Let All God's People Sing! Music and Worship in the Small Church--Part 1

By Robin G. Jordan

God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. John 4:24 HCSB

In this series I am going to examine a number of the principles the application of which I briefly described in my previous article, “Some Things I Have Learned about Worship Music.” I am also going to take a look at some additional principles that we applied in tailoring Sunday morning worship to the resources and circumstances of our small but growing mission church. While these principles were applied in a liturgical context, they may be put into practice in a non-liturgical setting.

Our aim was to offer an appealing worship experience that would help attract newcomers to the church and which at the same time was consistent with the Anglican tradition. We sought to attract a wide range of people—not only families and individuals who were new to the area and were searching for new church home but also those who had stopped going to church for a variety of reasons or who had never attended a church before.

By “attract” I mean that that church’s Sunday morning worship would be such a meaningful experience for those who participated in it for the first time, they would want to keep participating in it. Having heard about how we worshipped, those who had never experienced it would want to experience it for themselves. Having experienced our worship, they would want to invite others to experience it with them.

By “consistent with the Anglican tradition” I am not referring to the Episcopal tradition which in the 1980s was influenced by the Anglo-Catholic tradition and was showing the influence of the liberal tradition. I am referring to the wider Anglican tradition which includes the charismatic and evangelical traditions. It is a tradition that gives a central place to the Holy Scriptures and to worship that is based upon their teaching and in harmony with it.

We operated on the premise that it is the Holy Spirit that ultimately draws a person to a particular church and to Christ. The Holy Spirit works through us and what we do as well as in the heart of that individual.  He is drawing the individual to us and to Christ. We are to actively reach out to the person and not passively wait for him or her to come to us. Those coming to our church regularly asked their friends, neighbors, relatives, colleagues, co-workers, clients, customers, and others whose lives in some way interconnected with theirs to join us for worship and fellowship, “to taste and see the Lord is good.”

We were not looking for people to return because we had great organist and a great choir—nowadays a great band—or they had experienced the presence of God in some dramatic way. Rather we were looking for the Holy Spirit to move them even in a small way, for them to sense that they were where they needed to be on Sunday mornings, and for them to return for that reason.

In retrospect our approach to evangelism was similar to the approach that George Hunter describes in The Celtic Way of Evangelism.  Through a variety of ways we brought people into fellowship with our community. We invited them to participate in the life, ministry, prayer, and worship of the community. We exposed them to what we believed and valued. We then invited them to commit themselves to Christ, recommit themselves, or deepen their commitment.

We believed that the Holy Spirit worked through the hymns, worship songs, and service music selection we used in Sunday morning worship—not just through the congregation hearing them but also through the congregation singing them. The Holy Spirit would move the hearts of all present on Sunday morning and turn their thoughts to God. This is what I mean when I talk about Sunday morning worship being a meaningful experience for those who participate in it. There are moments when the Holy Spirit is tangibly present. You can sense Him moving in whatever is happening at the time—a hymn, a prayer, a sermon, a Scripture reading, a worship song. Everything in the service may come together in such a way that it can be only the Holy Spirit’s doing.

One of our guiding beliefs was that through the worship music and the other elements of Sunday morning worship we invite the Holy Spirit to make his presence known. How the Holy Spirit manifests himself is a matter of his own choosing: “the wind blows where it pleases…” (John 3:8). However the Holy Spirit manifests himself. He has ways of manifesting himself that escape our notice. Of one thing we can be assured, he is present. Indeed we cannot worship God without him.

With the Holy Spirit’s guidance we select the ingredients of worship, under his direction we assemble them together, and then the Holy Spirit breathes life into them like he breathed life into the dry bones of Ezekiel 37. We may use a tried recipe or new one. But whatever we do, the Holy Spirit is operative in all that we do.

When I talk about the Holy Spirit manifesting himself, I am not talking about the sign gifts—healings, prophetic utterances, tongues, and the like. I am talking about the ways the Holy Spirit reveals that he is at work in those present, doing what the Holy Spirit does. A Scripture reading will take on a particular clarity.  You can see this in the people’s faces as they listen to the reading. The congregation’s singing will take on a different tone. The people will be pouring out their hearts in praise of God.

The Holy Spirit enables us to recognize the Scriptures for what they are—the divinely-revealed Word of God. He also enables us to recognize Christ for whom he is—the divine Son of God, God’s Word incarnate. The light goes on in people’s heads. If you are paying attention, you can actually see it happen.  It is in those moments you are not only seeing the Holy Spirit at work in others but you become aware that the Holy Spirit is working in you. You would not see what you are seeing if the Holy Spirit was not directing your attention to it. This is just one of the myriads of ways that the Holy Spirit invigorates and strengthens faith.

For this reason I never close my eyes when I am praying with others and I pay attention to the flow of the prayers. The Holy Spirit prompts you to pray for some concern and before you can open your mouth, someone else is praying for that particular concern. The two of you did not talk about it before hand so it can be only God’s doing.

We did not view the hymns, worship songs, and service music selections as embellishments of the service but as integral parts of the people’s worship—their common prayer. Choosing them was important as choosing the other elements of Sunday morning worship. I will look at the principles we applied in their selection in an upcoming article.

