Churches are always in need—and sometimes in desperate need—of renewal in their worship arts. Congregational song is one strand in the tapestry of our church life that is dangerously frayed. Part of the problem is that we are not a singing culture. Have you listened to Happy Birthday in a restaurant? Or O Canada? Well, we don’t actually sing that one. We can no longer take our congregational singing for granted.
So it is encouraging to watch the work of leaders of congregational song such as Mary Oyer, a Mennonite from the Midwest, and John Bell (who needs no introduction here). John Thornburg, a cradle Methodist, a former pastor, and president-elect of the Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada, is another promoter of congregational song. In the preface to his songbook, The One Who Taught Beside the Sea, he writes:
“It is time to quit the referendum-based approach to the music of the church, searching in vain for the one song or one style everyone likes.” Thornburg thinks we need to sing with a “solidarity-based approach … [E]ven if the songs we sing in church next Sunday are not the ones which resonate most deeply within our spirits.” It just might be that they are “transforming the life of the person seated next to us.”
Let me add that we also need to be singing the song of the person who isn’t seated next to us … yet. That person might be living in our neighbourhood, just around the corner, or just under the radar. We need to sing the church that was, and is and also the church that, by God’s grace, can be.
