Month: March 2021

It’s been a year since UK churches were last allowed to sing together. Instead we’ve been singing to YouTube in our homes, and meeting in person with no singing. Neither seems to fill the gap. 

So, why is singing together such an important part of Christian practice?

You may be tempted to think that this is a modern question. ‘Worship’ as a music industry genre, complete with awards ceremonies and sales charts, is obviously a recent development. But the place of singing at the heart of Christian practice is not. Throughout Scripture and church history, wherever you find God’s people, you find singing.

In the Old Testament, singing is both commanded and assumed. Songs give voice to everything from salvation from enemies (e.g., Exodus 15) to the passage of love (Song of Songs). In every circumstance of life, the Psalms exhort us to ‘sing to the Lord’. The only time the people of God are tempted to fall silent is when their Babylonian captors demand the sacred songs of Zion as mere entertainment (Psalm 137, but note that they write a song about it instead).

In the Gospels, we don’t hear a great deal about singing, but where we do, it really counts. Jesus sings a hymn as a final act of fellowship with his disciples as the Last Supper draws to a close (Matthew 26.30). The following afternoon, he gives voice to the agony of the Cross with the opening line of Psalm 22.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul instructs the early Christians to ‘speak to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’ (Ephesians 5.19). If you have ever been stirred by Colossians 1 or Philippians 2, those passages may well be early hymns, so you have been led in worship by their songwriters. And the strange scene of heavenly worship in Revelation 4 and 5 initiates the familiar pattern of liturgy and song practised in church services ever since.

Scholar Ralph P. Martin says, ‘the Christian Church was born in song’. And that strand of DNA has found expression through all the centuries since – from Gregorian chants to Bach chorales, from Negro spirituals to the hymnody of Watts and Wesley, from metrical psalms to contemporary worship concerts.

We Christians are a singing people.

In the generous wisdom of God, there are endless reasons and benefits for this characteristic mode of expression. Allow me to briefly highlight a few:

We sing to remember

If we forget what God has done in history, we cut ourselves off at the roots. Singing to God in worship is a way of actively remembering God’s goodness throughout the generations, and passing that story on to the next generation, grounding our lives in the timeless rhythm of grace.

We sing to believe

To sing the gospel is to take a step beyond understanding concepts, into experience and testimony. To sing is to engage my will, my body, my imagination and my emotions with what my mind knows. Congregational singing invites me to be wholehearted (and exposes me if I’m not). I’m sure that’s a reason why people feel so strongly about what we sing in church, and a reason why joining in with singing can be such a battleground when we’re struggling.

We sing to agree

Singing in the congregation is an expression of unity with our brothers and sisters. As we give voice to our shared hope, we align ourselves with one another. Unison melody speaks of our unity in Christ, and harmonies speak of the diversity of parts we play in the body.

We sing to respond

Sometimes it feels like singing simply overflows in response to God’s goodness, but even when it doesn’t, it’s a healthy discipline. Singing in worship orients us towards God in gratitude, which opens us up to grace, helps us navigate through hard times, and forms us into people who carry the sound of the gospel into the world.

We sing to hope                                                              

Our songs cast a vision of our eternal destiny. At its most profound, singing together catches us up in a glimpse of the world to come. Those glimpses shape our hopes and desires, and energise our action in the world. There’s a sense in which what we sing, we become.

So, Church, don’t lose your song! Joining in with YouTube sometimes feels empty, but trust that it catches us up in something far greater. It won’t be many months until we can sing together again in our buildings, and even that is only a pale reflection of the song to come when we hear it on the lips of every tribe, every tongue, saints and angels, all creation. It is worth practising our parts now!

Hear Paul’s exhortation:

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 5.16-20

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Chris Juby coordinates Worship, Media and Arts at Kings, manages hymn publisher Jubilate Hymns Ltd, and writes songs for Resound Worship.

Photo by Susana Fernández on Unsplash

My 11-year-old asked, “How does the voice work?”

The voices of her older brothers, brimming with secondary school erudition, replied in unison: “The human voice is created by airwaves pushing over the vocal cords.”

And immediately I added, “Well, that is true, but really, it’s… well, it’s magic.”

This sibling interaction over breakfast featured the collision of a scientific reductionism with childhood wonder. A great mystery was noted in God’s creation (the range and beauty of the human voice—wow!) that was summarily demystified by a mechanistic explanation (air vibrating vocal cords—easy-peasy, ho hum).

This was a scene of disenchantment. 

Now, many scientists are filled with constant wonder, and ply their crafts with astonished joy. But through the gristmill of modern history and cultural change, one of the trends Western societies have inherited is a reductionistic approach to knowledge. As Charles Taylor observes in A Secular Age, the world has been mechanized in order to become more knowable within our frames of knowing. Once the mechanical explanation is provided, the wonder is gone. Knowing eliminates awe.

Taylor calls this “disenchantment.” 

From a contemporary Christian perspective, a healthy epistemology (i.e., an approach to knowing) affirms that air vibrating vocal cords produces chords of a different sort while retaining awe over such a marvelous act and recognizing its source as the inscrutable wisdom of an all-knowing Creator. No matter how finely we may dissect his creations, they cannot be truly sterilized of his supernal beauty or purged of his supernatural power.

Secularization, however, has eviscerated the numinous from our investigations of the world. In fact, we have come to associate the loss of wonder as a true sign of maturity. Chesterton memorably writes, 

…when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. 

Parenting is the oversight of a child’s process of maturing. As a dad, I have mourned the loss of wonder in my home (like when the glories of the human voice are reduced to a mechanized process in the throat). But there are a lot of doors to open in life, and a kid cannot stand in fear of a dragon behind each one. Besides, marveling over closed door slows down the rushed routines for getting everyone to school.

Sadly, I must admit that my own parenting is a constant exercise of disenchanting the world for my children:

“Dad, I’m scared.”

“Son, there are no such things as monsters. Go to bed!”

“Dad, I saw a dragon! It was flying over there near that hill!”

“Whatever you say, dear.”

One of my favorite cinematic scenes of parenting appears in the 2014 film Boyhood. The boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), is in early adolescence and falling asleep on the sofa next to his father (Ethan Hawke). 

“Dad, there’s no, like, real magic in the world, right?

“What do you mean?”

“You know, like elves and stuff… people just made that up…?”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean what, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like, like a whale? You know what I mean? What if I told you a story about how underneath the ocean there was this giant sea mammal that uses sonar and sang songs, and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you’d think that’s pretty magical, right?”

“Yeah. But like, right this second, there’s like no elves in the world, right?”

“No. Technically, no elves.”

In this scene, a father tries to re-enchant the world for a kid whose process of maturing demands he relinquishes a world of elves and magic. He resists a return to what we might classify as “medieval” superstitions. But he awakens in his son a sense of wonder over the world that exists (an approach many scientists would welcome). 

Since the world is not just full of marvels, but reflective of a marvelous Being, I want to live as someone whose age and experience are marked not by a loss of awe, but by layered depths of mature wonder. I want my children to keep a curious eye on the door, the stairs, the wardrobe, the horizon—because God is up to something… and I do not want them to miss it.

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Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash