The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang

by Edmund S. Lorenz

Hymns Provide Help and Comfort in Dark Hours.

These hymns not only bring the joy of giving articulate expression to these mountain-top experiences, thus reviving them again and again, but they validate these experiences by showing that others have shared them and give them reality in the hours when faith fails and the temptation arises to consider them mere mirages and illusions. Others have been with us in Bunyan’s Beulah Land and verify our experiences of its delights.

Hymns Afford Clear Expressions of Christian Truth.

Another purpose in the use of hymns is to secure the clearest, most impressive, most appealing, most rememberable statement of the leading truths of the Christian faith that will fix them most ineradicably in the consciousness and the life of the individual and of the church. Such hymns must not be dry formulations of abstract doctrines, desiccated by logical discussions and metaphysical hair-splittings. Truth that is dry is no longer vital truth. Its vitamins of reality, of the deep feelings called forth by a sense of its actuality, of spiritual and poetic intuition, of self-propagating vitality, have been lost. Aridity of orthodoxy begets aridity of heterodoxy and is usually responsible for it.

Didactic hymns that will serve the purposes of the Church must be living hymns, expressing truth transfigured by the feelings aroused by the contemplation of its glorious reality. “There is little heresy in hymns.” Heresies for the most part arise from arid mechanical reasonings; hymns flow from the intuitions of the heart.[4] This explains why some of our best hymns about Christ were written by Unitarians.

Hymns Give Opportunity for Active Participation by All.

Another purpose of the singing of hymns is to secure the active participation of the whole congregation in the service. Although the responsive reading is valuable in this respect, the union of all the voices of the people in song is more striking, calls for more aggressive effort, and definitely wins the attention of all to the sentiments expressed in the hymn. It creates more interest and stimulates both body and mind.

Hymns Provide Variety.

The singing of hymns also adds marked variety to the order of service and so renders it more attractive. It supplies climaxes in different parts of the program and relaxations of attention to the spoken word. It represents a greater contrast with the other exercises because it calls for active participation and produces entirely different effects. The lack of song in the services of the Friends has been one of the greatest factors in the limited growth of a movement representing deep earnestness, conscientiousness, and spirituality.

This variety and the opportunity to take a modest part in the service have proved among the greatest attractions. The more singing, the more people, is the universal experience.