If Not, Why Not?

I recently read something on line that announced that young people are increasingly illiterate when it comes to the church's song -- the great hymns of old. I thought to myself, whoa, big surprise! It did not take a great social scientist to come up with that observation.

The vast majority of churches no longer sing hymns -- they sing (if and when the people in the pews -- make that theater seats -- sing) the praise choruses and contemporary songs of the current crop of Christian artists and songwriters (you watch TV... Songs for Worship, Vols. 1-1,000). Even those young people who were raised in the faith, raised in the church, do not know the hymns of old (save a few lines from the most generic of them). Second, the vast majority of churches sing only bits and pieces of these hymns (stanzas 1 & 4, etc.) so the poetry of the hymn is often lost by singing only a few lines here and a few lines there. Third, the whole of music education in public school has moved from real singing to the karaoke sing alongs that make pop music accessible to the few teens who sing in high school choirs. And the list goes on...

The big question -- why is this a big deal? Let me first say that it is a big deal. For all our talk about Sunday school and Bible study, a goodly portion of the faith is passed on through the music of the faith -- in other words, what we sing is a good reflection of what we believe and what we believe becomes our favorite song. Music is important because it does not just set the mood or warm up folks. The great hymns of the faith teach the faith, nurture us in the faith, speak to us the Word of God, and allow us to join in singing that faith and Word... both to God and to each other. You know, the Luther quotes about music being second only to the Word... the handmaid to the Word, etc.

Knowing the hymns of previous generations is important because that is one way the faith is passed on to the next generation and one profound way in which we realize that faith did not begin with ME or end with ME... By giving us the great hymns of old, our forefathers and foremothers in the faith were passing on to us a living heritage and a great legacy. If we do not know these or sing this it represents a great disconnect with our Christian past and calls into question what it is that we are passing on to the Christian future.

Page through the Lutheran Service Book of the LCMS and you find a grand chorus of hymns and hymnwriters that extend from the earliest of days right down to the day before that book his the press. It preserves the great hymns of the faith so that we can sing with the Didache or Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux or Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther or Paul Gerhardt or Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley or Horatius Bonar or Samuel Stone or Jaroslav Vajda or Timothy Dudley Smith or Stephen Starke... just to name a few from nearly every era...

We ARE heirs of an astonishingly rich heritage. But what we receive from those who have gone before is not some museum piece but a living faith and a living heritage. From them we learn, to them we add the best of what we have, and through these both we pass on the grand legacy to those whose voices have not yet been added to theirs and ours...

You are what you eat... they say... I wonder... could it be that we are what we sing? If so, I think it is time to pull out some of grandma's old recipes and cut the fast food for a while... speaking in musical terms... it is time to relearn the Church's song before we lose that important tie to our past and become adrift in the sea of now... it is time to relearn the Church's song so that we may add our voices to the voices that sang and still sing "May Jesus Christ be praised!"... it is time to relearn the Church's song so that we can add the best we have to offer and add to this living legacy until a new generation, schooled in the faith through the Church's song, can add their own contributions...