Sing a New Song

If it was good enough for Isaac Watts, then it’s good enough for me.” I didn’t come right out and say it, but I came close. I certainly was not going to attempt writing a new hymn; none was needed.

Over two decades of writing and speaking about singing and liturgy, I’ve been accused of being a liturgical traditionalist. Skim through the proliferation of lyrics mass produced in recent decades and, whatever your particular taste in music, it’s impossible not to observe how different they are from the psalms and hymns the church has been singing for centuries. That’s precisely by design. They were written not only to be different but also to be better, more relevant, to conform to a new ethos.

Some years ago, while visiting a church on our family vacation, we were invited to rise and sing the following:

Bewildered, I reread the lines. Unless I was missing something, it appeared that the writer of these words had managed to flip everything around. The eternal living God—who made the earth, the sky, the sea, and all that is in them—had been reduced to a means of individual self-discovery. “You are my completeness,” the added bauble that finally makes me whole, as if God were a fashion accessory that puts the finishing touch on my outfit.

I looked around the congregation. Hands were raised; eyes were pinched shut with emotion. What was I missing? There were references to forgiveness and peace, vague ones, but blunders? Only those “who think of sin but lightly” will refer to their offences as “blunders.” David uses no such reductionist terminology in his psalm: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (51:4). To my ear, the flouncy cadence of the lines about blunders sounded so different from the earnest sobriety of David on his face, confessing his evil to a holy God. Surely, the song at this church service had to get better. How could it get worse?

Maybe I was being too critical. Maybe the lyricist was onto a deeper truth in the line, “Your love is so free of demands.” I wanted to be generous, to find at least a morsel of truth that might redeem these lines. While I cast about, I tried to picture the persecuted church singing this. Imagine Christian martyrs throughout the centuries lustily joining in with “Your love is so free of demands” as the wood is lit beneath their feet at the stake. Not only was this song nonsensical, singing this made a mockery of the persecuted church, then and now. Watts put it far better:

I felt as if the fabricator of this newer ditty of self-actualization had learned his theology from a pop-psychology textbook—not from the word of God. Truth and the honor of Christ were at stake. I signaled down the row for my family to stop singing.

Historically, the finest poetry woos us away from self-absorption and makes us less self-referential. The best poetry “turn[s] us from ourselves to Thee,” as one poet put it. The Christian’s chief end is to do all things to the glory of God alone; how much more so when we take poetic words on our lips, addressing God in sung worship?

Though my family and I had stopped singing, the rest of the congregation dutifully murmured onward:

Impotent and passive, the father figure portrayed by this lyricist now sits wringing his hands and waiting. How vastly different this is from the God of the Bible in Isaiah 46:9–10:

How equally dissimilar this is from the God portrayed in the rich canon of the church’s hymnody.

The final plumage of self-praise in “You Are My Wholeness” shifted to praising the songwriter’s own choice. Unwittingly, all those who sing these words are praising themselves for following someone’s voice. We’re left to fill in many gaps, including who this “someone” is. Though the apostle Paul calls us to do everything in the name of Jesus Christ (Col. 3:17), oddly, while ostensibly singing to him in this reductionist doggerel, there was zero mention of the Triune God—Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. Wouldn’t ruined sinners rescued by Christ want to sing more like this?

Sing a New Song

I confess that because of lyrics from songs like “You Are My Wholeness,” I had retreated into traditionalism. There are so many great psalm versifications and hymns to sing, I thought, let’s solve the problem. Instead of being subjected to such unworthy lyrical nonsense, let’s simply stick with the best of the past. I thought I’d found my safe place in self-righteous traditionalism. Until I began reading the book of Psalms.

I love singing the psalms, and I’ve always tried to avoid debate with my exclusive-psalm-singing brethren. “Oh, you sing only the psalms?” Only? The psalms are the very words of God, breathed by his Spirit to the ancient poets who penned them. There’s nothing only about them. It was through those very psalms that I was repeatedly called to sing a new song (Pss. 33, 40, 96, 98, 144, 149). As the psalms were once new expressions of praise for old covenant deliverances, so new manifestations of the gracious deliverance of our God call for new “songs of loudest praise” to give voice and substance to our new covenant gratitude.

