What happens when you put the lyrics
of some of our best-known worship songs under the theological microscope?
We’ve all stood in a Sunday morning
service, bleary-eyed from a late night, and submissively warbled our way
through an entire worship set without engaging our brains. We could have been
singing anything.
And we’ve all sung lyrics to worship
songs we didn’t fully understand. A favourite at my own church is the hymn ‘I
Will Sing the Wondrous Story’, which includes the repeated line, ‘Sing it with
the saints in glory, Gathered by the crystal sea’. Despite the fact that I
don’t know what this refers to – and it sounds strangely like the title of an
episode of Dr Who – I gamely sing it every time.
Many of us have sung things we don’t
actually believe. Matt Redman’s magnum opus ‘Blessed Be Your Name’ contains
the questionable line ‘You give and take away’, which seems to suggest
that God actively causes, rather than allows, suffering. But is this really the
nature of the biblical God? The trouble is, it’s such a good song.
LYRICS COUNT
In a Church culture in which personal
engagement with the Bible is sometimes patchy, worship songs and hymns become a
primary source of theology for some. For others it is the most dynamic tool in
terms of connecting with God. We pick up memorable bits of scripture (often a
bit mangled to fit the verse structure), and larger principles about God
through the lyrics of our Sunday anthems. So the accuracy of their theology
really matters.
The other reason we should carefully
consider our song lyrics is a missional one. If a non-Christian, with no prior
knowledge of the faith or its traditions, walks into your church, what might
(s)he make of singing ‘These are the days of Elijah’? It gets worse at
Christmas. Every year we force nominal believers to sing ‘Christian children
all must be, mild, obedient, good as he’, thus reminding them why they only
come to church once a year.
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