Why? Why oh why? What no Easter hymns?
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
Please don't take this as an attempt to pick a fight with a particular Christian tradition or as another salvo in the 'worship wars' but I'm genuinely curious about this ...
A friend who worships in an evangelical Anglican parish told me how they sang their usual worship songs and choruses on Easter Sunday and one hymn, 'How Great Thou Art.'
All rousing stuff I'm sure but why no Easter hymns?
It's not as if there are any shortage of them.
Heck, the Pentecostals always used to sing 'Up from the grave he arose / With a shout of triumph o'er his foes' at Easter.
Great stuff.
'He arose victorious from the dark domain
Now he lives forever with his saints to reign,
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah Christ arose!'
What's going on?
Surely an evangelical Anglican parish with charismatic leanings can incorporate traditional Easter hymns - or contemporary ones - into its worship?
Ok. I know I worship in a Church where each Sunday has its own particular theme and there are few liturgical variations but what's with these evangelical Anglicans?
There's a rich tradition of hymnody within evangelicalism per se but as far as I can see it's all reducing down to a handful of worship songs and a smaller number of hymns - such as 'Be Thou My Vision', 'How Great Thou Art' and 'In Christ Alone' (which I'd see as a hymn rather than a worship song) irrespective of the theme or occasion.
I can't be the only one who has noticed this. Is it a failure of imagination or what?
At one time charismatic evangelicalism was known for being expressive, creative and innovative.
Now it's the same old same old handful of choruses over and over again.
It's become an impoverished and attenuated caricature of itself.
What can be done about this?
Incidentally, I watched the online recording of a service from this particular parish a few weeks ago and could have predicted everything that was sung and said just as easily as I could had it been the Litirgy of St John Chrysostom.
At least we know we are generally going to get that in Orthodoxy and don't pretend that we are being spontaneous about it.
Don't get me wrong, evangelicals and charismatics do a lot of good stuff and I'm not on a witch-hunt.
But it does make me wonder where they are going with all this.
A friend who worships in an evangelical Anglican parish told me how they sang their usual worship songs and choruses on Easter Sunday and one hymn, 'How Great Thou Art.'
All rousing stuff I'm sure but why no Easter hymns?
It's not as if there are any shortage of them.
Heck, the Pentecostals always used to sing 'Up from the grave he arose / With a shout of triumph o'er his foes' at Easter.
Great stuff.
'He arose victorious from the dark domain
Now he lives forever with his saints to reign,
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah Christ arose!'
What's going on?
Surely an evangelical Anglican parish with charismatic leanings can incorporate traditional Easter hymns - or contemporary ones - into its worship?
Ok. I know I worship in a Church where each Sunday has its own particular theme and there are few liturgical variations but what's with these evangelical Anglicans?
There's a rich tradition of hymnody within evangelicalism per se but as far as I can see it's all reducing down to a handful of worship songs and a smaller number of hymns - such as 'Be Thou My Vision', 'How Great Thou Art' and 'In Christ Alone' (which I'd see as a hymn rather than a worship song) irrespective of the theme or occasion.
I can't be the only one who has noticed this. Is it a failure of imagination or what?
At one time charismatic evangelicalism was known for being expressive, creative and innovative.
Now it's the same old same old handful of choruses over and over again.
It's become an impoverished and attenuated caricature of itself.
What can be done about this?
Incidentally, I watched the online recording of a service from this particular parish a few weeks ago and could have predicted everything that was sung and said just as easily as I could had it been the Litirgy of St John Chrysostom.
At least we know we are generally going to get that in Orthodoxy and don't pretend that we are being spontaneous about it.
Don't get me wrong, evangelicals and charismatics do a lot of good stuff and I'm not on a witch-hunt.
But it does make me wonder where they are going with all this.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Not your circus, not your monkeys. Don't the Orthodox have a saying about keeping your eyes on your own plate?
But I am interested in the 'sociology' of this development in a general kind of way.
