The Psalms Part 3 of 4 - Church Music in Worship

God sent His singers upon the earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again."
--"The Singers" by Longfellow

I had been a member of a small Presbyterian denominational church hailed from Tennessee. This is a mainstream traditional evangelical Protestant denomination. My graduate studies and work had me situated in several cities over time. Thus I had spent more years worshipping in other denominations other than with my parent church.

Before rejoining a local Presbyterian church in 2004, for many years my church home had been the Covenant Church. I left the latter place of worship not for reasons of hermeneutics nor organizational discords, rather, because of the church gradual shifting away from using the hymnal and liturgy in corporate worship.

The music aspects of the worship service at this Covenant church has devolved. From this worshiper's point of view, the Sunday service music had become, for lack of a better word, incidental. It existed to fill the worship order. During the last year of my attendance, with the prompting of the worship leader and Powerpoint slides, we sang more contemporary Christian songs than hymns from the hymnal. The intention was moving toward a more culturally aware worship service to attract the X and Y generations on the one hand, and to keep the peace with the old-timers. The result was a conflation of contemporay Christian songs and traditional hymns on worship services.

At the worship service, we sang more "warm and fuzzy" Christians songs (e.g. I Stand in Awe; God is So Good) than selections from the hymnal. The assembly no longer voiced its collective spirit in the doxology of praise with the accompaniment of the organ following the offertories. Nor at the Lord's Supper was the congregation invoked to sing hymns of rememberance such as "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." In reality, this church was quietly discarding the liturgical forms and the crystalline hymns from ages past. It was leaning toward a contemporary worship scripted with the amorphous Christian music.

These songs take away the emphasis on sin, repentance, God's mercy, and our edification. The focus is on the artist or his song rather than on Christ. The Christian doctrine and the imperatives of the Gospel are watered down, if not completely removed altogether. The richness of metered doctrinal poetries are supplanted by monontonic, flat, and irregular metered touchy feely proses. These songs are more suited for personal worship, small groups, or fellowship around a camp fire. They are not hymns for public worship as the song publisher, the artist, and some churches would want Christians to believe.

To illustrate the fuzziness and the feel-good "hymn" I've sung in worship at the former church, here are the verses to "God Is Good."

God Is So Good

God is so good, God is so good,
God is so good, God's so good to me.

God cares for me, God cares for me,
God cares for me, God's so good to me.

God loves me so, God loves me so,
God loves me so, God's so good to me.

God is so good, God is so good,
God is so good, God's so good to me.

This monophonic (to sing in unison) song says nothing about the attributes of our God, much less about how good He is and what He has done for me. In computer jargon, this song has interlopability. Replace "God" with "Buddha" or "Allah" and you have two more "worship" songs for the price of one.

On the matter of God's reconciled man to Himself (if that's the song writer's intent), here is "Haven't You Been Good" by Steve Earl.

Haven't You Been Good

Verse 1
Thank You for the cross
Thank You, Lord, for drawing me
Out of millions lost
Thank You, Lord, for saving me

Chorus:
Haven’t You been good?
Haven’t You been so good?
Glory to Your name
Glory to Your holy name
Thankfulness and praise
For grace and mercy never changing
Haven’t You been good
Haven’t You been so good to me?

Verse 2
Favor on my life
Always watching over me
My darkness turned to light
And heaven’s arms enfolding me


In this song, the focus is on the artist or the "Me", not Jesus by name. The artist was somehow chosen or saved by God for unknown reasons relating to the cross. In this song, just like the preceding one, God is "good". The flip side of this fuzzy theology is that God can also be "bad" if He so chooses. This is one ambiguous song about who God is.

There is no Christian theology in these so-called worship songs. What's deceptive and if not heretical about their affect, non-Christians could very well think by singing these songs in or out of a contemporary Christian worship service they would have curried God's "goodness" and salvation.

In contrast, here is Isaac Watt's "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" (based on Galatians 6:14; Philippians 3:7). It's an 8.8.8.8 metered hymn-poetry. In my view, it is the best English hymn ever written. It is also my very favorite.


When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

When I surey the wondrous cross,
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the cross of Christ, my God:
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.

Amen.

This, my friends, is a hymn of my faith. A concise expression of who God is and of His dying on the cross for my sin. And this is precisely the kind of hymns some churches are saying no longer relevant to this generation.

I beg to differ.


... to be continued in Part 4 of 4.