Worship Wars – Part 2
Rev. Robert D. Shofner, Jr.
St. John's UCC- Boonville Indiana
We’re on the subject of Worship Wars and how music plays such an important part in our lives. It unites … and it divides. I gave an example of my first casualty in the current war, a young man and his family leaving our church after being told his rock ‘n roll style of music was not welcome in our worship.
There was a second skirmish shortly thereafter, but, surprisingly, it wasn’t in a church setting. It was in Rotary Club! The meetings always opened with a couple of songs printed in a yellowed, dog-eared song book led by the official “song leader.” Tunes like, Down by the Old Mill Stream, Sweet Adeline, She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain – you get the idea. Obviously, songs that appealed to an “older” generation of club members. Then they appointed me song leader. I printed up a new song book, and suddenly the club was singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Mellow Yellow, and “I got a pair of brand new rollers skates … she got a brand new key!” Obviously, the older members weren’t too thrilled. They replaced me as song leader after only a few months!
Last week we talked about the revolution in music that came during Isaac Watt’s time. It took a couple of decades for his kind of music to gain acceptance in most churches. Question. If we could put ourselves in the pews way back then, how would we react to these new fangled “praise” songs? Would we have embraced Watt’s music – or rejected it? Think about that.
Not long after Isaac Watts, in the latter half of the 1700s, came the hymns of Charles Wesley, John Wesley’s brother. His hymns were not unlike those of Watts. They generally followed great theological themes. There are 16 of his songs in our hymnal, including O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing; Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, and Jesus, Lover of My Soul. He also wrote Christmas carols, including Hark, the Herald Angels Sing; and Easter music, such as Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.
Perhaps one of Wesley’s greatest hymns is number 366 in our hymnal, And Can It Be.
And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Savior’s blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain?
For me who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Charles continued writing: “Long my imprisoned spirit lay / Fast bound in sin and nature’s night.” And he goes on to tell his own story:
I woke – the dungeon flamed with light!
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
. . . and concluded,
No condemnation now I dread:
Jesus, and all in Him is mine!
Alive in Him, my living Head,
And clothed in righteousness divine.
Bold I approach th’eternal throne,
And claim the crown through Christ my own.
He ends each verse with the exclamation: “Amazing love! How can it be / That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”
These were the themes that Charles’ brother, John, was preaching in the streets of England; great themes of personal salvation to people who had never heard them in a lifetime in most churches. Seeing prisoners in chains was common in those days. People were well aware of dungeons. This poetry was real to the people of Wesley’s day.
About the same time John Newton came on the scene. He was a converted slave trader, and he gave us “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.” Newton had been a wretch of a man, and he knew it. That’s why God’s grace to him was so amazing.
All these hymns express a magnificent, saving God and, at the same time, pictures of life as people experienced it then and there. Many of the melodies were borrowed “off the street” as music familiar to that generation. The tune of Amazing Grace is but one example. The original melody was either an Irish or Scottish folk tune, often played on bagpipes. If Newton had written his hymn in the late 1960’s, maybe he would have picked another tune. I remember a worship service in 1974 when the long-haired son of the preacher I worked with sat down in the sanctuary, guitar in hand, and sang Amazing Grace to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun.
There were quite a few in church that day who were not too thrilled, to say the least. I thought it was cool. Of course, if it had been me, I would have picked a more upbeat tune, like the theme from Gilligan’s Island.
Wonder how that would have gone over?
Last time I said there were four times in the American church when people went to war over music. Let’s look at the second of those.
It came about during the time of the Civil War and immediately after. It’s hard to give a specific date, but it’s about a century or so after Watts and Wesley and Newton. One year does stand out – 1859. The country went through a devastating economic downturn, a depression, actually. Countless people were roaming the streets of cities in desperate poverty. Churches began opening their doors for the poor to come in and pray. There was an enormous spiritual revival in America and England. They call that period of time the “Open Door Revival.”
With the revival came a new kind of music. This time the music, in terms of subject matter, was more testimonial, more about one’s personal experience with Christ. There was a greater emphasis upon the individual and his or her connection with God. Jesus is more of a Friend than anything else in this kind of music. If the music has any faults, it’s that it tempts us to get too “chummy” with Jesus. I’m not sure we would want to presume on Him in only that way.
Those were the days when the songs of writers like Fanny Crosby became popular. Her music reflected the individual conversion experience. This was a time when people were more conscious of making what we call a “personal decision to accept Christ.”
It is estimated that Ms. Crosby wrote eight thousand different pieces of music penned under two hundred different names! In our hymnal she is credited with only six. She was blind, and when we read the texts of her songs, it’s interesting to see how many times she referred to sightedness as her great anticipation when she got to heaven. “And I shall see Him face to face,” she wrote in one of her songs.