But these songs weren’t found just in the psalms. In Revelation 5:9, in a culminating torrent of splendor, the saints and angelic hosts “sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.’” My traditionalism was getting pummeled.

The Mouths of Babes

Meanwhile, my children began to work on me. “Daddy, don’t read us another book. Tell us a story; one you make up yourself.” I pointed to the walls of books in our home. There are so many wonderful things to read. “No, Daddy, make up a story.” That was twenty years ago. I’ve been making up stories ever since, my children often my chief critics. Writing books was one thing, but attempting to write a new hymn terrified me.

Then I hit on a solution. I would have a character in one of my children’s books (The Accidental Voyage) write a hymn. Throughout the story, my protagonist gnawed his pencil in fits and starts. It was perfect. If he managed to craft a poem that resembled a singable hymn, then I would be safe. More likely, if my efforts in his persona were an unmitigated disaster, then I could simply blame this adolescent protagonist. What do you expect from a twelve-year-old? Feeling liberated, I furiously worked in secret on several other hymns. But exposure was around the corner.

After writing a birthday sonnet for a pastor friend of mine, he asked me to write a new hymn for the Thanksgiving service—in a week. His was a discerning congregation of hymn-savvy Presbyterians. What did he think I was, a performing circus animal able to crank out poetry that would stand up to their scrutiny? I declined.

Besides, after a long battle with cancer, my father had recently died and I didn’t feel much like writing a new hymn. We had sung hymns at my father’s bedside, reciting and singing the psalms, the thirty-fourth emerging as one of his favorites.

He would often ask me to read it. He would then lean back on his pillow, close his eyes, and smile as I read.

Though I had declined to write the hymn, I found myself looking up biblical passages on thanksgiving, always drawn back to my father’s favorite psalm and the phrase, “O, taste and see that the Lord is good!” The allusion to the Lord’s Supper stirred me, but the days before the Thanksgiving service were clicking by and all I had was an initial idea. Neophyte muse that I was, how could I possibly write a hymn in so short a time—one that would be worthy of the high worship of God?

Three days before the Thanksgiving service, I managed to produce five stanzas that began like this:

The next stanzas explored the salvific roles of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for which every Christian has unmeasured cause for thanksgiving. To match the poetic meter, the accompanist had chosen an existing long-meter tune. I sweated and fidgeted as the congregation sang.

Hostility to Form

As Augustine put it, “I count myself among those who learn as they write and write as they learn.” And did I ever need to learn several important things about hymns and writing them in these early efforts.

My poetry tutorials, however, had begun much earlier. God placed me in a hymn-singing, literary home, where we would snuggle up on the couch and listen to my mother read aloud from Shakespeare, even Chaucer in Middle English. Not understanding a word, I was charmed by the sounds and cadence of the poetry. In my adult life, during decades of teaching history and literature, including the writing of poetry, I watched with mounting apprehension as our culture descended further into a post-poetry, post-literacy malaise, with the church dutifully in tow.

Along with postmodernity’s hostility to form, dismantling culture and disfiguring art, our ability to define and appreciate poetry has been marred. We’re taught to disparage poetic conventions such as meter and rhyming, and anything else that gives shape and order to art. Literary experts say that we are to read poetry just like we read prose, as if poetry were a literary birth defect of prose rather than its own genre with its own rhetorical qualities.

For thousands of years, poetry has included various metrical patterns and parallelisms of sound, rhyming being one of the most delightful and anticipated. In our moment, however, vers libre is celebrated as the highest form of poetry—emotive free verse that defies the conventions of the ages. With lines capriciously designated, much of this material is little more than fragmented prose masquerading as poetry.