We have our own issues in Orthodoxy of course.
We sang five musical pieces. Four worship songs, one hymn. The hymn is always "Thine be the Glory." Which is a great Easter Hymn but it does feel like the people planning don't have any knowledge of the riches which are available - or the humility to ask the "Traditional Hymn" people what they would suggest.
Of the four worship songs, two were about Easter (Resurrection Hymn - Stuart Townend and Happy Day - Tim Hughes). One of the others was Easter adjacent - it did have a line about the morning when the buried body began to breath. The other had no connection at all with the day or the preaching (Mark 16:1-8), but it was lively and had actions - so more one for the children.
So although Gamma Gamaliel was extrapolating from a single case, my experience would back this up. I would see the difficulty as being that anyone who was brought up in an evangelical/charismatic church in the last 30 years hasn't been exposed to the great hymns of the past. And in our church the people who choose the music (the "band leaders") are all under 40.
OK so that is just two churches. But I'm sure it's replicated elsewhere.
I'm not sure I'm 'catastrophising' as such but as @Anna_Baptist has indicated there are plenty of suitable Easter-themed songs within that particular tradition.
So why not use them?
I don't think I'm extrapolating from a single example either.
I'm afraid I think it's part of a wider malaise.
Alright, it might not be any of my business but I do think that many of my brothers and sisters in Christ are being 'sold short' when, with a bit of imagination and application, they could benefit from the riches of their own tradition as well as those from wider Christendom as a whole.
Just sayin'.
We ended up in an impromptu communion service/"house church" situation Easter evening, when we went to take communion to one person and ended up with TEN (thank God I'd packed the entire church setup to take with us!). And we sang. What did we sing? The only thing that we could be reliably sure the whole group knew, coming from multiple ethnicities and denominations (tell it not in Gath): "On a Hill Far Away."
Believe me, it felt really weird to be singing THAT on Easter, but the Easter hymns we knew are not reliably ones that our fellow worshippers knew, and some Easter hymns are complicated musically (I'm looking at you, "Jesus Christ is Risen Today," with your fancy alleluias.). So we went with the reliable.
(A further complication for a church would be the possibility of having a new organist/pianist/other musician, who was inexperienced with the Easter hymns.)
Sorry, I cross-posted. I don't know the Resurrection Hymn by Stuart Townend but judging from the title it certainly sounds like an appropriate choice.
In general terms although the traditional non-conformist 'hymn-prayer-sandwich' may not be to everyone's taste it does require thought and effort on the part of the minister or whoever else 'curates' it.
When it comes to 'worship band' led worship it so often becomes a medley of 'favourite' choruses that bear little or no relation to whatever theme is meant to be the focus - even if it's an improvised one rather than one set by a lectionary or calendar.
That's fine if that's what people want, I suppose but I can't help but think it's a missed opportunity when there's so much appropriate material available.
I mean, they can sing their standard worship songs at any time. But at Easter why not at least attempt to choose something with an Easter theme.
Sorry but I don't 'get' it at all.
It's Easter. Why not sing about it?
Sure, but you are talking about an impromptu service there not a fairly large and well-resourced Anglican parish which has input from HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) a large London evangelical/charismatic Anglican outfit which has widespread influence across the country.
We aren't talking about people having to improvise on the spot here.
Read my latest post. We aren't comparing like with like. We aren't talking about your people. We are talking about a completely different situation where they have resources you would give your eye-teeth for.
I'm not talking about your situation. I'm talking about a largely middle-class Anglican parish in a location that isn't exactly overly well-heeled but isn't inner-city or urban poor either.
You are operating in a completely different situation to the one I'm referring to.
Nobody is saying you should.
And once again, we aren't talking about your situation which is very, very different to the one I'm referring to.
If it is true that you are interested in the sociology of this development, it would probably help you if your comments were more neutrally curious and less weighted toward lament and negative judgment.
