This is the last post I currently have planned in this series about the songs we sing, although I doubt it will be the last time I write about worship. It has been part of my life for too long, and has shaped too much of who I am, for me to imagine that I have finished thinking about it.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have known that I was created to love and worship God. For many years, music was the clearest expression of that. Playing the piano, singing with other people and helping to lead worship were among the places where I felt closest to God. Music is still an important part of how I pray, particularly when I can’t find the words for myself.

As I’ve grown older, my understanding of worship has become much wider. Music is one way in which we worship, but I now find a fuller picture in Micah 6:8, with its call to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. For me, worship includes learning to live and love as Jesus asks us to, allowing what happens when we gather as a church to shape the way we live through the rest of the week.

That understanding has been behind much of this series. In When Our Worship Becomes Political, I explored how worship shapes the way we understand power. In What Are Our Songs Supporting?, I asked what else may travel with the music we use, including money, influence and the public ministry of those who write it.

For this final planned post, I want to turn to a more practical question. What helps a real congregation worship together, using the voices and musicians it actually has?

Are we focusing on the wrong questions?

Conversations about church music often become arguments about style. Should we sing traditional hymns or contemporary worship songs? Should we have an organ or a band? Should one person take responsibility for planning and leading the music?

I understand why people have strong feelings about these things. Music is closely tied to memory, belonging and the ways in which we have encountered God. A change in musical style can feel as though something much more personal is being taken away. Even so, I sometimes wonder whether these arguments distract us from asking what the music is actually enabling the congregation to do.

The organ is often treated as the traditional form of church accompaniment, while the worship band is seen as a recent interruption. The history is more complicated than that. Organs have been used in English churches for centuries, but their form and place within parish worship have changed considerably. Early organs were often much smaller, while the large permanent instruments found in many churches became increasingly common during the nineteenth century as organ building, musical taste and ideas about worship changed. The Churches Conservation Trust has a useful lecture exploring that history.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many churches relied on unaccompanied voices or local groups of singers and instrumentalists. The musicians associated with west gallery music used instruments available within their communities, including fiddles, cellos, bassoons, clarinets and flutes. As organs, harmoniums and formal choirs became more common, many of these local groups were removed from parish churches. Some continued their music in Methodist chapels or elsewhere in the community. The change to what we later came to think of as traditional church music was itself contested and involved the loss of an older form of local participation. The West Gallery Music Association gives a much fuller account of this history.

I’m not raising this because I want to argue against organs. I love a good organ and have enjoyed being in the choir for evensong. I also enjoy worship led by a contemporary band, and I’m quite happy with a piano, a guitar or voices singing without accompaniment. Different styles offer different things, and I wouldn’t want every church to sound the same.

The question I’m more interested in is whether the music helps the people who are present to worship together. Can they make the words their own, or are they spending most of the hymn trying to find the notes? Does the accompaniment support them, or does it turn them into an audience listening to somebody else perform?

Giving older hymns another life

Traditional hymns can be wonderful. Some contain theology and poetry that I wouldn’t want the Church to lose. They also carry the faith of people who have sung them through joy, grief and uncertainty over many generations.

Yet some hymns have quietly fallen out of use because congregations struggle with the tune or no longer understand the language. Many of the congregations I encounter don’t have the same experience of communal singing that earlier generations may have had. A wide vocal range, an awkward leap or a melody that rarely moves in the direction people expect can leave much of the congregation behind.

The words can present their own difficulties. Sometimes a word is simply unfamiliar. In other cases, its common meaning has changed since the hymn was written, so people hear something quite different from what the writer intended. Some texts also carry assumptions about gender, disability, empire or the power of God that can’t be resolved by replacing “thee” with “you”.

I don’t think preserving a hymn means that we must always sing it exactly as it first appeared. Hymns have travelled between different tunes for centuries, and many well-known texts have never belonged exclusively to one musical setting. The West Gallery Music Association notes that While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night has been found set to more than 150 tunes, which rather challenges the idea that a hymn and its familiar tune are inseparable.

I have some experience of this myself. I wrote new music for The Church of Christ in Every Age because I wanted people to sing Fred Pratt Green’s words, but I had never found the usual tune easy to use with the congregations I was leading. Writing another setting was a way of bringing the text back into worship and helping people engage with what it says about the Church’s life in the world. If you are interested you can find the recording and a score HERE.

I also enjoy some of the newer arrangements of hymns such as And Can It Be and To God Be the Glory. A new arrangement can change the energy of a hymn without losing its words. Sometimes a chorus has been added, while in other versions one of the original verses has been used as a refrain. These approaches can give people a familiar place to return to and allow an older hymn to find a place within a different musical setting.