Literary elites assure us that traditional poets were simply being cute with words, showing off, being crafty in their slavish devotion to convention. I wonder if they might also tell us that Michelangelo was just being crafty with marble, that medieval architects were simply showing off with stone-vaulted ceilings, or that J. S. Bach was merely being cute with counterpoint.

When critics of poetic conventions asked twentieth-century poet Robert Frost why he didn’t write in free verse, he replied with an apt simile, “Writing poetry that doesn’t rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down.” Frost believed that there was something inherent in the genre that demanded structural boundaries, if it is to be what it is. But his was a voice crying in a literary wilderness.

Congregational Passivity

How does this relate to sung worship? Observe the congregation in a contemporary service, and it becomes clear that it is difficult to sing lyrics composed to post-poetry dictates. Throughout much of Western civilization, poetry was composed to be sung by the whole clan. Today, singing is now largely done for us by commercially popular, celebrity entertainers or those who imitate them. The congregation has become avid listeners, but increasingly inept participants in full-voice singing.

Finding myself a guest in many different churches, most arranged with the entertainers and their instruments on center stage, I’ve been observing congregational singing for years. Many people are not singing at all, especially the men, and most of those whose lips are moving are murmuring more than full-voice singing. Why is that?

Whatever our playlists look like and however lustily we might sing in the privacy of our cars, let’s be frank: one who is not a pop musician feels uncomfortable attempting in public to sing like a solo-voice entertainer. It turns out that, although they call themselves “worship” leaders, they are not leading us. They are doing it for us. Our participation is irrelevant to the performance. Join in if you care to. Either way, it will not change the instrumental, high-volume sound pulsing through the worship center.

Conventions for Congregational Singing

So, how are we to write, compose, and sing new songs that reflect the ethos of worship rather than the ethos of entertainment? David played his harp, a solo performer—for the sheep. But he wrote psalms to be sung by the congregation, young and old, without any consideration for generational preferences. Hence, as we attempt to craft new songs, the hymn writer does not write for a solo performer or for a choir. A good hymn could be sung by either; but the writer of a new hymn, like David, will intentionally craft poetry accessible for the whole congregation of God’s people to sing with full voice.

When Christians of all ages and various singing abilities rise to their feet to sing the praises of their redeemer, if things are to be done decently and in order, they will want to sing with one voice. Though it is more difficult to observe when hymn poetry is subordinated to the musical score (as in American hymnals), for centuries, virtually all hymns have been written in regular rhyme and meter. Solo entertainers can sing metrically irregular songs and often do, but singing free-verse worship songs is difficult for the congregation.

What Makes a Good Hymn?

Our greatest problem of discerning what is worthy to sing in worship is a theological problem. Americans fixated on making everyone equal don’t make good worshipers. Sinners, undone by their crimes in the face of a holy God, falling on their faces before the sovereign Lord who has paid their vast debt in full with his precious blood, make better worshipers. We must get our theology right before we can correct our doxology.

Another problem we have with evaluating what is worthy to sing in worship is that we no longer think of hymns as poetry, and in our post-poetry culture, we have lost the literary tools to require the highest standards for that poetry. What we sing before the face of our redeemer in worship must be the finest human poetry, set to the most appropriate human music, shaped by the biblical ethos of worship.

Music in worship is not first about loud instruments, multicolored lights, or soloists aping entertainment celebrities, as we see in the ubiquitous nightclub liturgy of our present situation. Music in worship is first and last about the voice of the congregation singing to and with one another the word of Christ. Paul put it this way:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Col. 3:16–17)

Here, Paul tells us how and what to sing. New songs of new covenant worship find their substance and boundaries in this locus classicus of sung worship. Notice that three times we are told to take Christ’s name on our lips in our singing, and we’re told three times in the whole context of the passage to sing our thanksgiving—which strongly suggests that new lyrics will be Christ centered and filled with gratitude.

