Why do we sing at church?

Why do we sing in church?

I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously.

The Significance of Singing

There can be no doubt that our communal singing as we gather together[1] has good and great significance.  We devote between 30 and 50% of our time together to singing.  It is the memorable melody and the words attached to it that we leave church humming and continues to circulate in our minds and hearts through the week in a way that the sermon or a conversation never do.  And in God’s economy and grace music has the power to awaken in us profound responses.  The potential influence of our singing is enormous and therefore the responsibility on those who are music leaders is substantial.  Do we use our time singing wisely and well when we are gathered together?  What truths are we implanting in people’s minds and hearts?  Are we selecting songs which rightly portray God, and portray him fully?  Do we favour certain aspects of God’s character which over time will warp and distort our congregation’s view of God?  Are the tunes we select awakening the entire range of emotions appropriate to God, or do we favour only certain responses and expressions? 

It is vital we understand what our singing is for biblically so that our planning and practice of leading is wise and done well for the health and growth of our church.

Why do we sing in church?

There are many places in the Bible we can go and see singing in praise to God in this community sense.  Psalms is in essence Israel’s collection of songs.  We see further songs of praise, rehearsed and spontaneous throughout the Bible, for example in Luke 1 and 2 in response to the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus.  We see collective gatherings of God’s people in Ezra, Nehemiah and Acts.  We see the celestial gathering of God’s global people in faultless praise in Revelation 4&5. 

Miriam & Moses

I want to look at Moses and Miriam’s song of praise, recorded in Exodus 15 in response to God’s mighty act of rescue from slavery in Egypt, across the miraculously parted Red Sea, and as they begin their journey to God’s promised land.  Reflected in this passage are the three biblical focal points of true worship:

A declaration about God to display God’s greatness.

Psalm 19 tells us all creation exists to display the greatness of God, and so it should not surprise us that this is the first focal point of our communal singing – to display God as he truly is, both great and good.

I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea...Your right hand O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.  In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries...Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?  Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?  (Exodus 15:1,6-7,11)

A declaration about God to strengthen other Christians in faith.

The first focal point is to declare who God is.  The second is to declare what God has done.  This second purpose is to sing the great truths of God so to stir one another to deeper, richer and fuller faith. 

The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God and I will exalt him...You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed; you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode... (Exodus 15:2,13)

We sing and praise to encourage one another.  This focal point is repeated throughout the New Testament (my emphasis added).

...be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart... (Ephesians 5:18-19)

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs... (Colossians 3:16)

And let us consider how to stir one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another... (Hebrews 10:24-25; presumably this meeting together includes singing)

Notice the weight given here to singing as instructional and truth-declaring: addressing, teaching, admonishing, stirring up, encouraging.  In a sense we set sermons or Bible verses to memorable tunes and through that declare life-transforming truth to one another.  Music in and of itself has power to captive our emotions; image the power it is given when we carefully select words that herald, with beauty, the truths of God.  In this sense ‘good’ praise finds its root in ‘good’ theology.  Our content must be richly and fully and truly declaring God.  Many songs do this brilliantly, but many ‘Christian’ songs fall short here and we must be wise in our selection, holding appealing melody and truth-filled words as of dual-importance.  We do not want to be either dull or shallow.  We do not want the distortion of a swollen head over-stuffed with knowledge toppling off a shrunken, shrivelled heart; nor is an engorged heart on which is balanced a miniscule and feather-light mind attractive.  Rather we want heart and head, emotions and mind expanded and bursting and healthy.  To sing in a way that is intellectually creditable and emotionally satisfying.

So, whereas the first focal point is on who God is, the second is on what God has done.  We sing first to God, but secondly we sing the truths of God to each other to strengthen and encourage our knowledge and love for God.

     A declaration about God to persuade non-believers to faith.

The third focal point is on the evitable non-Christian people who are among us as we gather together.  We sing to them, proclaiming the truth of God in the hope that God may use our worship to awaken faith.

The peoples have heard: they tremble; pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia...Terror and dread fall upon them; because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as stone... (Exodus 15:14,16)

Miriam and Moses are singing to their and God’s enemies, warning them of the fury of God and the need to fear him.  Elsewhere we see singing proclaiming the love and kindness of God and calling people to its embrace.  The point, in either case, is declaring to non-believers the truth of God in the hope they will be awakened to faith in Christ.  This entwined reality that praise is evangelism and evangelism is praise is seen clearly in places like Psalm 96. 