We made a point of evaluating every element of Sunday morning worship for its appropriateness and its contribution to the overall worship experience. We eliminated a number of extraneous elements from our worship. The example I gave in my previous article, “Some Things I Have Learned about Worship Music” was the practice of singing “Amen” after each hymn.

We did not retain an element or add a new element simply on the basis that “my previous church did it that way” or “other churches are doing that way.” We were aware bad habits form quickly and once they form, they are difficult to eradicate. The congregation may even develop a perverse attachment to them. What went on in a previous church or goes on in other churches is not necessarily the best liturgical and musical practice.

I am going to take a look at the process that we followed in evaluating the practice of singing “Amen” after each hymn and the principles we applied in that process. We first considered the appropriateness of this element. Hymns are part of the congregation’s prayer. The apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians urged them to pray in a language that others could understand so they could add their “Amen” and make the prayer their own (1 Corinthians 14:16). When we say “amen” in response to a prayer, we are affirming our agreement with its content. “Amen” means “so be it.”

In liturgical worship we find four different kinds of prayer—the unison prayer which all say together, the litany in which one or more ministers offer the petitions and the congregation says a response after each petition usually a very brief ejaculatory prayer such as “Lord, hear our prayer,” the suffrages in which a minister and the congregation alternate in offering petitions, and the collect and similar prayers in which a minister says the prayer and the congregation responds to the prayer with “Amen.”

When a minister says the latter type of prayer, he is acting as the tongue of the worshiping assembly. When the congregation responds to the prayer with “Amen,” it not only affirms its agreement with the prayer’s content but also claims the prayer for what it is—the worshiping assembly’s prayer. It should be noted that when a minister says the petitions of a litany or his part of the suffrages, he is also acting as the tongue of the worshiping assembly. They are not his petitions. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of common prayer. Even the Prayer of Consecration and Thanksgiving over the communion elements is the prayer of the entire assembly. It is not the priest’s prayer.

When a service comes from the Book of Common Prayer, the private devotions and prayers of the priest or officiating minister should not be said during the course of the service but in the sacristy before and after the service. They are not a part of the assembly’s prayer and have no place in the service.

When we sing a hymn together, the prayer is our own as when we say a prayer together. Singing “Amen” at its end is superfluous. We do not need to affirm our agreement with the hymn’s contents or claim it as our own prayer.  Except when an “Amen” is a part of a hymn’s text and therefore essential to its structure, singing “Amen” at the end of the hymn is unnecessary.

We then considered the element’s contribution to the overall worship experience. In most hymns the “Amen” was not an integral part of the text of hymn and it was sung to a different tune from the hymn. What it amounted to was a little two-syllable song sung to its own tune at the end of the hymn. It did not add to the people’s worship experience but detracted from it. It blunted the force of the hymn and interrupted the smooth flow of worship.

Next we considered the historical background to the practice of singing “Amen” after the hymn.  In Church Music and the Christian Faith Erik Routley tells us, “The whole nature of hymnody changed at the Reformation…in the English and early American system of hymnody, amen is never sung after hymns until the mid-nineteenth century.”  The Oxford Movement would revive the medieval practice of singing a doxology and an “Amen” after every hymn.  “So eager were the Tractarians to make it clear that the medieval culture alone was the pure religious culture, and medieval hymnody the proper norm for all other hymnody,” he writes, “ that at a number of points in their hymnals they appended doxologies with amens to existing hymns.”  Routley further tells us:

The custom spread through Anglican hymnals and was imitated by the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, and to a limited extent by the Methodists and the Baptists, for no reason but the obscure and irrational notion that the Church of England knew its work in matters of liturgy. Around 1920 the Anglicans recognized that adding amens had been an anachronism and an error, and began to abandon them. Obediently the nonconformists followed them at about a twenty-year interval, and by about 1950 the amens on hymns had virtually disappeared in England, although it was retained for some time in Scotland.

Routley uses the example of singing “Amen” after each hymn to illustrate the problem of sentimentality in church music. He observes:

It is an excellent example of a custom which people still jealously guard in America, any criticism of which arouses great indignation, and any argument against which is disregarded.

We also consider its affect upon newcomers. Singing an “Amen” after each hymn was unfamiliar practice to those coming to our church from denominations that had abandoned the practice or had never adopted it in the first place. The practice was off-putting to worshippers who were not accustomed to it nor had any sentimental attachment to it. A number of Episcopal churches had already dropped the practice, including the parish church that had launched the mission. We had not followed the practice while we were a satellite congregation of the at church.  The then unpublished 1982 hymnal had abandoned the “Amen” at the end of every hymn.

Based upon this evaluation we concluded that we would only sing “Amen” after a hymn when it was an integral part of the text of the hymn and essential to the hymn's structure..

In a future article I will examine a practice that we were forced to reintroduce because our vicar insisted upon its reintroduction even though our evaluation of the practice showed that it was not appropriate, an evaluation shared by the mission’s founding pastor and supported in the literature. I will also take a look at the steps that we took to mitigate the negative effects of the practice.

Photo: St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Lancashire NH