On Second Thought, It’s Not Just the Lyrics I Don’t Like

“Right. Um, Lord, um, we thank you for the music, the songs we’re singing. Um, we thank you for your bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me ’til I want no more, want no more, feed me ’til I want no more. So much, thank you very much to you God, please, amen.”

Miranda S3 E3 ‘The Dinner Party’ (2013)

 

I thought this was a cute music-related picture. When I was a kid I had a storybook in which one of the characters wrote a symphony based on the positions of birds on the telephone wires across from his flat.

In March of 2016 – gosh, it’s quite some time I’ve been maintaining this blog now, isn’t it? – I wrote a post called ‘I’ve Got a Feeling, or The Actual Problem with Many Modern Worship Songs’, in which I argued that there was a troubling tendency in the lyrics of worship songs written in recent years towards a focus on our reaction to God and his character and his works, instead of just him and his character and his works in themselves. I argued that these kinds of lyrics pulled out the legs from under the chair, as it were; they forsook any substantial articulation of the divine glories that were supposed to prompt the reaction, in favour of articulating the reaction itself at great length, as if that were what our relationship with God were fundamentally built around. I argued that this left us in danger of both a kind of works-righteousness, and of straight-up idolatry: presenting our feelings and actions in musical worship to God as if they were the key thing going on here, and meanwhile failing to ground those feelings and actions in proper reflection on any meaningful truths about the nature of the God we worship. I very much stand by what I said then, and the problem has certainly not gone away at all in the intervening years. But, as I’m sure you’ll be absolutely thrilled to know, I now have something to add to my complaint. In that post, I took issue with lyrics and lyrics alone, and indeed took care to stress that musical style is of no importance when it comes to glorifying God. And it isn’t. Except that some specific aspects of it, I’d now like to suggest, sort of are.

Have you ever seen a copy of, say, The Complete Mission Praise,¹ or another collection of sheet music of songs designed for collective worship, specifically one that includes both older and newer compositions? And if you have, did you notice that the older songs usually only take up one double-page spread – tune on the left, lyrics on the right – while the newer ones span so many pages that you have to sellotape several photocopied sheets together in order to be able to view the entire song without turning the page? Why so? I think it’s fairly evident that it comes down to musical structure. Old hymns have a series of verses, one after another, which all follow the same tune, so you only need to write out four or eight lines of music and you’ve got the whole song covered. A really edgy old hymn might include a chorus, but the format will still be a straightforward verse-chorus-verse-chorus-until-you-reach-the-end kind of setup, so you still only have to write out a limited number of lines that are then repeated numerous times. Newer worship songs, on the other hand, tend to work quite a lot like modern pop songs: something like, verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus chorus, or perhaps verse verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus coda; and there’s often a bit of variation between one verse and another, or between repetitions of the same line in the coda, that sort of thing. All this means that you need a lot more sheet music to accurately codify the whole length of the song, even if the song itself doesn’t actually have that much content.

Trying to follow a modern worship song as written, therefore, can get quite unwieldy and confusing, as I can testify from having spent a few years in the music group at my parents’ church when I was younger. But we always did follow them as written, or else things would have got even more confusing. So-called ‘worship leaders’ are, of course, notorious in church culture for going back and doing the bridge one more time, randomly repeating the second half of a verse, skipping to a totally unexpected section of the song and leaving the poor soul in charge of the PowerPoint in a bit of a flap trying to figure out where they’ve dashed off to while the congregation shoots him expectant glances.² I think it’s fair to suppose that we’re all on the same page in wanting what’s up on the screen to match what we’re supposed to be singing, and it definitely doesn’t help with that for the person with the main microphone to indulge his or her own ideas about how the track ought to be remixed. That said, though, I kind of don’t blame him or her, because the nature of these kinds of modern worship songs is that they do lend themselves to spontaneous repeats and variations. The order in which the various component sections ought to follow one another is not obvious or clearly fixed the way it is with old hymns, and it feels weirdly and needlessly prescriptive to suggest that the song must always be played exactly as written.

That’s partly because, for songs like this, ‘as written’ isn’t really the original form of the thing. If you think about how old hymns were composed, it was usually a case of, someone wrote a poem with a fixed meter, and then begged, borrowed, or stole a tune that fitted that meter.³ Nowadays, things are different. The lyrics and the tune are, the vast majority of the time, composed together, which removes the need for the lyrics to have a fixed meter – fixed meters being generally less popular these days anyway. Instead, modern songs tend to approximate something closer to normal human speech. This is another reason why they take up so much space in Mission Praise; there’s a heck lot of syncopation, unusual lengths of notes, and different verses supplying different numbers of syllables to fit within the same musical phrase. I can tell you from experience that it’s often relatively difficult music to read if you don’t know how the song is supposed to sound. One definitely gets the impression that in most cases, the sheet music was only written down after the song was recorded, and I don’t envy the poor soul tasked with transcribing it.

