“Sing unto the Lord a new song,” says the psalmist.
The Episcopal Church’s Canon II.6.1 requires each minister of the church to “see that music is used as an offering for the glory of God and as a help to the people in their worship.” But even if music were not required of us by the decree of both God and church, we would sing because music expresses our deepest thoughts and feelings when words fail us. Music has a sacramental power. It can speak of great joy or great sorrow, and at the same time move the listener to share the emotion it invokes. The ability to “effect what it symbolizes” defines sacrament. It is for this reason that we worship with music. Throughout history, the most significant events in human life, both public and private, have been accompanied by music. We have had music for birth and music for death; music for war and for peace; and especially, we have had music for prayer and for worship. Music unites us in our common purpose, and nurtures us in our singular pursuits.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on hymns and hymnals for children, a topic that hasn’t attracted the attention of many scholars, and in my research, I looked closely at thousands of hymns written for children or ncluded in hymnals intended for children’s use. I had a hope, as I began, that I would find some hidden treasures, waiting to be recovered. Alas, that was not the case.
Children’s hymnody has a unique place in the life of the church, in that most of the religious songs written for children are not really hymns – that is to say, they are not intended for use in worship, but rather in teaching. Nonetheless, what I found in my study was that throughout the history of children’s hymnody, from John Bunyan, who wrote the first English-language children’s hymns, to the present day, we are ever ready to make trade-offs between theology, poetry and melody, assuming, for some bizarre reason, that correctives can be given later for the falsehoods we teach our children now. Hymns like “Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam” take a theologically sound idea – the hymn is an apt translation of “You are the light of the world” and set it in a poem and a tune that were already old-fashioned when they were written, reflecting an adult’s idea of how children should be.
For my part, I am ready to give up on children’s hymnody altogether. In our long history, only one poet, Cecil Frances Alexander, has ever done it consistently well, And many of her finest children’s hymns, like “Once in royal David’s city” and “There’s a green hill far away,” are no longer remembered to have been written for children.
As an aside, I want to point out that Alexander’s focus was both liturgical and catechetical – “Once in royal David’s city” and “There is a green hill far away,” along with her most famous hymn, “All things bright and beautiful,” are part of a collection of hymns written as line-by-line reflections on the Apostle’s Creed.
But here’s my pitch. The things that make a hymn effective for children – repeated refrains, melodies that move generally in steps or thirds with distinctive larger intervals that make the tune memorable, use of clear, straightforward, contemporary language with strong poetic images, published in books that are light enough for small hands, in large, easy-to read type, these are the things that make hymns generally effective, not only for children, but for the elderly and infirm, those with failing eyesight, and those who are not skilled at reading. Community hymnody, not children’s hymnody is what is wanted.
But what does community hymnody mean? We have been systematically rejecting “popular” music, that is, “music of the people” for use in church for many generations. Not since Martin Luther has the church embraced the popular song of the day for use in worship. And the so-called contemporary styles that we do allow in are thirty or more years old. If you spin your radio dial looking for anything on commercial radio that sounds the least bit like “Contemporary Christian Music,” you will only find it on an oldies station. And consider this. Most of the twentieth-century musical styles that we banned from church: Musical Theater, Country and Western, Rap, share with hymnody the idea that the words matter most, while the kind of light rock that we have embraced however reluctantly is a musical genre that holds melody and rhythm to be more important than words, and furthermore is a solo genre, not well-suited to congregational singing. I’m sure many of you sang in high school choirs, and remember the ridiculous choral arrangements that the choir director thought were so hip, of popular songs of the day. I have particularly painful memories of “A Horse With No Name” and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” This is not a style of music that works very well for choirs or for congregations.
If we really want to welcome all generations to our churches, we cannot insist that they abandon their musical tastes at the door. Every kind of music needs to have a place in our common life, and we need to engage ourselves in learning what our children and our neighbors love about their music, even as we teach them what we love about ours.
Blessings,
– Bill