Articles
Elders and the Worship Wild West
We live in a time in which churches have unprecedented access to new hymns and praise songs. In theory, this sounds like a blessing. Let a thousand flowers bloom! In practice, the torrent of new worship material overwhelms Christians who can't read music and waters down the teaching that is a vital part of our singing together.
We need some way to stem the flood, to separate the less useful from the more useful and allow the latter to refresh our repertoire. Formerly, hymnal editors performed this function, but the era of hymnals is over. Instead, this task must fall upon the shoulders of elders.
Often, elders are hesitant to take on this role. They are unused to the work, and many of them don't feel qualified to assess the musical aspects of a hymn.
That may be, but elders don't need to know music to do their jobs. Instead, they must assess the spiritual content of each prospective addition to the slide deck. Songs that don't powerfully teach and admonish should go the way of the incompetent Bible class teacher or the ineffective preacher. This is true of songs of praise, too! I propose the following evaluation process:
First, type out these spiritual songs like poems, without musical notation. This helps to focus attention on what is important. Music is an essential part of every hymn, but the gospel is proclaimed through words, not music. If a hymn is a hamburger, the text is the meat, and if the meat isn't good, the burger’s not worth eating.
Type out the hymn. Be sure to type it out the way that it is actually sung. If it contains a bridge with 27 repetitions of the same phrase, include all 27 of them. If the chorus is sung four times in a row at the end, type it out four times. If different parts are singing different things in the chorus, write out what the most verbose part says.
Then, once you have your printed text, read it out loud. If you feel bored or silly during this reading, that tells you something vital about the quality of the lyrics. Evocative music can make singing shallow words more enjoyable, but it can't make them more meaningful.
Once you have read the words, study them like a passage of Scripture. Look not merely for “scripturality”, but for scriptural depth. Is the author saying profound and helpful things, or is it simply more of the same old, same old? Do they appear to know their Bible, or does a smart seventh grader in one of our Bible classes know more than they do? Hymns with verses almost always have better content than hymns without because they can advance complex ideas.
Throughout this process, be skeptical. Every new hymn you accept into your slide deck is making a demand on all of your people who don't read music. Is the message of the hymn so good that it's worth the price? If not, let it go. No one will miss it.
This analysis is not demanding. It probably won't take more than five or ten minutes per hymn. However, if every new song must pass through this screen before being introduced, it will replace quantity with quality and volume with value. The hymns we sing do more to shape the beliefs and worldview of our congregations than anything else, even preaching. When elders oversee the teaching that is done as we sing, they set the church on the best possible track.
