In his book Gemeinsames Leben (Life Together), Dietrich Bonhoeffer described the common life to which he and twenty-five seminarians aspired in the makeshift, emergency-built houses of the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde near the Pomeranian coast (now Zdroje, Poland). In the chapter entitled “The Day with Others,” he considers the community gathered together at prayer and worship and at meals. A section of that chapter is devoted to “Singing the New Song.” His reflections on this aspect of communal life and worship are summarized in this selection:
“Sing and make melody in your hearts to the Lord” (Eph. 5:19). The new song is sung first in the heart. Otherwise it cannot be sung at all. The heart sings because it is overflowing with Christ. That is why all singing in the church is a spiritual performance. Surrender to the Word, incorporation in the community, great humility, and much discipline—there are the prerequisites of all singing together. (Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein, HarperOne, 1954, 58)
Given that each of the previous contributors to this conversation is deeply committed to the contribution of congregational song to the gathering of the Christian community for worship, it is unsurprising that these same themes—surrender to the Word of God, incorporation in the community, humility, and the discipline not only of music-making but of submission to godly authority—are sounded in their essays in more or less explicit ways.
These four themes or characteristics of congregational song have their ground, purpose, and end in the unity of the body of Christ. Unity of heart and mind within believers, unity among believers, and union with Christ and with the Word of God incarnate in him all find their expression in the congregation’s song and in the ministry of the lay musician.
“Speak to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19). Our song on earth is speech. It is the sung Word. Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because here they can unite in the Word. (Bonhoeffer, 59)
“It is the sung Word.” The relationship of music and text, of music and the Word of God, was a matter of signal importance for patristic writers, who made no sharp distinctions between music and rhetoric. Augustine of Hippo, in his six books On Music, never discusses pitch (!) but examines instead the rhythms and meters inherent in the natural flow of spoken Latin. Musical forms were acknowledged as aids to concentration, attention, and memory of the texts of the liturgy, a large portion of which were the psalms. Great care had to be taken that melody and melodic ornamentation should help and not hinder the expression of the Word and its understanding. Plainsong and other Western forms of chant grew not only out of experimentation with earlier melodic traditions but out of the rhythms and stresses of spoken Latin—as may be demonstrated by the occasional awkwardness of English texts set to more complicated plainsong melodies.
For Ambrose of Milan, the unison singing of the congregation was an image of the unity between God and humanity established in Christ. William T. Flynn notes that in patristic writings “the community represented by singing was not only an image of earthly community, but was also a participation of the earthly community in heavenly worship, and therefore in the life of God”—as epitomized in the conclusion to the preface of the eucharistic prayer, “Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven…” (“Liturgical Music as Liturgy,” in Liturgy and Music: Lifetime Learning, ed. Robin A. Leaver and Joyce Ann Zimmerman, The Liturgical Press, 1998, 258). Congregational song, whether hymnody, psalmody, or settings of the texts of the liturgy (like the Gloria in excelsis and the Sanctus or the canticles of Morning and Evening Prayer) possesses an iconic character that at once narrates and responds to the Word of God and that shows (sings!) forth the unity of the body of Christ as the congregation is united in the Word.
In the medieval Western Church, singing was still considered to be one of the principal ways in which the whole Church was united in the liturgy, as singing was thought to symbolize the joy of the heavenly kingdom. However, over time the singing role of the congregation was reduced at most to amens, greetings, and some litany responses, while most of the music was sung by clergy or choir. With such a radical diminution, it became difficult for the participants to think of the Church’s song as a unity that embraces all gifts and abilities. It is of course a commonplace that the Reformers, with the sole exception of Zwingli, returned the Church’s song to the people, whether in the chorales of the Evangelical (Lutheran) tradition or in the metrical psalmody of the Reformed (including the reformed English/Anglican) tradition. For the Roman Church’s part, the Council of Trent agreed with the reformed English and Lutheran position that chorally sung words should be intelligible.
The Church’s iconic, living hymnic tradition narrates and responds to the Word of God. In my own (Anglican) tradition, successive American editions of the Book of Common Prayer have included this direction, taken here from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America: “Hymns, anthems, and songs of praise must be in the words of Holy Scripture, or of the Book of Common Prayer, or congruent with them. The local Minister is responsible for maintaining this standard.” Here is a clear and direct statement of the content and indirectly of the central purpose of Christian hymnody: surrender to—submission to—the Word of God. (Recalling that the late J. I. Packer remarked that the Book of Common Prayer is the Bible arranged for worship.) And to Caleb Skogen’s point, here also in this direction is a clear statement from the Anglican tradition that the worship of the Church, of which music is a part though not the whole (for music is the handmaiden of the liturgy), is under the authority of those to whom the ministry of Word and Sacrament has been committed in ordination. Even the longstanding tradition in Anglicanism of allowing a hymn before and after sermons points to the Church’s hymnody as narrative and response to the Word of God. (Regrettably, this provision was dropped in nearly all Prayer Book revisions of the last fifty years or so.)
