg Thompson, reflects on Isaac Wardell's influence and hints at the sacramental character and function of singing. Thompson explains that Wardell is moving the congregation "toward greater congregational engagement, which is to say, lots of people really, really singing. I have been amazed as I have seen everyone from children to Chinese students to Boomer conservatives gathered around not just the same table but around the same songs—and singing.”

Let the fieldwork begin--I will be traveling to Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi over the next few months as well as to churches closer to home in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. I'll keep y'all posted.

Singing makes atheist "church" work

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 03:06:00 +0000

I was interested to read this article in the British newspaper The Guardian about an atheist church service in London. Atheists want community and something to do on a Sunday morning. After experiencing the service, a couple of curious atheists from High Wycombe told the reporter:

"Some of the things I thought really wouldn't work, like the singing, were really good. Normally I hate singing."
Churches do a lot of what they do "because it works", he notes, "Atheists make a mistake to look at church and throw it all out just because they don't believe in God."

And what did they sing together? "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen and "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder.

7000 White Men Singing

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:18:00 +0000

Over on his wall, my facebook friend Rev. Ligon Duncan announced the release of a new album of congregational singing.

On November 27, 2012 Sovereign Grace Music will release Together for the Gospel Live II, the second live recording of the singing at Together for the Gospel.
In April of 2010 and 2012, thousands gathered in Louisville, KY, to participate in the Together for the Gospel conference. This album contains 16 of the songs they sang, led by Bob Kauflin on piano.
Go here for ALBUM INFORMATION: http://sovereigngracemusic.org/Albums/Together_for_the_Gospel_Live_II

The Together for the Gospel conference is a gathering of conservative (mostly white) evangelical pastors. They are committed to all sorts of things. Its web site has eighteen articles of "Affirmations & Denials." Among them is the affirmation that, "the teaching office of the Church is assigned only to those men who are called of God in fulfillment of the biblical teachings." If you want to know what this doctrinal position sounds like, listen to this YouTube clip.
The worship leader, Bob Kauflin, explains over on Sovereign Grace Music's website:

While we can glorify God through a variety of musical instruments, we’re commanded over 50 times in Scripture to sing God’s praise. So we left the electric guitars, drums, and basses at home for this project.

While I love this commitment to congregational singing, I can't help thinking that the guitars, drums and basses were not all that was left behind at home.

I am not trying to score a cheap point here--this group of men make a remarkable sound and from the conference organizers' point of view, this is what seven thousand pastors should sound like. But when I listen to it as congregational singing, the absence of women's voices is deeply disturbing.

I have just finished mixing Red Team's new album and so I am perhaps particularly attuned to hearing all the voices. In the process of mixing the album I learned something new. On one track I had my children sing. They are just two small voices in a multi-tracked crowd of 50 voices. However, the timbre of children's voices cuts through the mix and completely changes the sound. The inclusion of just one voice can change the sound of a large group.

If congregational singing is "a sounding image of the unified church" as theologian Steven Guthrie claims, then I prefer my congregational singing to include everything that has breath praising the Lord. Perhaps it is a good exercise to listen out for the voices we can't hear singing in the sanctuary on Sunday morning. This musical concern might lead us to some significant ecclesial soul-searching.

Science and Group Singing

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 22:47:00 +0000

I am never sure quite what to do with neuroscientists who make claims about singing--I am not in a position to evaluate their research. However, it doesn't surprise me that there may be some biological reasons why singing makes you feel good, after all musicians have known this for millennia.

A couple of reports on recent scientific papers that turned up on the blogosphere are interesting. An evolutionary psychologists from Magdalen College, Oxford, claims that group singing releases endorphines that promote group harmony. This led me to a report of a German study conducted in 2010 of a bunch of four-year olds and the effect of group singing on their interaction with each other. "Children who had sung and marched together were more likely to help one another pick up marbles.

From Memory to Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:22:00 +0000

I am tucking into a fascinating book published last month by Eerdmans, From Memory to Imagination:Reforming the Church's Music by C. Randall Bradley, the director of the church music program at Baylor University.

The book is loaded with subheadings-- in some chapters nearly every paragraph has its own heading. This certainly makes it easy to skim!
Bradley is calling for churches in their response to the current crisis in church music not to retreat to their memory of a simpler time -- rather to dare to imagine the new future for church music and worship. In the process, Bradley has some interesting things to say about singing (emphasis added):

When we sing with a group, we are joining our instrument with those of others; it is an act of intimacy. Our breathing becomes synchronized with the breathing of others, and a physical conformity ensues that is unlike that of any other human activity. The sheer power of dozens or hundreds of human bodies forgoing their own preferred breathing patterns to reconcile with others is a striking picture of community and of the power of group singing (174).

This gives me a new insight into how congregational singing is a practice that is both the Church's testimony of God's reconciling power and also a practice which requires reconciliation.

Can You Sing With Your Enemies?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Slade) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching at Park Street Brethren Church in Ashland OH. They have two Sunday morning services - the 9:00 in the sanctuary built in the 1920s and the 10:30 service in the gymnasium built in the 1980s. Two very different spaces and different styles of worship music. The second service is set up in the round -- and so I was spinning around like Bono on U2s last tour!

My sermon was really trying to make a theological case for why congregational singing is a constitutive practice of the church -- why singing God's praise together is a profound act that makes us who we are. (The message is streamed over at the Park Street's website). At the heart of what I was saying is that the Church is the community of forgiven sinners and reconciled enemies and that the discipline of singing together testifies to this truth. As the congregation submits itself to this discipline people are taught more about forgiveness and reconciliation and are transformed. I was preaching from Colossians 3:12-17 and was noting the proximity of the instructions to "bear with one another" and to "forgive each other" with the exhortation to "sing psalms hymns and spiritual songs." Congregational singing is the song of the reconciled and the reconcilers. It testifies to this reconciliation because--I claimed--enemies do not sing together.

After one of the services a person came up to me and said they had been estranged from their sibling for over a year (I am being vague here to preserve this person's identity). "We used to sing together. I think I am going to suggest we sing together again . . . we won't talk, we'll just sing." This person heard in my words the notion of singing as a transformative discipline which might open up the possibility of reconciliation.

I have been thinking about this and I was reminded of something the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about prayer. In his short book Life Together, Bonhoeffer talks about a “happy discovery” he made. “I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner” (Life Together, Fortress Press, 1996, 90–91).

Perhaps, in a similar way, one can no longer hate a brother or sister in Christ with whom one sings God's praises.