Perhaps her best known hymn is Blessed Assurance; and it reflects her most important theme: Jesus is mine. The emphasis is on that personal relationship: “This is my story / This is my song.” Wesley wrote about his relationship to God; Crosby wrote more about her walk with Jesus. Ira Sankey and D.L. Moody requested many songs from Crosby, using them for the enormous evangelistic campaigns they held, wanting those songs that would call people to Christ. Rescue the Perishing, which is in our former hymnal, is a good example of that.
Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus the mighty to save.
Once again, the point is this. The music – both the melody and content – reflected what was going on at the time. There was a growing emphasis on calling people to a personal conversion to Jesus, and many of these songs were written in this second wave of Christian music speak right to that. Again, the words and melodies rose out of the language and tunes of popular culture.
Ira Sankey, the great evangelistic singer, was one of the very first to appreciate what music could do in a large meeting where people were being called to surrender to Christ.
He wrote: “We now faced the problem of ‘singing the gospel’ . . .” This was an interesting term – to sing songs that tell the story of salvation. Like Fanny Crosby’s Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.
Sankey’s most famous song – which Moody was always asking him to sing – was The Ninety and Nine.
Sankey had read a poem, written by a 21 year old woman, in a newspaper. He saved the words, and one night, in the middle of an evangelistic service while Moody was preaching, he pulled them from his pocket and decided to sing them when the sermon was finished. He accompanied himself on a little pump organ and made up the melody as he went along. Listen to the words:
There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold
But one was out on the hills far away,
Far from the gates of gold –
Away on the mountains wild and bare,
Away from the Shepherd’s tender care.
The song describes the Shepherd’s passionate search for the lost sheep. And then, in the last verse, the sheep was found! And Sankey sang:
But all thro’ the mountains, thunder-driven,
And up from the rocky steep,
There arose a glad cry to the gate of heaven
‘Rejoice! I have found my sheep!’
And the Angels echoed around the throne,
‘Rejoice! For the Lord brings back His own.’
This song probably attracted as many people to Jesus in those days as Moody’s preaching. It is centered on the theme of rescue … being lost and then being found. That resonated with the many people who felt themselves lost and bewildered by all the changes in the world.
But the sad thing was … there were other people, once again, who totally rejected this new music and its content. They rejected the use of a pump organ to accompany the singing of the crowd or the soloist. They derisively called the new music “human hymns.”
Sankey wrote: “The first meeting was attended by less than fifty persons, who took seats as far away from the pulpit as possible. (Sound familiar?) I sang several solos before Mr. Moody’s address, and that was my first service of song in England. It was with some difficulty that I could get the people to sing, as they had not been accustomed to the kind of songs that I was using.”
But … as the nights went on, the crowds grew. Soon they were preaching and singing to twenty thousand people. But everywhere Sankey and Moody went, some Christians gave them a terrible time about the music they chose. They were shocked that he sang solos. Sankey wrote about a meeting in Scotland:
“One another occasion . . . while I was singing a solo a woman’s shrill voice was heard in the gallery, as she made her way toward the door crying: ‘Let me oot! Let me oot! What would John Knox [the great Scots reformer] think of the likes of you?’ At the conclusion of the solo I went across the street to sing at an overflow meeting in the famous Tollbooth Church. I had just begun to sing, when the same voice was again heard, ‘Let me oot! Let me oot! What would John Knox think of the likes of you?’”
Over and over people would walk out in the midst of the music crying out what must have been something of a cliché: “You’re singing human hymns … human hymns!” But what did they want? They wanted … they argued … that the only legitimate songs worth singing were the psalms … or Isaac Watts hymns. Go figure!
So we can see that the worship wars are nothing new. And the question – not an easy one to answer at all – arises: how does each generation open the door for the next generation to sing the gospel in its own fresh way? Think of it: the music that many of us here today love – the music of Wesley, Newton, Crosby, and those that came after – was fought bitterly by many people when it was first introduced. What if those people had been successful in their opposition?
Does all the music we love have to be thrown out just because younger people may want something different? No. We’re going to end this with an example of a small movement among younger artists to bring back the old hymnody with different melodies and upbeat arrangements. This piece is O Sacred Head Now Wounded, by a group called 4Him. It’s number 284 in our hymnal, in case you want to follow the words. Notice the Beatles’ influence in their music, and the power of the song.
O Sacred Head Now Wounded – 4Him
Let us pray.
Father, thank you again for the gift of music. This time we pray that you open our hearts and minds to be, at least, a little more open to the different styles and types of music which you inspire. You are a God who loves variety. We know that just by looking of this wonderful world You have created. Grant us the grace to love variety, too. It will truly brighten our days.
And the people said, “Amen.”
1. Sola Scriptura – “The Bible alone.” Scripture alone speaks authoritatively, and it speaks to all believers, independently of church leaders and councils, human interpreters and so-called spokesmen for God.
alone, and mediated by Christ alone—not by angels, saints, relics, sacraments, priests, teachers, churches, or anyone or anything else. Christ alone was the perfect Savior, and he alone is the perfect prophet, priest and king.