Not About Me

True biblical sung praise has three focal points: displaying God’s glory, encouraging Christians in faith, and evangelising non-Christians.  Nowhere in the Bible is there a self-focus in our praise.  It is never about us.  Obviously we benefit and are blessed when we sing God’s praise for others benefit, but we do not sing with the goal of getting the benefit and the blessing.  Rather we sing for the benefit and blessing of others.  Our praise, whether as leader or congregation member, is an act of service to God and others.  This of course does not surprise us once we remember the Christian call to imitate Christ and to emulate him as the great servant (e.g. Mark 10:45; Philippians 2:1-12).  Equally the reality is the more we seek to focus on God and others as we praise Him the more we will be benefitted; and the more we are self-seeking the less benefit we will experience!

Avoiding an error

I want to briefly flag up an error that can occur in thinking about this area of sung praise and how it relates to the concept of a life of worship.  We need to remember that the reason the people of the Old Testament sang is somewhat different to the reason New Testament Christians sing.  There is continuity but also difference.  In Old Testament times God self-contained his presence in the temple and so when the people gathered there it was a unique and irreplaceable moment to worship God in a way that they could not in ordinary life.  Literally God was present in the temple in a way he was not in any other part or place of life.  With the coming of Jesus God releases himself from the temple and floods every aspect of the world and life with his presence (e.g. the protective temple curtain torn in two at Jesus’ death in Mark 15:37-38).  So where as the Old Testament people could only truly worship in the temple we can worship in all of life.  So our communal singing is not the sole opportunity to truly worship (as in some senses it was in the Old Testament) but an expression of praise flowing from an entire life of worship.  God is not more present when we gather or when we sing as when we wash the car or chair a staff meeting or cook the dinner (though we may perceive his presence in different ways in these different situations).  In fact one purpose of all we do in a main meeting becomes about facilitating our ability to live a life of worship through the rest of the week.    

The New Testament uses the word worship about every aspect of the Christian’s life (e.g. Romans 12:1-2) and words like ‘singing’ and ‘praise’ and ‘edification’ and ‘teaching’ for when we gather together and sing[2].  Because of this we must make sure we do not pull Old Testament references to worship directly to our own experience of singing without understanding their completion in Jesus and the New Testament.

What does that mean in practice?

Let me draw four caricatures to avoid and some practical applications about our main meetings.

Four caricatures to avoid:

·  Emotional Emma.  The aim of singing is not to cultivate a personal, sentimental, inwardly focussed feeling.  Of course we want to deeply stir and enrich others’ emotions, but not falsely manipulate or be wrongly centred on ourselves.

·      Professional Pete.  We do not focus on performance and excellence, which makes us an audience celebrating human abilities.  Instead we seek un-distracting professionalism that allows us to focus on God and others.  

·   Intellectual Ian.  We do not focus solely on doctrinal purity, theological accuracy and cerebral clarity as the goal of our worship.  Instead we seek songs of clear, deep biblical truth as a means to be enriched and transformed.

·        Get-on-with-it Owen.  We refuse to view singing as a necessary annoyance that interrupts our ability to serve God practically.  Instead we view the privilege of displaying God, encouraging others and reaching unbelievers, as we express our worship through singing, as a tremendous honour never to be neglected and always to be delighted in.

Twenty practical applications:

Here is an illustrative not exhaustive list of practical steps we could take to help our sung praise be focussed in the right place, engaging the whole person, and awakening the full array of our emotions to God.

1. Choose songs that primarily are about God and secondarily about our response to God.  God always acts first.  He created the world.  He gave Prophets and Apostles to reveal himself through his Word.  He sent his Son to die for us.  He gave his Spirit to turn our hearts to him.  The initiative is always God’s, and this should be reflected in our song choices.  We begin and major on God.  We end and minor on ourselves and our response, as important as that is.

2.  Choose songs based on both content and melody.  Many Christian songs have great words but unpleasant or old fashioned melody.  Many have wonderful tunes but shallow words.  We do not have to settle for one over the other.  We can have both, and we should work hard to have both great words and great melody.

3.  Saturate our sung praise with other truth-declaring mechanisms – poetry, silence, audio-visual, prayer and especially reading the Bible.

4.   Consider using the main teaching passage of the day as the foundation and stimulus of our sung praise – reading it and perhaps using a simple sentence provided by the preacher that summaries it. 