There is also value in writing new words for tunes a congregation already knows. Learning a new melody and an unfamiliar text at the same time asks a lot of people, particularly in churches where there may be little opportunity to rehearse. A familiar tune allows them to pay more attention to the words.

That can help churches sing about experiences and questions which may be missing from older collections. New texts can grow from concern about the climate, the experiences of disabled people, migration or something happening within the local community. They still need to fit the tune properly, with words that fall naturally on the musical stresses. Writing four paragraphs which happen to rhyme won’t necessarily produce something a congregation can sing.

The intention isn’t to improve the past or pretend that everything needs to sound contemporary. It is to ask whether an older text can still become the prayer of the people gathering now, and whether a familiar tune might help them find words for the world in which they are living.

Can new music survive the journey home?

I’ve encountered a related problem at festivals such as Spring Harvest. Introducing new songs is an important part of these gatherings, and I have discovered music at festivals which I have later used in local churches. However, much of the new material has come from international writers and large worship organisations, presented by skilled musicians with a full band and professional production.

A song can sound wonderful in that setting. There is a confident lead singer, the band knows the arrangement and the screen tells a large crowd exactly when to come in. The same song may be much harder to use when everyone returns home and the music is being led by one person with a piano, organ or guitar.

The original key is often too high for an ordinary congregation, particularly where the recording has been arranged around the range of a solo singer. The rhythm may depend heavily on drums or a backing track, and long instrumental sections can leave people uncertain about when they are meant to sing again. A capable local musician may be able to transpose and simplify it, but sometimes so much of the song’s effect depends on the original arrangement that it doesn’t travel well.

This is one reason a great deal of new music introduced at festivals never becomes part of regular local worship. People may have enjoyed it in the moment, but the churches they return to can’t reproduce what happened on the stage.

I don’t expect a local church to sound like a festival, and I’m not convinced that it should try. The music needs to work with the congregation and instruments available. A song which can be led confidently on a single piano or guitar may be of greater use than one which only comes alive when it sounds like the recording.

This also raises questions about where our modern worship music comes from. There are international songs which I value and use, but churches can become heavily dependent on a small number of large organisations such as Hillsong and Bethel whenever they want something that sounds contemporary. That limits the range of voices we hear and can leave local musicians feeling that their role is to reproduce music created somewhere else.

Making worship more local

This is part of what attracts me to Resound Worship. It is a British collective whose songs begin in local churches and are then developed through collaboration and peer criticism before being shared more widely. The writers are working with the lives and limitations of actual congregations rather than beginning with what will work on an album or a festival stage.

Someone writing or arranging music within a church knows the people who will sing it. They know the instruments available and how confident the congregation is with new material. They may also understand which experiences need to be given words because they are already part of the community’s life.

This doesn’t mean that every church needs to produce its own collection of worship songs. It would also be unwise to assume that something is ready for congregational use simply because it has been written locally. Songs benefit from editing, collaboration and the willingness to hear that a favourite line doesn’t fit the tune or makes little sense to anyone else. That process of testing is one of the strengths of Resound Worship’s approach.

Local creativity does, however, give churches another option. An existing hymn can receive a more singable tune. A well-known melody can carry words written for a particular occasion. A new song can emerge from the worship and work of the community itself.

In his interview with Musicademy, Andy Flannagan questions a worship culture shaped by marketing, celebrity and the expectation that churches will consume whatever is promoted to them. He worries that congregations can become audiences and that Christians may end up relying almost entirely on other people’s words for their relationship with God. He also asks what God may be saying to the Church at a particular time, including the uncomfortable things that might never become commercially successful worship songs.

I recognise some of what he describes. It is easy to wait for a new album or a large worship event to tell us what the Church will be singing next. Meanwhile, words growing from the prayers, doubts and experiences of our own communities may never be written.

Making space for local writing and arranging can help worship sound more like the church that is offering it. It might also recover something of the participation found in those older local groups of singers and musicians, where church music belonged to the community rather than arriving as a finished product from elsewhere.

I don’t think we need to settle the argument between hymns and worship songs, or decide whether the organ or the band has won. Those choices will continue to vary between churches, and I’m glad that they do.

I would rather ask whether the people gathered can take part, whether the words help them understand more of God and one another, and whether what they sing has any connection with the lives they will return to when the service ends. An old hymn may do that exactly as it is. Another may need a different tune or words that can be understood. A newly written song may serve one local congregation particularly well without ever appearing on an album.

This is the last post I had planned for this series, but I am sure worship will continue to find its way into what I write. I still believe, as I did when I was a teenager, that I was created to love and worship God. I now understand that calling through the words of Micah: doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God.

The music can help us find words for that life and learn to share them with one another. Perhaps the better test of our hymns and songs is whether they help those words become part of who we are.