Even Worship Songs Need Good Writing!

Question: Since our worship songs generally consist of more than "na-na-na-na," doesn't the meaning of a worship song matter?

Question: Since the meaning of a worship song evidently matters, shouldn't we try to get it right?

But we don't always get it right.  Consider these examples.

Natural and Legal Metaphors Mixed Up

My personal favorite is this line: "And like a flood his mercy reigns."  Do we really want to proclaim the message that God's mercy governs in the manner of a natural disaster?  (And if a flood governs like a king, I wonder what sort of weather events legislate like a parliament.)

Perhaps we could use on our overhead projectors on Sunday mornings the alternate spelling that actually makes a little sense: "And like a flood his mercy rains."

They're not the same thing.
(Pictures from Hobbes' Leviathan and from Edal Anton Lefterov.)

Plain Old Bad Grammar

And then we have this one: "And if our God is with us, then what can stand against?"  Why don't we give that preposition an object?  The Bible does (Romans 8:31): "If God is for us, who can be against us?"

I can't see what good the bad grammar does in this situation, unless it creates the illusion of good poetry.  But this would only be an illusion.  Of course, poetry doesn't always have to follow the rules of grammar.  But it takes more than bad grammar to make good poetry.

Adding "us" on the second repetition of the final line would not sabotage the meter: We already stretch "against" to occupy the space of about seven syllables, so we can afford give the space of one syllable to "us."  Nor would adding "us" ruin a rhyme (if there is a word that rhymes with "against," you won't find it in this song).

Biblical Oddities

"Days of Elijah" is such a nice song, but often a painful one for me.  If David (instead of, say, Ezra) is "rebuilding a temple of praise," I wonder when the first temple of praise was built.  I've heard this altered to "building a temple of praise"; I like that; I understand it.

For years I was annoyed by the line about "the days of Your servant, Moses, righteousness being restored."  One Sunday morning last summer I realized that this actually makes sense as part of the biblical narrative: Some of the righteousness lost when Adam sins is restored in the Mosaic law, especially the Ten Commandments.

Still, I wonder how many people are actually thinking about two Bible characters and more than a thousand years of biblical history when they sing that bit; maybe we could just sing "And these are the days of your servant, Josiah, righteousness being restored."

Et Cetera . . .

Some worship songs I'd do better not to mention are, it seems to me, much, much worse in theology, poetry, etc.

And hymns aren't excluded.  I would need another blog post (or another dissertation) to analyze the unbiblical dualisms and Platonisms that appear in some hymns.

Giving Our Best to God

We should be giving our best to God.  If you're like me and you don't sing very well, then go ahead and sing; for you and me, maybe bad singing is the best we can do if it's all we have.  But the Church has more than bad poetry, bad spelling, bad grammar, and bad theology to put in our worship songs.  We can do better.

In particular, these songs I've mentioned are nice songs!  I don't want us to stop singing them.  But can we maybe sing them a little better?

5 patriotic hymns you probably won't sing this 4th of July Sunday

Tomorrow is July 4th, a day associated with fireworks, homemade ice cream, food on the grill, and, if you grew up Baptist, singing patriotic songs in a church service. In the church of my childhood, patriotism and Christian worship went hand in hand. At a young age, I memorized all the words to The Star Spangled Banner -- both first and second verses -- by reading the lyrics, which were printed in the back of a Gideon New Testament. I clearly remember a patriotic service wherein a man sang the song "I'm proud to be an American," and I'm pretty sure (although the combination of thick Texas accents and a fuzzy childhood memory could prove me wrong) that instead of singing, "I won't forget the men who died and gave that right to me," he actually sang, "I won't forget the man who died..." That's right: singular, capital-M-man -- as in Jesus -- whose death, according to this fervent patriot, was intended to secure our American Right to Freedom.

When I got older and we moved churches, the patriotic fervor cooled. Oh sure, in VBS we started the day by reciting the pledge of allegiance to the American flag, but we always also pledged allegiance to a Christian flag and to the Bible, and while patriotic tunes occasionally came into the services, the older I got the less frequently these songs appeared. It was as though I was witnessing the dying of a trend. By the time I was leading worship services of my own, I didn't think the topic of patriotic hymns would ever arise for me as a serious issue again -- they had simply fallen out of fashion. I figured that patriotism and Christian worship resided in different realms, and that my days of singing patriotic tunes in church services would be limited to those few weeks post-9/11, when "God Bless America" could be heard in every public gathering and, especially, blaring from every radio station through the powerful (Canadian) pipes of Celine Dion.

