In last month’s confession, I forgot to include one other theft. It slipped my mind, okay? I stole it from Alice Parker.
“Where congregations do sing well, it is always because there is at least one person who is actively expecting it.”
Fraser McKee (of Glenview Presbyterian, Toronto) writes of just such a person in his reaction to the Record’s February music issue. He tells of Rev. Rawson who, at a business men’s breakfast in Montreal in the 50s, stopped and corrected the singing mid-hymn, and then “forcefully” started it up again. Poor sense of occasion, perhaps, but Rev. Rawson is proof, if we ever needed it, that you can never take congregational singing for granted.
McKee also offers an intriguing observation about declining church rolls. “Maybe the problem is the selection of music?” he writes. “[It’s] the old argument of the traditional versus the new to gain potential newcomers.” I have to ask: don’t churches do everything—from crafting sermons to running Out of the Cold programs to choosing music—to gain newcomers? “Go, make disciples,” Jesus said. Aren’t disciples just newcomers who decide to keep on walking with Jesus? Shouldn’t churches then simply avoid the new and trendy, and concentrate on keeping the stalwarts comfortable until it’s time to shut the doors and switch off the lights for good?
Let’s acknowledge that every long-standing church member has been deeply hurt at some point by someone who has trampled on their church’s traditions. But let’s not forget either that older church members are not necessarily fed by traditional fare. Mr. and Mrs. Stalwart might well be reading Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong while Christian heavy metal band As I Lay Dying vies for space with Benjamin Britten on their iPods. Let’s also remember that “traditional” is often code for “the hymns that I know and love.”
The real problem? It’s the word “versus.” Why do we think that the choice facing us is either/or—either contemporary or traditional, organ or praise band, black or white? And why do we pit one against the other as if church is a courtroom in an old gangster movie?
In reality, the well that we can draw from is very deep; deeper and wider than we often realize. In the words of a certain bank, we’re richer than we think.
Many hymn-writers, alive and writing today, are both contemporary and traditional, both old and new, writing new words to beloved melodies and re-clothing old hymns in contemporary garb. This is an elusive, hard-to-name middle ground that is far from middle-of-the-road.
I’ll come clean: my opening quotation was from Alice Parker’s book Melodious Accord: Good Singing in Church (Liturgy Training Publications). In my next post, I’ll sing like a canary about the hymn-writers I mentioned: names, aliases, accomplices, last known websites…