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). In both liturgical texts and in congregational song (psalmody and hymnody), the Church is given both a catechetical and a homiletical role, “teaching and admonishing one another” in the Word, a ministry to which all the baptized are called that complements but does not supplant or diminish the teaching and hortatory ministry of those in holy orders.
Great humility, and much discipline—Bonhoeffer is on the mark to include these among his prerequisites for singing together, for these are required to be able to surrender to the Word and to embody community. Brittany Hurd echoes Bonhoeffer in her admonition to “sing the melody with understanding and volume” when he writes:
The soaring tone of unison singing finds its sole and essential support in the words that are sung and therefore does not need the musical support of other voices [harmony]…“With one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6). The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoilt by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing. This, is it true, discloses itself to our cultivated ears only gradually and by patient practice. It becomes a question of a congregation’s power of spiritual discernment whether it adopts proper unison singing. (59-60)
Bonhoeffer is even stronger than Hurd in his commendation of unison singing, giving the reader with the strong impression that there is no place for part-singing. (He writes critically of the “bass or alto who must call everybody’s attention to his astonishing range” and of the “solo voice that goes swaggering, swelling, blaring, and tremulant from a full chest and drowns out everything else.”) For my own part, I think that Hurd’s counsel of patience and discernment regarding the suitable times and places for unison singing versus harmony should be followed. Beginning with Clement of Rome, many of the Church Fathers referred to the Church as being in perfect symphonia (agreement or harmony) because it is led by and united in Jesus. Ambrose referred to the joining together of voices of various ages and abilities in his congregation as if they were diverse strings played in harmony with one another. Having grown up and come to faith as a Baptist, I know the joy and power of congregational part-singing in songs like “Leaning on the everlasting arms” and “Standing on the promises.” Anyone who has participated in a shapenote sing (which admittedly are held apart from formal worship services) or who has sung a Welsh hymn like “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah” or who has sung John Dowland’s delightful setting of Old Hundredth knows the power of voices lifted up in harmonious praise and prayer to God. But, as Hurd counsels, patience and discernment—and these require spiritual discipline and God’s grace.
I haven’t added any practical recommendations to those offered by Brittany Hurd, Caleb Skogen, and David Erb because their robust charges are sufficient to that task. I leave the lay musician instead with the last of John Wesley’s “Directions for Singing,” from his Select Hymns (1761), emphasis added:
Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.
Todd Granger is a physician in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has for over forty-five years served as a church musician, organist, pianist, chorister and cantor, and has directed small instrumental and vocal ensembles. He currently serves as Catechist for Adults at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (Chapel Hill).
In his book Gemeinsames Leben (Life Together), Dietrich Bonhoeffer described the common life to which he and twenty-five seminarians aspired in the makeshift, emergency-built houses of the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde near the Pomeranian coast (now Zdroje, Poland). In the chapter entitled “The Day with Others,” he considers the community gathered together at prayer and worship and at meals. A section of that chapter is devoted to “Singing the New Song.” His reflections on this aspect of communal life and worship are summarized in this selection:
“Sing and make melody in your hearts to the Lord” (Eph. 5:19). The new song is sung first in the heart. Otherwise it cannot be sung at all. The heart sings because it is overflowing with Christ. That is why all singing in the church is a spiritual performance. Surrender to the Word, incorporation in the community, great humility, and much discipline—there are the prerequisites of all singing together. (Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein, HarperOne, 1954, 58)
Given that each of the previous contributors to this conversation is deeply committed to the contribution of congregational song to the gathering of the Christian community for worship, it is unsurprising that these same themes—surrender to the Word of God, incorporation in the community, humility, and the discipline not only of music-making but of submission to godly authority—are sounded in their essays in more or less explicit ways.
These four themes or characteristics of congregational song have their ground, purpose, and end in the unity of the body of Christ. Unity of heart and mind within believers, unity among believers, and union with Christ and with the Word of God incarnate in him all find their expression in the congregation’s song and in the ministry of the lay musician.
“Speak to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19). Our song on earth is speech. It is the sung Word. Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because here they can unite in the Word. (Bonhoeffer, 59)
“It is the sung Word.” The relationship of music and text, of music and the Word of God, was a matter of signal importance for patristic writers, who made no sharp distinctions between music and rhetoric. Augustine of Hippo, in his six books On Music, never discusses pitch (!) but examines instead the rhythms and meters inherent in the natural flow of spoken Latin. Musical forms were acknowledged as aids to concentration, attention, and memory of the texts of the liturgy, a large portion of which were the psalms. Great care had to be taken that melody and melodic ornamentation should help and not hinder the expression of the Word and its understanding. Plainsong and other Western forms of chant grew not only out of experimentation with earlier melodic traditions but out of the rhythms and stresses of spoken Latin—as may be demonstrated by the occasional awkwardness of English texts set to more complicated plainsong melodies.