Why should other Christians celebrate in the manner in which you celebrate? Why should they choose the music you would choose? They are not you, and they are not Orthodox. It's in the eye of the beholder, isn't it - what you might consider appropriate observance is what someone else might consider pointless faff.
I am not of the tradition of the congregation in question, but I can imagine reasons other than the one posited by Anna Baptist (lack of familiarity with older hymns):
I take it my usual approach of singing it very loudly until people catch on wouldn't work?
Absolutely. I don't disagree and that's why I posted the 'mea culpas'.
FWIW I should have added huge caveats to the OP - or perhaps rewritten it entirely to remove the judgmental aspects - although I suspect I'd have retained the note of lamentation to some extent as I will explain.
Firstly, I would of course prefer any church to cultivate an active and engaged faith rather than the nominalism that blights so many of the 'historic churches' - if I can put it that way.
Orthodoxy suffers from that in spades. We always have loads of people at the Easter Vigil that we never see for the rest of the year. That's fine, it's all about respecting human freedom, if they act respectfully.
This year we had half-cut fellas at the back of church drinking cans of beer and heckling the priest when he stopped the service to remonstrate with those who were making a noise and drowning out the prayers.
In a break with tradition (we do that at times) I was given a mic for the readings so at least people three-quarters of the way down could hear what was said (or intoned).
I'm no longer in the choir but they call on me to do some of the intoned or talky bits between the chants in order to give the singers a bit of a rest.
Anyhow, and this is where the lamentation comes in, rightly or wrongly I do get concerned that things are in danger of becoming attenuated or 'dumbed-down' to a vague kind of pietism if a congregation's sole diet consists of worship songs and choruses.
It's one of the reasons why I became Orthodox. That said, we have our own problems of course and I'm more than happy to air our dirty linen where appropriate.
My beef isn't with independent or 'non-denominational' churches which don't have a tradition of marking feasts and festivals in the way the older 'historic churches' do.
The setting I was referring to was an Anglican one, where at the very least one might expect Easter themed hymnody on Easter Sunday.
Heck, from what @Baptist Trainfan has described, his 'Free Church' service had more seasonal Easter content than this particular Anglican parish did.
Make of that what you will.
If Wesley was right that people get their theology more from what they sing than from what they hear, then I do think there is an issue.
Equally, in my own setting I wish we could have more expository preaching and other aspects I greatly admire from various Protestant traditions.
I do apologise for my judgemental tone and it shows how far I have to go. I'm grateful to Shipmates for calling me out on that.
I may have dug myself into a deeper hole with this post. I hope not.
Lord have mercy!
I suspect that the following factors feed into this kind of thing.
1) not really understanding different seasons
2) only having services weekly so trying to squish the whole tridium into a family friendly "guest service".
3) a lack of easter worship songs (there are a few but not loads) as the charismatic locus tends to be either on the cross or the individual experience of God.
That said, I certainly believe that the evangelical and charismatic emphasis on personal faith and personal experience of God is a sound one.
However, as many on these boards attest, tangible or 'felt' experience of God can be a fairly nebulous thing. How do we know that any oomphy, whoozy or whishty-whishty feelings we may have are 'of God' or whether we've had too much cheese before we went to bed?
And how about those people who say they don't have any 'experiences' to speak of?
The RC apologist Ronald Knox said that he'd never had a 'religious experience' in his life.
Does that invalidate anything he may have said or written about the Christian faith?
I'm with @Lamb Chopped in believing that we can experience the divine. Equally, though, as she has written on some threads, an absence of any such 'felt' experience doesn't necessarily infer the absence of God's presence or work in someone's life.
I've shared on these boards before how I once attended a Christmas Day service at a Baptist church in South Wales where the minister quickly 'fast-forwarded' over the Nativity and Christ's 30 years of 'normal' life before his three years of ministry to 'a hill outside Jerusalem, three crosses on the summit ...'
It is, of course, the case that 'historic churches' like my own can and do inculcate nominalism and indeed superstition. People turn up half-drunk to our Easter Vigil, take the 'magic' candle light and then clear off home or back to some drinking den or other.
