Rule #6: Let church music do its thang

I've fallen off the pace a little bit with posting, and looking back over the last few posts it seems like it's been quite a while since we've had a good old-fashioned rule.

So here it is - let music do its thang.

What exactly is church music's thang though? Music in church can do a bunch of good stuff. It can direct prayers to God, it can express truths from God's word, it can aid us in the memory of Scripture (think 'Highest Place' as a good example). But other elements of our meetings can do these things too.

However, there a couple of things that I think only singing does in our church meetings.

Firstly, singing in church is uniquely holistic - it engages the whole person: their mind, will and especially their emotions (at least in principle). It is this emotional element that music is uniquely capable of targeting. Although good preaching, praying and public Bible reading ought to target the emotions, music is specially designed to elicit an emotional response and to give that response expression.

NB: Because music so powerfully engages the emotions, there is a great responsibility attached to its use. Good music will always be 'manipulative', since the whole point of it is to change your emotional state. But this manipulation can be either good and godly (encouraging an appropriate whole-person response to biblical truth) or it can be unhelpful (encouraging a heightened emotional state which is destructively and unbiblically passed off as 'an intimate encounter with God's presence').

Secondly, singing in church is uniquely corporate. That is, the whole body of Christ does it. Unlike corporately listening to God's word as it is read from the Bible or authoritatively explained by the preacher, unlike prayer led from the front (or even one-at-a-time 'open prayer'), singing is the only part of the meeting where every member participates (except perhaps in reciting set liturgical elements like a creed or confession, and even then these things probably account for less than 2 mins of the service, whereas singing will get a solid 10 mins). This means that singing is our only real chance (during the formal part of the meeting) to speak words of encouragement to one another, or to corporately respond to God's word.

So I think it makes sense to play up music's unique distinctives: its capacity to engage mind, will and heart at the same time, and its scope for truly corporate prayer to God and encouragement of one another.

Let it do its thang!

(But this is just off the top of my head - perhaps you have thought of other thangs that music is specially able to do. What have I missed? What do you think?)

'I've never liked the Psalms...': Part 1.

On the face of it, church music and the psalms should be a perfect match.

I mean, the Bible actually has songs in it already - pre-made! They even have musical directions! (albeit inscrutable ones. I take it that 'according to Gittith' was one lisping psalmist's way of saying 'let there be rock!' But I digress.) Best of all, if someone comes to nitpick over the theological emphases of your song you can hit them with a somersaulting double-roundhouse 'It's in the Bible, suckah!' Five hundred points!

But, by and large, songs based directly on the Psalms are pretty rubbish. Why is this? As fair dinkum Bible songs they should be so great, but I personally usually find them a little odd and off-putting. Now, whilst this may say more about me vs. the psalms than it does about our church music, I think there's something here worth thinking about.

My initial thought is that this is probably related to the issue of translation. Language is flexible, and texts can be translated into other languages. However, there is inevitably some loss of meaning. This problem is compounded when it comes to translating poetry, where how something is written is just as important (if not more!) as the actual content. I suspect we feel this meaning loss more acutely when we try to adapt the Psalms (which are Hebrew poetry, and follow the rules of Hebrew poetry) into whatever kind of musical style church music is (what musical genre would you say church music actually is? Is it kind of early nineties middle-of-the-road soft pop/rock? Doesn't seem like a bilious enough description...). I reckon not enough thinking is being done about how the fact that a Psalm is a Hebrew song shapes its meaning, and what sort of features of 'modern' music might be equivalents to those the features of Hebrew music which the song depends on for its meaning. I think that assuming that something that used to be a song (when it was in Hebrew, before Christ) will automatically transfer across and effortlessly slide into the Western, 20th Century conception of what a song is.

So I think this is actually an optimistic post. Psalms should make for great songs, if we think a little bit harder about what translation actually is. More to come.

Image from http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/Issue2/John_Thornhill.htm