This Colossians passage reveals three more functions of hymns, summarized by hymnologist Erik Routley: New covenant hymns will codify doctrine (“teach and admonish”), unify the church (“one another”), and glorify God (“to God”). We have seen a decay of all three of these functions in most of the new songs of recent decades. Praise choruses and worship songs have been generally reductionist in theological content, saying less and less about doctrinal truths and often never using the name of Christ.

Furthermore, instead of unifying the church, the shift to lyrics and music that suit the ethos of entertainment has created a generational rift and divides the church. Some churches have a traditional service and a contemporary one, thus dividing the church by tastes and age rather than bringing the church together with one voice in song. A good test if a lyric will unify the church is to ask if the persecuted church would have chosen to sing it, if the early church would have sung it, and whether Christians would have sung it in the Reformation, the Great Awakening, or the missionary movement of the nineteenth century.

The third function of singing to the glory of God has been under attack for decades. When the church prefers singing what entertainers sing at concerts or what Christian radio stations are playing, there is a pull to imitate the entertainment industry and its popular celebrity method of singing with church worship leaders now attempting to look like and sound like they are on stage at a concert.

The late Keith Green, himself a vanguard of contemporary Christian singing, was distressed as he observed changes afoot:

It isn’t the beat that offends me, nor the volume—it’s the spirit. It’s the “look at me!” attitude I have seen at concert after concert, and the “Can’t you see we are as good as the world!” syndrome I have heard on record after record.

That was decades ago. What would Green say today?

However noble the intentions, the entertainment arrangement is the perfect storm for singing to the glory of the performers on the stage. Routley quips that when the three functions of hymns—codify, unify, glorify—are absent, he wished for the song to have “the short life of all rootless things.”

New Reformation Hymns

Finally, Paul tells us to write and sing new hymns “with all wisdom”—that is, to do so skillfully. This means that those who presume to craft new hymn lyrics or compose tunes for those lyrics need to study, develop their skills, know what they are attempting, and stand on the shoulders of the great hymn writers of the past such as Cowper, Watts, Wesley, Havergal, Bonar, and many others.

It was while immersed in the study of our hymnody that I became so reluctant to attempt writing a new hymn. How could I possibly measure up to the best hymn writers of the past? Then it occurred to me: I don’t write books because I think I’m the best writer in the world, any more than I love my wife because I think I’m the best husband in the world, any more than I parent my kids because I think I’m the best parent in the world, or any more than I worship Christ because I think I’m the best worshiper in the world. Neither do I write hymns because I think I’m the best hymn writer in the world.

Then one frosty December evening, as I scribbled in front of the fire, I found myself toying with the idea of attempting a carol. When I came to my senses, I contemplated tossing my notes into the fire. What was I thinking? Christ’s advent? The sacred mystery? Angelic heralds? The culmination of thousands of years of prophecy? The best of the existing carol canon guaranteed failure on my part. Carols are uniquely rich with celebratory atmosphere, evocative of rejoicing and feasting, sleigh bells, and every charming winter association imaginable. Hymnologists tell us the best-loved hymn of all time is actually a carol, Charles Wesley’s “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” It was literary suicide to attempt a carol.

Because of my fears, early scribblings for this carol sat dormant for several years. Hymn writing can sometimes be like that for me: an initial burst of ideas and then nothing; just an imaginative black hole. Then another advent season approached. I read aloud from Luke’s Gospel with my family, and we sang a carol. When the kids were tucked in their beds, I pulled out my initial notes and sifted through the scribbled idea and word banks.

Late that night, with fear and trembling, I managed to set down six stanzas as they appear below, beginning with the angelic announcement of Christ’s advent to the shepherds, proceeding to our Lord’s sinless life, Gethsemane and the cross, the resurrection, and concluding with Christ’s triumphant Second Advent. I offer it here for this advent season in hopes that it might help you fall down in wonder at the glorious sight of the incarnation of the Son of God, and then rise and joyfully sing the praises of King Jesus.

Douglas Bond is the author of twenty-eight books, including his latest, God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To). He also leads church history tours and is the lyricist of New Reformation Hymns (www.bondbooks.net).