Of course, the sheet music isn’t the only resource at our disposal if we want to know how a new worship song is supposed to go; we can just track down the original artist’s recording – or any of the numerous cover versions; it’s often quite hard to work out who actually wrote the thing – on our favourite online music-streaming platform. And then we can hear it the way he or she sings it. Because that’s what tends to happen on the original recording: the tune is carried and conveyed by one individual voice. And these songs make sense when they’re sung like that. They were composed by, like, one guy with a guitar, and therefore that’s their natural home. The weird timing works in that context, because, as I said, it approximates human speech, as by one individual. The lack of a predictable structure works in that context, because nobody needs to know which bit is coming up next except the one who’s deciding; and because we’re used to pop songs that have a bit more variety in their structure than simple successive verses and choruses can provide, so that’s the sort of thing we prefer. And even – this is where we collide with the point I made back in March 2016 – the focus on a personal reaction to God sort of works in that context, because this is an individual articulating her own experience. If she feels as if there’s a fire burning inside her or whatever, great, bully for her; it’s perfectly plausible that she genuinely spent a good long while in meditation on God’s excellence and felt moved to write this song describing how she feels about it as a result. But the thing is, she shouldn’t suppose that she can bring the rest of us along with her.

 

One guy with a guitar.

Old hymns were designed to be sung congregationally. They have fixed meters and predictable structures so that they’re nice and easy for everyone to join in with. Tunes with regular, unsyncopated timing, and a nice melodic melody in which every note is distinct, are easy to pick up on and sing correctly, and what’s more their regularity helps to keep everyone together. And once you’ve got the tune down pat, it’s straightforward to grasp how every verse is going to fit into it. There’s no unexpected variation in timing or tune that feels you leaving daft for enthusiastically belting out the wrong variant. And it’s just one verse – or verse plus chorus – after another, so that you never feel in the dark about what’s going to be coming up next. The person in charge of the PowerPoint is having a dreamy time, and as for everyone else, there’s no awkward lapsing into silence when you’re not sure how many times the last line is going to be repeated, or missing off the verse line of a verse or chorus because you weren’t expecting it. You can just sing.

This means that congregations actually sound better when they’re singing old hymns, or new hymns that follow the same format. They know what they’re doing, and so they can do it well and wholeheartedly. The modern stuff, by contrast, leaves them uncertain, and much as ‘uncertain’ isn’t really a great trait for any music, it’s surely an especially bad one for music that’s supposed to be praising our wonderful, unchangeable God and assuring our brothers and sisters of the sure and steadfast hope we have in him.

After all, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing when we sing together: we’re supposed to be singing this stuff to one another, just as when we administer truths about our Lord to one another in any other way, for our edification. Both the bits of epistle that specifically command the singing of hymns take care to emphasise this. “Be filled with the Spirit,” Paul writes in Ephesians, “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” And then likewise in Colossians, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”⁴ The songs we sing should thank God, but it’s also vital that in them we address one another, that in them we teach and admonish one another. The whole assembly sings to the whole assembly so as to benefit the whole assembly – so that they might learn more of who God is and be thankful to him.

So when you’ve got all these modern worship songs that are written by and for one guy with a guitar, when the tune approximates normal speech so closely that it’s quite hard to get a handle on how it actually goes, when the ‘worship leader’ is in charge of which bit comes next and the congregation is left floundering at every transition – I’m just not sure it’s the best recipe for genuine edification, you know? And on top of that, as I’ve alluded to already, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that these modern songs tend to come with lyrics that focus on a personal encounter with God and personal feelings, which it’s unfair to assume are true of everyone in the congregation at a particular time. Unfair, and unhelpful: feeling obliged to sing things that aren’t true isn’t going to do anyone any good. What will actually establish our brothers and sisters in the faith, what will comfort them and build them up and strengthen them for the tasks God has for them, is if we address them in song with teaching and admonishment, namely truths about who God is and what he’s done for us. That’s stuff we can all sing, all the time, because however changeable we are, he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Whatever our feelings, we can all sing the same things about our Lord. By the whole congregation, for the whole congregation.

