This is an extended response to the The Briefing, edition 355 (April 2008), in which Mike Raiter has written a very interesting article on what he sees as the decline of public singing.

If, as Mike fears, congregational singing is in its dying gasps, how are we to breathe new life into it? If the current model is wanting, towards which vision should we look instead? I don't know, but this is what I think we're looking for.

As a member of an itinerant congregational singing band, my greatest joy comes in those moments when we can barely hear our instruments over the sublime roar of fellow believers singing their lungs out. I still remember being at Galston earlier this year, struggling to distinguish our singer Alanna's voice from the chorus of a hundred or so enthusiastic young believers (and she had thousands of watts on her side!). For me, that is the way it should be.
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It may seem crude to measure a good night and a bad night in decibels (the volume of the crowd's singing), and of course the integrity and truth behind the singing is ultimately more important. But I am always very conscious that the early church seems to have made do without musicians,¹ and so the only good reason I can see why I should bring my piano to church is if it helps us sing together. No level of musical achievement is consolation for not having done well the one thing that we set out to achieve.

So if the current model is wanting, towards which vision should we look instead? I don't know, but this is what I think we're looking for.

1. We need songs

It all starts with the songs. Yet the global ‘worship music industry’ is naturally biased towards making and promoting music which is great to listen to but not necessarily great to sing together. I don't think this is anybody's fault in particular; you just cannot afford to make and distribute a high quality album which only church music directors will want to buy. As anyone who has ever worked on a congregational album will attest, at every stage in the songwriting and production process you are confronted with a choice between what will be best for church singing and what will sell. It's a vicious choice, because, under the current model, unless your album sells, your songs will never see the light of day.

The result is that many songs end up in a key far too high for anyone but the original performer to sing. Others are carried by instrumentation which no church can hope to reproduce. And still others end up with an impossibly irregular rhythm for the congregation to try to mumble out.

Sometimes we can adapt songs—for example, transpose them into a sensible key. Overall, I suspect, the industry is just not going to deliver. We need to invest money and time into growing and training our own songwriters. Few churches can support a music minister to spend all day writing songs. So can anyone think of a way to ensure that good music ministry happens, and is not held ransom to the very different priorities of the album selling business?

2. We need a sound

Even among those artists who have straddled the good-for-selling/good-for-singing dilemma (and in this category I include the likes of Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Reuben Morgan and Mark Peterson), the fact is that they make music which is appropriate and adapted to the space and context within which they normally lead singing. Who wouldn't? We cannot really blame Hillsong for writing songs that work best for thousands of voices in Acer Arena. But nor should we be surprised at the underwhelming results when we try to mimic the wall of sound at a U2 concert in a small church building with a tiny band.

Mike thinks that it's time to “sit down and ask ourselves what is the best medium for actually promoting congregational singing”. He's spot-on. We need our own vision of what church music should sound like—not because there is anything unholy about the current styles on offer, but simply because it does not always fit our actual churches. At one music conference, I once accosted by a lady from Queensland who told me that she had bought one of our earlier albums. She said, “I love it, but it's useless!” and explained that few of the songs she liked would work at her church of 20 people and an old piano. If the churches we are serving look more like this than Acer Arena, we need to write songs to suit.

I'm still trying to work out how to do that. But I think what we need is a sound which is culturally relevant (so as to serve our missional goals), but also one which is appropriate and adapted to the spaces and resources with which we are working. Not all contemporary music is played in a stadium with four guitarists; more intimate artists like Feist, Sarah Blasko, James Blunt, Missy Higgins and Death Cab for Cutie have all found an audience with simple instrumentation, strong emotion and great songwriting. Their music suits intimate shows rather than stadiums. Sound like something we could draw on?

3. We need creativity

The most important thing, however, is that we need to be creative. We are battling a culture which has, by and large, bought iPods and lost the motivation to sing together in public. Simply cranking up the bellows of a pipe organ or turning down the band might be all the provocation my grandparents' generation needs to belt out a good hymn. But, in my limited experience, it does not usually solve the problem for congregations dominated by young people, new converts, or (to make a rash generalization) men.

If singing is important, how do you make people want to sing? That the song leader and band should decrease and the people of God increase is very true indeed, but it's a statement of our end goal, not a roadmap of how to get to that point. The goal is quite simple; the trick is in the art of it.

The best song leaders lead the congregation not “into the presence of God”, ² but into a proper frame of mind for singing. I remember one night when we were asked to sing with a bunch of youth leaders in the south of Sydney at the end of a long day of planning and training. It was clear that everybody there (ourselves included) was far too tired and distracted by the worries of the day to be in the right frame of mind for singing, and I feared that it would be another dry night of going through the motions. But our singers totally surprised me when they started the night by acknowledging how everyone felt, yet urging us to find joy in the truths we were about to sing which don't rest on feelings but on Jesus. Another time with a different group chiefly made up of high school students, they broke the teenage inhibitions about singing in public by starting with some silly choir warm-ups. In yet another context, they decided, at the last minute, to go on without the band at all. And each time the people sang. When you're trying to do something as radically countercultural as getting people to sing in public, you need to be a bit creative.

But so many churches I visit seem instead to foster a stifling culture of prohibition. Attempting to avoid unhelpful paradigms of music, they define themselves by what they do not do—picking up on the habits of other churches or secular performers and doing the exact opposite. One church I visited forbids singers to hold the microphones in their hands because it's too reminiscent of a U2 show. Another forbids them from using a mike stand in case their hands should be tempted to rise above regulation shoulder height. Like drawing with an eraser, it's as silly as it is counterproductive. Concerns about music being too much a ‘performance’ should not be dismissed lightly; exalting art instead of God is idolatry. It has no place in life, let alone in church. But using human creativity for God's glory is a different thing altogether. In order to develop a culture of great song leading, and a corresponding culture of great singing, we need to be free to try things.

If this is the vision, what is the first step? A guitarist friend of mine is doing ministry training this year at a church where they have abandoned the musician roster concept altogether. Instead, they encourage musicians in the church to form bands with a particular style who rehearse together regularly as they think critically about what aspects of music culture can be adapted to help people sing. They don't import many songs from the ‘worship industry’; usually each band adapts the words of their favourite hymns and reworks the music. This model isn't right for every church, but the vision of songwriting, the approach to culture and the kind of creative attitude which drives it certainly is. So what's your church's vision for singing?

For more responses to Mike's article, visit the Briefing.

Endnotes

¹ Edward Foley, Foundations Of Christian Music: The Music Of Pre-Constantinian Christianity, Grove, Nottingham, 1992, p. 63.

²Graham Cray, ‘Justice, Rock and the Renewal of Worship’, in Robin Sheldon (ed.), In Spirit and Truth, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1989, p. 64.