Most people don’t take the responsibilities of organising church music seriously enough, and this is reflected in the way we organise our music ministries.

Coming from a sermon-centric Anglican church for a long time I saw my ministry (playing piano) as a strangely irrelevant part of our public meetings. I would do it, but only because I was asked to. If we were going to have music, I decided, we better make damn sure it was tolerable – or at least in tune – but if it were up to me I wouldn’t bother.

Then, finally, it dawned on me that I had completely missed the significance of songs in church.

The way we use music in our meetings places it unmistakable in the category of word-ministry, and with that comes the responsibility of teaching (mill stones and all). Previously I had seen the process of assessing lyrics as a boring but necessary rubber-stamping exercise: the final step of removing manifest heresies from the songs I had already chosen for their overall musical merits. Suddenly I realised that our question should be, not “is there anything terribly wrong in here”, but “are these songs positively going to teach us well”.

At first I assumed that this was just my own strange capacity to mistake the unmistakably obvious. Sadly, however, I regularly see leadership teams built upon one of two disastrous dichotomies.

In the first fatal model, the band puts songs on the repertoire and the preacher takes off the ones which can be shown to be patently heretical. Great! We end up with music which is “not entirely heretical”. Can you imagine if that was the best we could say about our other word ministries?

In the second (and just as silly) model the church appoints a self-confessed musical ignoramus to run the music over the music team (because musicians are prima face unreliable). The result is a repertoire of terrible songs. No, not useful songs with good lyrics though plain melodies. What you get when you separate the words from the music is just straight out terrible songs.

A song which tells the story of Calvary with the laborious drudgery of 8 mindless verses may effectively turn our minds towards our own suffering, but it does nothing to confront us with the cosmic paradoxes of our Saviour’s willing sacrifice. It would be far better not to sing at all, but just to read the appropriate passage. The same is true of a song which marries a serious cause of reflection with a melody which is corny, cheesy or infantile. It would be better if we just didn’t sing!

You see, what any songwriter will tell you is that you separate words from music to your peril. Melodies speak. Words sing. They both communicate with each other.

Instrumental music can bring you to tears, although everybody will be crying about something slightly different. In a song (strictly defined as a piece of music with words) the meaning of the music is focussed more tightly. But in a good song, the melody and words still pull together in harmony divine. Choose a song for church where the semantic content is not supported by the melodic content, and you fail to set people upon the right path of reflection about the truth.

The tune and the words also have a complex interaction at a more artistic level. Most people understand that the number of syllables is dictated by the rhythm of the musical component (although, judging by some of the disastrous alterations to popular hymns, not everybody does). But equally important is the assonance of the words suggested by a particular melodic phrase. I’m not just talking about getting the words to rhyme; I’m talking about the sound of words fitting or not fitting with the melody they are being sung to (see endnote 1 below). Likewise, the sound of words subconsciously influences how we think about their meaning: it is no accident that Bach used lots of “s” words in his cantatas when talking of the devil (see endnote 2 below).

If all this sounds overly complex – it is! Songwriters agonise over matching melodies and words, but often we only work out later why something works or doesn’t work. In the mean time, it takes both a musical ear and a keen eye for truth to spot great church songs. We need to be encouraging a model of musical leadership with the necessary skills to discharge the great responsibility of leading music.

Endnotes:

1. A