So as it emerges, my problem with modern worship music isn’t, after all, restricted purely to the lyrics. I also have a problem with the typical tunes and structures, because I think they lend themselves to one guy with a guitar better than they lend themselves to a whole congregation of saints gathered for one another’s edification. But that’s not a separate issue to the lyrics; on the contrary, it’s a symptom of the same disease. We’ve forgotten what the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is for, the mutual edification of the saints, and so it’s no wonder that the songs we’re writing aren’t geared towards that purpose, either lyrically or musically. So if we only manage to remember what our songs are supposed to be for and start taking that seriously, then I anticipate that improvements both lyrical and musical in nature shan’t be too far behind. Hope, as the saying goes, springs eternal.

Footnotes

¹ They’re pretty expensive, so you know, I wouldn’t rush off and buy one just in order to get a fuller grasp of the point I’m making: https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007563432/mission-praise-two-volume-set-full-music/. Apparently the book’s got so fat now that they’ve divided it into two volumes. That should stop it falling heavily off the music stand quite so often.

² For instance: https://babylonbee.com/news/skipping-cd-player-fills-in-for-sick-worship-leader.

³ For example, did you know that the tune to which we sing ‘Thine Be the Glory’ comes out of an oratorio by Handel about Judas Maccabeus? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p1BedwyFKY Well, I say it was about Judas Maccabeus. It was ostensibly about Judas Maccabeus. But it was actually about the Duke of Cumberland’s recent victory at Culloden over the Jacobites. Make of that historical analogy what you will.

⁴ Here’s the Colossians: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+3&version=ESVUK. I think this means that writing worship songs is a kind of teaching ministry.

Better, Not Back

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo – the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was, when so much bad had happened? … But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

The sun shining ... trees will also prove somewhat relevant in a moment.

Samwise Gamge knows a thing or two about how stories work.¹ You’ve got the setup, which tells you The Way The World Is. Then there’s some kind of complication; some threat rises that needs to be dealt with; great demands are made on our heroes that they rise to meet the challenge; a heck lot of bad goes down. And after all that, how can the world go back to the way it was? Well, it can’t. It doesn’t. It isn’t supposed to. All that suffering wins something better than a return to the way things were; it wins victory over the threat. Whereas before evil was just dormant, now it’s defeated. When the shadow has passed, the sun shines out the clearer.

The world didn’t go back to the way it was after the Ring was thrown into Mount Doom and destroyed; it was better, because there was no possibility of anyone ever using the Ring for evil again. The world didn’t go back to the way it was after Voldemort was killed at the Battle of Hogwarts; it was better, because there were no Horcruxes left and no chance that he might return from semi-death as he’d done once before.² The world didn’t even go back to the way it was after the Avengers used actual time travel to snap the half of the universe’s population that had turned to dust back into existence; it was better, because this time around they successfully defeated Thanos. Heavy prices were paid, in all cases, certainly, but the peace they bought in the end was worth more than the peace there was at the beginning, because, as consistently demonstrated, that first peace was susceptible to disruption by evil, whereas the second peace, evil having been permanently dealt with, was not.

Well, not to the same evil, anyway; when we’re talking about fictional realms, there’s almost always room for a sequel where something else goes wrong. But nevertheless, you catch my drift. A happy ending is worth more than a happy beginning, because it involves evil being defeated rather than merely dormant. All the suffering in the middle, grievous as it may have been, turns out to be worth it for the sake of securing that happy ending. Plus, it’s the key vehicle of character development, whereby our heroes actually become heroes rather than merely main characters. In the best stories – or the ones with the most satisfactory endings, anyway – the world doesn’t go back to the way it was. The world going back to the way it was is something that belongs to cartoons and the ilk: things might get pretty crazy within the ten- or twenty-minute runtime of an episode, but they invariably all go back to normal at the end of it, and hence we always know that none of the struggles and successes and sufferings of our poor two-dimensional heroes are ultimately going to have any significance or worth. In the great stories, by contrast, the ones that really matter, the ones that stay with you and mean something, the world doesn’t go back to the way it was; all those struggles and successes and sufferings get to count for something; the cause is won, and the world ends up better.

And so it is too in the greatest story of all.

