The last verse of a national hymn reads thus:
Refresh thy people on their toilsome way,
lead us from night to never-ending day;
fill all our lives with love and grace divine,
and glory, laud, and praise be ever thine.[1]
This grand old hymn stirs our soul, awakens our trust, wrenches praise from our soul and plants prayer in our hearts. Many churches have rejected hymns and a new morbidity[2] has gripped its once praising people. Even if they do sing hymns the resident musicians have to tinker and distort it, thinking they are cleverly doing a service to the people, when all it does is praise their innovation. It exalts the musician’s difference, it is the God they worship. They have to be different for difference’s sake. One of the idols we worship today is the god of modernization – change it for changes sake. But, as Loren Williamson said: “if it ain’t broke don’t mend it.”
I have worshiped for nearly four years now in a church that boasts such innovation but not once in that time has my soul been moved with a great hymn played at pace that has stirred my soul. I look at football stadiums and those who follow their team, and the supporters of Andre Rieu and his Johann Strauss orchestra, and see hungry crowds waiting to sing and join together in their worship, for that is what it is. They have more hope than the average modern church.
The great lack in services today is “JOY.” I didn’t say happiness, don’t mistake the difference. Happiness depends on happenings, but not joy, for joy is planted in our spirit by the Holy Spirit irrespective of happenings. In other words our past week cannot govern our response by that week’s happenings. We rise above not beneath the prevailing circumstances. Joy must have expression and an outlet for the soul demands it. It is God’s safety valve. We seem to worship the God who cannot laugh anymore. It is almost as if the financial struggle over the last decade has changed Christians from being bright happy people to a struggling crowd or miserable survivors.
A visitor to my church said that she thought Pentecostals rolled on the floor- “what a hope I said,” I’ve been in the Pentecostal church for approximately seventy years and never been in a service that was out of control, how disappointing. However, the “old” excitement has now gone, everything is measured and ordered, times are met, programmes adhered to, spontaneity has disappeared. Musicians play as if they are conducting funeral, slow and so slow we almost fall asleep on our feet. For God’s sake move it along and do something that suggests there is life somewhere. Import 500 Africans if you can, and see what real joy is.
Excuse my rantings for I weep with disappointment as we weekly fail to enter real, dynamic uplifting praise that shake the gates of hell. The devil must be glad of our respectability and dirges.
Michael Carr
[1] God of Our Fathers by Daniel C. Roberts 1876
[2] I use “morbidity” for that is what is – an illness or sickness
