The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

IV. PURPOSES SERVED BY SINGING HYMNS

Hymns Unite Christians in Worship and Christian Activities.

The singing of hymns is the most practicable method of uniting assembled Christians in worship and praise and of creating a common interest in the various church activities. This is really the leading purpose of such a gathering.[1]

Worship in prayer, when it is spontaneous, must be largely individual; when it is expressed in responsive ritual, there is great danger of mechanical stiffness in the outward form of the prayers and in their reading, and also in the limited area of the thought to be expressed. But song is the natural and spontaneous vehicle for exalted feeling and gives the greatest opportunity for varied sentiment. No one individual could hope to strike all the strings of noble praise as have a thousand saints who have written our hymns.

Hymns Concentrate Interest and Attention.

There is a concentration of interest and attention. The common thought, the common emotion, the common impulse of devotion, the common expression, the unanimous attitude of will and purpose—all quicken the susceptibilities and enlarge the spiritual horizon. God seems nearer, more actual, and more realizable as the source of every blessing. Abstract ideas of God as Father, of his Son Jesus Christ as Saviour, of the Holy Spirit as Comforter, quicken into blessed realities. It is easy to appropriate the joy, the reverence, the adoration, the intimate communion with God, which the hymns so clearly, so movingly, so contagiously, even so rapturously express, and to make them intimately our own. This is true worship, the high peak in man’s experience of God.

The social elements in human nature come into play and intensify the religious emotions. The personal distractions and inhibitions that hamper devotion are eliminated. Under properly effective conditions there is a mass attitude, a mass emotion, that needs only a mass expression to affect every individual unit. The contagion of the crowd in expression and in action will affect the most sluggish and indifferent and carry them into an experience that they could not have reached alone. Add to this the stimulation of the music and the physical exhilaration of singing, and the worship is lifted to a pitch of enthusiasm not otherwise possible.

This worshipful use of hymns exercises a most inspiring and vitalizing influence on the participants. The reaction of the mind and soul of the singers to the exalted sentiments sung must have a profoundly spiritualizing effect upon their natures. One cannot sing the old Latin hymn, “Jesus, the very thought of Thee,” in any genuine way without feeling an accession of greater love to Christ; or “My faith looks up to Thee,” by Ray Palmer, without a deeper realization of one’s dependence on Jesus Christ for salvation and for keeping grace.[2]

Hymns Afford a Means of Expression for the Congregation.

Another office of the church hymn is to give a voice to those deep experiences in spiritual things that enrich the lives of the children of God. Many excellent Christians are dumb, unable to give expression to their genuine spiritual experiences. Others find their means of voicing what they feel totally inadequate. The hymns they sing and appropriate to themselves unstop their silent tongue. High tides of spiritual blessings, times of refreshing when Christ is near to the soul, hours of privilege when the whispering of the Holy Spirit is heard, victories over fierce or subtle temptation when God’s grace proves sufficient, moments of God’s overshadowing presence when the whole world is transfigured, and a thousand other marvelous experiences in the Christian life—all call for hymns to express them. They must be tender hymns, ecstatic hymns, triumphant hymns that will satisfy the craving of the soul to voice forth its deepest love, its spiritual ecstasies, its strange sense of overcoming power. The dumb soul, unable to speak of its explorations of divine grace, finds a voice in these hymns written by saints who had the divine gift of expressing like glimpses of the divine glory.[3]