There’s a series of important questions around what songs you sing on a Sunday: their theology and how well it coheres with the church’s, their singability by this particular congregation, song choices that best encourage and inspire expressions of praise, and what songs fit the moment or ‘stage’ of the morning you’ve reached.
I’d like to explore something slightly different: the importance of singing ‘local’ songs.
The Christian musical world in the UK was profoundly shaped by the British New Churches of the charismatic renewal. Graham Kendrick, Nathan Fellingham, and Stuart Townend (among many others) wrote songs—a few of which we still sing—that were sung around the new churches and then propagated through conferences and Bible weeks. Others came in behind whose music was sung widely, but these were songs written for their local churches that then gathered momentum across movements and often jumped to other denominations.
This was slightly homogenised through publishing efforts and the impact of camps like Soul Survivor and Stoneleigh—most people sang Matt Redman songs in the late 90s—but there was still a profoundly local aspect to it. Many songs were for local contexts, moments, or movements; some jumped into other contexts. Lots of what we sang was written in the UK, with smatterings from other parts of the world.
Fast forward to today, as our culture more widely has globalised so have the sources of our worship music. The vast majority of what we sing these days comes from either Bethel, Hillsong or Elevation. These large churches who make serious bank from music publishing arms have financed and produced some wonderful songs. There’s a lot of dreck too.
Of course, that itself isn’t the problem, most songwriters need to pump out mediocre to bad songs to find gold (though ideally they don’t publish many of the bad ones!), just as a writer needs to write bad sentences to excavate good sentences. Plenty of that on display around here.
The dominance of this small number of powerful church-come-recording-outfits is a challenge, as is the theology that is often imported uncontested by singing their songs; this latter challenge is compounded by the fact that algorithms now give us new worship music rather than it being curated at the conferences people learned the songs through. The challenge I’m most interested in is that I wonder if it’s meant less desire to write songs locally.
A lot of the impetus for songwriting in the earlier history of the new churches was because the hymnody they had inherited was not serving the purpose of the theology they wanted to sing, or the emotional register they wanted to sing in. There was greater urgency at producing the songs that would work for your congregation. There will have been hundreds of songwriters whose names we don’t know because they didn’t get prominence outside of their local setting, but who wrote songs that were valuable to their local congregations.
It is healthy and sensible for movements and local churches to write and sing their own songs. I’m not convinced it’s a good thing that you can walk into the Anglican church down the right and find them singing Hillsong songs too. Neither am I arguing for a totalising ban on a particular producer of songs, if the song is good we can sing it, but I would fear a complacency about needing to find the right songs or needing to get them written.
Saying that I’d be wary of songs that come from heretical writers; for all it’s true that the theology of some of the hymn writers (It is Well for example) would not be one we’d share, time has left us with the songs we can own even if we mean something different by them. While the writer doesn’t invalidate the song, and someone’s theology changing doesn’t have to invalidate their previous work, we want to consider each case carefully. When a notable and popular songwriter is a Oneness Pentecostal we should be searching their songs to confirm if their anti-Trinitarian stance is present in the lyrics before we even consider singing it. Different local elders will make different decisions, but I fear that sort of due diligence rarely happens.
Writing local songs is a large part of the solution there. The sign of a good song written in your church isn’t if lots of people listen to the recording (if you happen to record it) and then sing it in their own churches, rather the sign of a good song if it aids the worship of the people of the local congregation it was written for. The initiatives from Resound worship to inspire local songwriting are encouraging and something we could do with more of.
Introducing a new song every couple of weeks is inevitably a bad idea for your congregation, we absolutely should continue to sing ancient hymns that have spoken to the breeze of the centuries and should probably recover some form of Psalm singing (though ideally in a style that makes sense to our churches). Nevertheless, new songs written for your context and the particular moments your church finds itself in should be encouraged, as should using a song from elsewhere that fits your particular moment.
People learn their theology from songs, so let’s write songs which don’t have awkward lines that need a slightly twisted explanation to not be singing something untrue. Let’s write big, bold, Reformed Charismatic songs that speak of the wonder of grace, the gift of election, even perhaps the mercy of hell. Let’s write unashamed songs that help men sing loudly. Let’s write songs that address things we don’t often sing about.
We would need to free ourselves from the celebrity trap. Not every song has life beyond its local church, but they can bring significant life within that local church. That’s to be prized.
These things do happen. Songs are written within my movement, though then the onus is on churches to choose to pick them up because they want to sing from within rather than the general things everyone sings everywhere. It’s also true that songwriting is hard. I can’t write music (I don’t have a musical bone in my body) so cannot put my money where my mouth is.
Encourage your worship leaders and musicians to have a go. Get them to collaborate with theologians if that would help. If it were me, I’d start in the Psalms. I’d love for our churches to sing more Psalms but suspect that four-part harmony is musically alien to us; let’s write some songs that aren’t musically alien but capture the richness of the Psalms. Write songs about the ascension and gift of the Spirit. Write songs for particular moments in a worship time, deliberately. Write, and sing, songs.
Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash
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