5.  Choose songs that use clear and ordinary language comprehensible by all people, whatever their experience or knowledge of Christianity.

6.   Develop an undistracting proficiency through the meeting so transitions, the use of technology, readings, words-projected, etc are done well enough that they go unnoticed in and of themselves.  Having a clear order of service for those participating, and planning and communicating with everyone involved in plenty of time can all help.

7. Choose a variety of genres and styles to awaken different parts of our being, and different types of personality to God.  Music has the power to affect us profoundly.  Do we draw on the whole range of music styles?  Do we use songs that, the tune alone, begin to fill us with fear of God, delight in God, the need to repent before God?  Or do we select similar genres repeatedly and therefore fail to awaken this breadth of responses?

8.   Re-discover the ‘church calendar’ or/and the ‘seasonal calendar’ and use it to bring forth truths of God that might others be forgotten or neglected.  For example: add Ascension, Pentecost, Palm Sunday, All Saints Day to Easter and Christmas. 

9.  Different tunes and words flow more naturally from women’s mouths and from men’s mouths.  Just as we might adjust our songs to engage children so think about songs that resonate for men particularly (as many modern songs in church are more ‘feminine’ in style and words).

10.Do a six month audit of the songs you are singing – do they cover a breadth of truths about God and our response in their words and styles?

11.Worry more about your heart than your voice.  The reality of a public act like leading praise is we are prone to pride and feelings of entitlement and power.  We need to protect and cultivate a heart that longs to declare God’s greatness above all things.

12. Practically arrange the room and the musicians in such a way that we make much of God and little of ourselves.  This may include arranging the congregation to face each other so our eyes our draw to those we are singing to encourage and reach, and away from the musicians who facilitate but are not the focus of our worship.  It may include the musicians being positioned on the peripheral not centre stage.

13.Encourage people to avoid becoming self-absorbed (such as by constantly having their eyes closed, or only choosing to sing songs they ‘like’) but to seek to serve God and others through how they choose to sing.  Singing is first about God (declaring his greatness), and then about others (encouraging and awakening faith), and never focussed on ourselves, however subtly or subconsciously that might occur.

14. Seek to make the congregation’s voices the main instrument in sung praise so to engage as many as possible which also helps maintain a focus on God and not the individuals with instruments.  Avoid it becoming unconsciously a ‘performance’ with most listening but not participating.  This is not to say that there is not space for consciously performance songs as we meet.  Use creative ways of engaging and encouraging people to join in such as the use of rounds, congregational harmonies, women and men singing alterative pieces, etc.  Select songs that non-musicians can sing (many newer songs or older hymns have tunes or melodies that are difficult for the non-musical to be confident in singing).  Do be frightened about ‘training’ the congregation to sing new songs, teaching them more difficult parts.

15. Turn the volume down!  Play at a sound level that means people can hear and be encouraged by one another singing, not at a level which drowns out the congregation and discourages us from bothering!

16. Realise the responsibility that lies in preparing and leading congregational singing and give it the time, prayer, and thought it requires, and seek further training and development both as a theologian (so you choose good content) and musician (so you play good tunes).

17.Select songs that emphasis similar themes to create an aligned purpose, and allow this theme to be governed by the main teaching passage of the day.

18.Seek songs and adapt songs so they reference not the individual (I, me) but the community (we, us) so to remind ourselves that we gather together not for private devotional but corporate praise and edification.  Many songs can easily be adapted to reflect this without losing their melody or meaning.

19.Teach about why we sing from the Bible.  We can either make less of singing and musicians as a right corrective to an error (such as placing them in a clearly supportive role) or correct the error by making much more of them!  As those who express ‘truth through personality’ (Phillip Brook’s definition of preaching) or who express ‘logic on fire’ (M Llyod-Jones definition of preaching) or who are in essence ‘Word-ministers’ setting preaching to melody and truth to song and response in poetry, awakening avenues of our being closed to preaching in prose but ignited and discovered through truth carried in music.

20. Try writing your own songs.

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[1] The Greek word translated worship is always used in the New Testament not to refer to our singing but to the entirety of our lives, for example Romans 12:1-2.  Tradition and common usage in the church has narrowed the word worship to mean singing in church.  This is not inappropriate as long as we do not fail to comprehend our whole lives are to be lived in worship of God.  For clarity I have chosen in this article to talk about singing or sung praise and avoid the use of the word ‘worship’.

[2] Revelation might be an exception to this.