Has it ever occurred to you that the Garden of Eden wasn’t actually perfect? I mean, I’m sure it was really nice and everything, but let’s be real here, there were some pretty major issues. The fact that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was there at all is an obvious one. Then there was that talking snake going around advocating disobedience of God’s command. And most vitally of all, the human and his wife were of such a disposition as to start thinking that, now you mention it, Mr. Serpent, disobedience sounds like a really great idea.³ When the prospect of immortality is on the table, if you can’t be relied upon to do your job successfully every single time ad infinitum, then sooner or later you’re bound to get it wrong. The fact that the fall happened at all, in other words, proves that it was inevitable. And if the fall was inevitable, then we can hardly say that the original setup was perfect. It wasn’t. Creation wasn’t perfect. Humans weren’t perfect. Eden was the beginning-of-the-story peace, where evil was dormant; it was the equivalent of Bilbo keeping the Ring in an envelope on his mantelpiece, of Voldemort going about currently deprived of physical form and so powerless, of Thanos not having got hold of the infinity stones yet. There might have been peace for the moment, but it was never going to last, not while the potential for evil existed.

 

Of course, the fact that the serpent was cursed to crawl on its belly as a consequence of its deceit makes you wonder what it used to do before that. My personal favourite theory is that it flew. But that’s by the by.

It’s not as if God weren’t aware of that, either – as if he hadn’t ordained it. We know that the cross was always the plan. It was before the foundation of the world that we were chosen to be holy and blameless through the blood of the Lamb who was slain.⁴ That’s the happy ending God’s always had on the agenda. And so it wasn’t some kind of oversight that Eden was corruptible; indeed, it was necessary. The illusory peace at the beginning of the story, followed by the complication and the threat and our heroes’ striving and suffering, is necessary in order to land on the better peace of the happy ending.

And a better peace it is. Eden had two significant trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whereas the new creation will only have one, the tree of life. In Eden, the snake went about telling untruths, whereas nobody who does what is false or detestable shall have a place in the new creation.⁵ The first humans were susceptible to corruption and hence to death, whereas we are to inherit eternal life having been made perfect in Christ – who is God and so incorruptible, and moreover who was made perfect through his human suffering.⁶ As in every story, our hero becomes truly heroic through his persistence in service of good in the face of adversity; Jesus did so perfectly, and we are gifted his virtue as if it were our own, and in order that we might grow into that identity, we share in his sufferings.⁷ Think of it as character development. You don’t emerge from suffering and go back to the way you were; in God’s hands, you emerge from it better – refined like precious metal.

The first humans in Eden could have sung the throne-room song of Revelation 4 – worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created – but they couldn’t have sung the new song that replaces it in the following chapter: 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, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. And then a moment later, worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.⁸ That’s seven things, as opposed to the earlier three. The Son is worthier, more glorious, more excellent and more deserving of devotion, because of what he did for us on the cross. When he died for our sins, he didn’t merely put things back the way they’d been before our first ancestors ate the fruit; he created something better than that. Our first ancestors didn’t even know the difference between good and evil; we are granted to know and love the greatest example of good that there could ever possibly be.

We are not trying to get back to Eden, any more than Frodo and Sam were trying to put the Ring back on Bilbo’s mantelpiece. That was an illusory peace. Where we are heading is so much better. Evil shall be defeated, not merely dormant; there’ll be no possibility that we’ll ever be subject to it again. And the one who defeated it, and through his endurance of suffering in that endeavour was perfected as the best hero of any story ever, will live with us forever and ever. When the shadow of this life and this age is over and God himself shines as our sun, surely, indeed, our sun will shine out so, so much the clearer.

Footnotes

¹ As so often, thanks to Springfield! Springfield! for their extremely useful archive of film scripts: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=lord-of-the-rings-the-two-towers-the.

² Barring – Cursed Child spoilers ahead – mucking about with Time-Turners. Does anyone else feel as if … the Cursed Child reads like fanfiction, or a kind of weird midrash thing trying to account for points of contention and apparent flaws in the original series? Ah well, it’s still a properly stunning bit of theatre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzD3qlnhVZA.

³ I hardly need to tell you that you’re looking at Genesis 2 and 3 for this jazz, but heigh-ho, here’s a link: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+2-3&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 13:8, which I’m pretty sure I reference a lot on this blog.

⁵ Check out Revelation 21-22, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21-22&version=ESVUK, one of very few passages in the Bible which actually tells us anything at all about the nature of the new creation.

⁶ Yep, Jesus was perfected; Hebrews 2 and 5 are pretty explicit about that: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+5&version=ESVUK. Doesn’t mean there was any flaw in him to start with, but what he went through for us made him yet more excellent than he was.

⁷ There are quite a few places I could have taken you for that, but I’ll give you Philippians 3, because it’s great: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians+3&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Last Bible link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+4-5&version=ESVUK.