For Ambrose of Milan, the unison singing of the congregation was an image of the unity between God and humanity established in Christ. William T. Flynn notes that in patristic writings “the community represented by singing was not only an image of earthly community, but was also a participation of the earthly community in heavenly worship, and therefore in the life of God”—as epitomized in the conclusion to the preface of the eucharistic prayer, “Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven…” (“Liturgical Music as Liturgy,” in Liturgy and Music: Lifetime Learning, ed. Robin A. Leaver and Joyce Ann Zimmerman, The Liturgical Press, 1998, 258). Congregational song, whether hymnody, psalmody, or settings of the texts of the liturgy (like the Gloria in excelsis and the Sanctus or the canticles of Morning and Evening Prayer) possesses an iconic character that at once narrates and responds to the Word of God and that shows (sings!) forth the unity of the body of Christ as the congregation is united in the Word.
In the medieval Western Church, singing was still considered to be one of the principal ways in which the whole Church was united in the liturgy, as singing was thought to symbolize the joy of the heavenly kingdom. However, over time the singing role of the congregation was reduced at most to amens, greetings, and some litany responses, while most of the music was sung by clergy or choir. With such a radical diminution, it became difficult for the participants to think of the Church’s song as a unity that embraces all gifts and abilities. It is of course a commonplace that the Reformers, with the sole exception of Zwingli, returned the Church’s song to the people, whether in the chorales of the Evangelical (Lutheran) tradition or in the metrical psalmody of the Reformed (including the reformed English/Anglican) tradition. For the Roman Church’s part, the Council of Trent agreed with the reformed English and Lutheran position that chorally sung words should be intelligible.
The Church’s iconic, living hymnic tradition narrates and responds to the Word of God. In my own (Anglican) tradition, successive American editions of the Book of Common Prayer have included this direction, taken here from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America: “Hymns, anthems, and songs of praise must be in the words of Holy Scripture, or of the Book of Common Prayer, or congruent with them. The local Minister is responsible for maintaining this standard.” Here is a clear and direct statement of the content and indirectly of the central purpose of Christian hymnody: surrender to—submission to—the Word of God. (Recalling that the late J. I. Packer remarked that the Book of Common Prayer is the Bible arranged for worship.) And to Caleb Skogen’s point, here also in this direction is a clear statement from the Anglican tradition that the worship of the Church, of which music is a part though not the whole (for music is the handmaiden of the liturgy), is under the authority of those to whom the ministry of Word and Sacrament has been committed in ordination. Even the longstanding tradition in Anglicanism of allowing a hymn before and after sermons points to the Church’s hymnody as narrative and response to the Word of God. (Regrettably, this provision was dropped in nearly all Prayer Book revisions of the last fifty years or so.)
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). In both liturgical texts and in congregational song (psalmody and hymnody), the Church is given both a catechetical and a homiletical role, “teaching and admonishing one another” in the Word, a ministry to which all the baptized are called that complements but does not supplant or diminish the teaching and hortatory ministry of those in holy orders.
Great humility, and much discipline—Bonhoeffer is on the mark to include these among his prerequisites for singing together, for these are required to be able to surrender to the Word and to embody community. Brittany Hurd echoes Bonhoeffer in her admonition to “sing the melody with understanding and volume” when he writes:
The soaring tone of unison singing finds its sole and essential support in the words that are sung and therefore does not need the musical support of other voices [harmony]…“With one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6). The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoilt by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing. This, is it true, discloses itself to our cultivated ears only gradually and by patient practice. It becomes a question of a congregation’s power of spiritual discernment whether it adopts proper unison singing. (59-60)
Bonhoeffer is even stronger than Hurd in his commendation of unison singing, giving the reader with the strong impression that there is no place for part-singing. (He writes critically of the “bass or alto who must call everybody’s attention to his astonishing range” and of the “solo voice that goes swaggering, swelling, blaring, and tremulant from a full chest and drowns out everything else.”) For my own part, I think that Hurd’s counsel of patience and discernment regarding the suitable times and places for unison singing versus harmony should be followed. Beginning with Clement of Rome, many of the Church Fathers referred to the Church as being in perfect symphonia (agreement or harmony) because it is led by and united in Jesus. Ambrose referred to the joining together of voices of various ages and abilities in his congregation as if they were diverse strings played in harmony with one another. Having grown up and come to faith as a Baptist, I know the joy and power of congregational part-singing in songs like “Leaning on the everlasting arms” and “Standing on the promises.” Anyone who has participated in a shapenote sing (which admittedly are held apart from formal worship services) or who has sung a Welsh hymn like “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah” or who has sung John Dowland’s delightful setting of Old Hundredth knows the power of voices lifted up in harmonious praise and prayer to God. But, as Hurd counsels, patience and discernment—and these require spiritual discipline and God’s grace.
I haven’t added any practical recommendations to those offered by Brittany Hurd, Caleb Skogen, and David Erb because their robust charges are sufficient to that task. I leave the lay musician instead with the last of John Wesley’s “Directions for Singing,” from his Select Hymns (1761), emphasis added:
Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.
Todd Granger is a physician in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has for over forty-five years served as a church musician, organist, pianist, chorister and cantor, and has directed small instrumental and vocal ensembles. He currently serves as Catechist for Adults at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (Chapel Hill).
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