Yes, it is none of my business what certain charismatic evangelicals do, but I write out of fraternal concern rather than carping criticism.
I just feel it's a shame that the creativity that marks so many of these churches can't be deployed to write more Easter songs and choruses or to cover more bases than the two or three reductionist themes that seem to have dominated that particular scene for the last few decades.
Around the early-2000s I felt things were broadening out a bit more. There was 'alt-worship' there was a rediscovery of things like pilgrimage, contemplative prayer, iconography in some form or other.
Now, I'm afraid things seem to have settled into a kind of uniform predictability.
That may sound odd coming from someone who worships in a Church where the services are utterly predictable - by and large. But it's the way that the apparently informal and more spontaneous end of the CofE has become anything but spontaneous that puzzles me.
I'm leaving independent churches out of this, but wouldn't be surprised if we could see the same pattern across the Vineyard and other 'streams'.
Ok, it's all work in progress and various patterns will emerge but I'm thinking aloud that's all. Thinking allowed.
If that's their way and they are fine with it, then to quote someone recently deceased "Who am I to judge." It really is none of my business.
But I have never wanted to return.
What's your evidence for this? The wider malaise you seem to drift to is rather different from the one you started with.
IME the HTB resourced churches tend to have a fairly limited song choice to start with - out of a conscious decision to limit unfamiliarity, but most of them would this - or similar - in their repertoire:
https://genius.com/Hillsong-worship-o-praise-the-name-anastasis-lyrics
Maybe, but on the other hand perhaps it lands differently when music is a lot more ubiquitous than it was in Wesley's time (when hymns may have constituted the *majority* of music a lot of people both knew and heard).
I s'pose my impression, rather than hard empirical evidence, is that the 'limited palette' I've complained about in relation to HTB has extended to other groups with a similar ethos. I may be wrong and am more than happy to stand corrected if that's the case.
Again, it probably seems a daft thing to complain about when we Orthodox have 8 tones and a pretty standard repertoire for each Sunday in the year.
I s'pose that whatever church we are involved with we are going to find oversights and limitations of one form or other.
Orthodoxy claims to have the 'fullness of the faith' of course but even if we have that doesn't mean we've got everything sussed in terms of how we apply it.
Your point about music in Wesley's day is well-made.
Christ is Risen! Glorify him!
Peace be to all!
I think the critique of a limited palette is a correct one; and logistically once most of your songs move away from common meter, they become rather harder to teach. You could question how deliberate the mix of the resulting palette is, but I'm not sure anyone here would be in the position to comment.
But this is a bit of a tangent!
I knew a URC minister who would vet and accept or reject every single song his congregation were presented with on the grounds of whether they were theologically acceptable or not.
His wife was often miffed because he rejected some of her favourites.
I suspect he was in something of a minority.
Most churches which don't have a 'fixed' liturgy seem to sing whatever is popular or doing the rounds at any particular time.
There's often not much more rhyme or reason to it than that.
I was replying to @chrisstiles and cross-posted with @Baptist Trainfan.
Indeed. On the other hand I've known Baptist churches that have borrowed (pinched?) some of the Anglican communion liturgy for their services, such as the 'prayer of humble access.'
Heck, I know one which invited an RC priest along to lead some Lenten studies. A number of people left the congregation over that.
One would would hope that was happening at some level in some part of every church hierarchy.
Despite the opening disclaimer in the OP, it's hard to read it as anything but criticism of a different tradition from your own - one which has come under criticism before, to the discomfort of those who belong to it. In Ecclesiantics we encourage the respecting of other people's traditions and liturgical practices; the tone of the OP isn't sitting well here and doesn't seem to engender a reasonable prospect of constructive discussion.
We have noted that we may need to amend the Ecclesiantical Guidelines for clarity.
I'm therefore closing the thread.
[Doffs Hostly Mitre] - Nenya, Ecclesiantics Host