But the question of whether or not to include patriotic songs in worship services has resurfaced in my current church situation and I've found myself asking, "What role, if any, do patriotic songs play in a Christian worship service?" If you have the answer to that question, by all means, type it in the comments section, because I don't have a certain answer. But in my quest for the answers I found some interesting patriotic songs that have appeared in various church hymnals through the years. Just type in "patriotism" on hymnary.org, and you'll see many of these same results. So without further ado, I present

5 patriotic hymns you probably won't sing this Sunday:

1. "We will vote it dry" by J.B. Herbert:  This song, from 1914, appears under the hymn heading "Temperance/Patriotism." While it is found in the expected collections like Abstinence Songs and The Anti-Saloon League Songbook, it also appears in the 1916 hymnal, Praiseworthy for the Church and Sunday School. The first line reads "All the brewers tell us lager-beer's a food." I can't find any other lyrics on the world wide web, probably because the song hasn't had much staying power. This isn't the only Temperance song from Herbert; he also penned such classics as "Where there's drink, there's danger," and  "The Walls of Jericho Fell Down," which sounds like a normal hymn, until you get to the chorus: "Old Whiskey's walls have got to go/Just like the walls of Jericho/Those rummies won't know where they're at/ Their walls must tumble down, down flat." Frankly,  I'm glad this style of songwriting lost popularity in evangelical churches, otherwise we might have songs like "We will vote it fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite-political-platform.  (I like my job, so I don't dare fill in that blank on a public blog :))

2. "Oh Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean" by David Shaw: This patriotic tune was once widely anthologized in church hymnals from a variety of denominations, but it fell out of popularity around 1927. Maybe that's because the line between American pride and American idolatry gets a little fuzzy when it calls America "The shrine of each patriot's devotion," and says, "A world offers homage to thee." I should hope, in a Christian worship service that all devotion and homage are going to God. According to Wikipedia, this song once vied with the Star-Spangled banner for National Anthem status.

3. "Somebody Voted to Ruin my Boy" (Was that somebody you?) by Civilla D. Martin: This one also appears under the dual category of Patriotic and Temperance, but it stands out because its author, Civilla Martin, also penned the beloved hymn "His eye is on the sparrow."

4. Death Bells Tolling, Tolling, Tolling (To the Rescue) by Priscilla Owens: Okay, okay, I know I should stop posting temperance songs, but they're too good not to write about, especially one with a title as uplifting at that! Owens also wrote the popular hymn "Jesus Saves! (We have heard the joyful sound)," alongside many other hymns of a happier tone, and, to her credit, the "Death bells" in this hymn are replaced with "joy-bells ringing" as temperance workers appear with "voices cheering, life-boats steering..." What makes this song more than just a political plea? The line in the chorus that says, "Sign our pledge, now sign, And strength divine shall yet be thine." Basically, this song is "Love lifted Me," but it's about prohibition.

5. O Canada! This song actually appears in the 2008 edition of The Baptist Hymnal, so I have to wonder, when Baptists ask to sing Patriotic hymns, would they include this one? I mean, its second verse is actually more appropriate for a worship service than some of the more popular American hymns:

 Almighty Love, by Thy mysterious power,
In wisdom guide, with faith and freedom dower;
Be ours a nation evermore
that no oppression blights,
Where justice rules from shore to shore,
from lakes to northern lights.
May love alone for wrong atone;
Lord of the lands, make Canada Thine own!
Lord of the lands, make Canada Thine own!

Wow. "May love alone for wrong atone" is a prayer I could say for any nation on any day of the year. Maybe this July 4th weekend we should look above for our song inspiration. And by above, I mean North, to Canada.

Seriously, though, it is God we should seek in figuring out how large a role patriotism should play in a corporate worship service -- not tradition, not political affiliation, not what we think Christians should vote for (because that turned out so well in the case of those temperance songs), but God. After all, it is His glory, not a nation's glory, that we desire when we gather to worship Him.

Is This How We Worship?

Click on the picture if you can't make out the words:

This isn't how we should worship. But I think this is how we do worship sometimes, or at least how we sometimes wish we could worship.

• We try to ascend to heaven on the hot-air balloons of our emotions.
• We care little what the songs we worship God with actually mean, but we prefer them to mean very little. Otherwise, we might have to reflect on the words, and that might mean reflecting on theology, and we don't like reflecting on theology, because it doesn't feel as good as getting emotionally worked up.
• If the music is loud enough to risk damage to our ears, we don't care. Loud music makes the emotional experience better, and having strong feelings for God is a higher priority than our health. (Never mind what the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 6:20.)
• We leave the worship service and go about our daily lives. We haven't been transformed, but we do have the satisfaction of feeling like we really, really liked God at church this morning. We have nothing to remember from the worship service throughout the week--except for how much we really, really liked God last Sunday.
• It's ok if our lives are no better this week than the last, if we aren't any holier or more virtuous this week than the last, because come next Sunday we'll sing some upbeat songs again and really, really like God again.

That's how we think--sometimes. But, of course, we're wrong.