Equipping the Saints: That Catchy Tune

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I’ve long been a fan of Leonard Ravenhill, the British revivalist. Ravenhill can pack more punches in five minutes than the average megachurch pastor delivers in five years. We need more men like him.

If you listen to enough Ravenhill, the first unusual aspect of his preaching is that he continually sprinkles his messages with lines from hymns. What’s most amazing to me is that he’s probably doing this off the cuff. In other words, those hymns are deep inside him.

When we begin thinking about ways in which the Church in America can improve its education of the Body, Less drumming, more theology?most people look past music. I don’t.

“Shooting at the walls of heartache, bang, bang, I am _______________.”

If you’re over 40, I’ll bet the majority of you can fill in the blank to that lyric.  Yep, it’s “the warrior.” I have a bazillion pop/rock songs from my youth filling my head. Fact is, I wish I could get rid of most of them, but there they stick.

Likewise—and in a far more edifying way—I believe our Christian hymnody is critical to transmitting truth that sticks with people.

When I was sitting down to write this post, the first hymn that popped into my head was this one:

The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation,
By water and the word:
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.

Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

Frankly, that’s a theology lesson in two verses. If you know that hymn, you’ve got a solid base of truth in your noggin.

Compare that to what CCLI says is the number one church worship song today:

Come, now is the time to worship
Come, now is the time to give your heart
Come, just as you are to worship
Come, just as you are before your God
Come

One day ev’ry tongue will confess You are God
One day ev’ry knee will bow
Still the greatest treause remains for those
Who gladly choose you now

It’s a good song. We sing it in our church. We played it just a few weeks ago, in fact. But you can’t escape the reality that just doesn’t say as much. In addition, it swaps the meaning of the word you between the refrain and the verse. I mean, just who is you ?

We could fisk old hymns and new worship songs forever, probably, but reading through old Methodist and Lutheran hymnals shows a far more rich theology than flipping through the average Vineyard, Integrity, or Hosanna worship song collection.

I believe there is a solid place for contemporary worship songs that are God-directed and contain more “emotional” lyrics. I remember the first Vineyard worship song CD collection I picked up. I was blown away. And honestly, it made me look at the Vineyard more seriously. It’s one reason why I spent 16 years in Vineyard churches.

But as is so common with American Christians, we pushed the pendulum so far the other direction on hymnody that we lost the rich base of hymns that were theology lessons in four verses and a chorus. Too much of what we sing today is devoid of theology beyond “God loves me.” Yes, that’s an essential truth, but c’mon…

One will argue that today’s songs are more directed toward the Lord, and while some of that is true, it’s missing a greater truth. A hymn like “The Church’s One Foundation” is like the stones the Lord asked the Hebrews to pile beside the Jordan to remember their crossing into the promised land. Hymns that aren’t directed right at God have a place because they remind us of who we are and what the Lord has done. They are the stones of memory that bolster our foundation in the truths we believe.

It saddens me to no end that my son’s generation will grow up oblivious to hymns like “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart,” “For All the Saints,” “Christ the Lord Has Risen Today,” “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “And Can It Be,” and on and on. I might sing them at home, but if my son hears them nowhere else, they will become artifacts, just like my dad singing opera arias is an artifact to me. My son may recall a nebulous, nostalgic mood, but the hymns will have otherwise lost their intended meaning.

I will go so far as to say that music’s staying power places it above nearly every other mode of communication. I may not be able to remember the content of a sermon I heard preached two months ago, but chances are high I’ll be able to recall and sing most of the new worship song that debuted that same Sunday morning.

And that’s why this issue of theology set to music matters. If the average Joe in the pew remembers a dozen hymns packed with spiritual goodness and depth, perhaps he’ll recall their truths in the time of testing in a way that he may not have responded based on other, less sticky, sources.

If we want to build a stronger Christian, then let’s write better songs that highlight the core doctrines of the Faith.

An Old Guy Listens to Branded by Undercover

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It says something about my taste in Christian rock/pop that I stopped buying most of that genre’s music sometime during the mid-90s.

As for the oldies, I get them out every once in a while.

The other day I had to take a little trip, so I went down into the musical vault and pulled out a helping of Undercover, the seminal Christian “punk pop” band of the 80s. Yes, 80s. (To show my advanced age, I actually still own a Living Epistles T-shirt emblazoned with “No Surfing in Hell,” which I was told was a riff on one of Undercover’s tunes. And yes, I’m a bit embarrassed now that I was once dying to own a T-shirt like that.)

Anyway, I used to really enjoy Undercover’s happy, surf-skater-punk sound. Then they got a new lead singer and moved the band in a harder, darker, more introspective direction.

That direction produced the 1986 album Branded (link to lyrics). If you were to ask me what the top three Christian rock albums of all time were, Branded would have to be on that list.

I got out the Undercover, Anthology 1 double-CD the other day. It contains all of Branded, plus the previous three albums by the band.

Wow. I still love Branded. A great collection of music. Not a bad track on the entire disc.

{Update: I removed the link to my favorite song off Branded, “Where Can I Go,” because of questions of the legality of the source on YouTube. I talked with a copyright expert who let me in on all the weirdness and exceptions regarding such things, but I felt that discretion won out here, so I took down the embedded video.}

What are your favorite Christian “oldies” from the 70s and 80s?

I Don’t Know—And I’m Better for It

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Went out caroling last night with the youth and others from my church. A good time. I enjoy lending my voice to worthy causes.

It worries me, though, that a lot of today’s young people don’t know the traditional Christmas hymns (you know, the ones that talk about Jesus) as well as they seem to know “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” When we took a request from a carolee to sing “Rudolph,” the singing gusto went up noticeably, particularly from the youngest carolers.

I noticed that same trend last year at a St. Nicholas Day sing that we do with some friends. The younger crowd stumbled through the old Christmas hymns but were in full voice for the secular songs. Worst of all, despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of Christmas songs played in our own home are sacred, our son seems to stumble through those, while somehow knowing all the lyrics to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” This startles me because, as far as I know, he’s never seen The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. And to hear him singing that ubiquitous ditty about the Heat Miser and Cold Miser from A Year Without a Santa Claus, which I’m nearly positive he’s never seen, makes me wonder whether I should give him a tin-foil hat for Christmas.

Last night, I saw Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Top 100 songs of 2007. After perusing the list, I quickly realized I’d finally reached geezerhood; I recognized less than a fifth of the artists on that list. Worse, I recognized not a single song.

A running joke in my family deals with my encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of ridiculous facts, the kind of savanthood that would place me on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. millionaire_or_not.jpgIn fact, my wife’s family heartily encouraged me to try out for Millionaire in its heyday. I saw one show, one early one featuring the million dollar question “How far is the earth from the sun?” a question I thought most second graders were supposed to know, then wrote off the show.

At some point in that one show, they asked an earlier question about some rap group, and I thought that would be my Waterloo if I ever tried out. I used to have an extensive knowledge of popular music, but somehow that got petrified around 1995, and after that it’s been all downhill. And don’t even get me going on these one-hit hip-hop wonders that sprout up today.

Ironically, my father-in-law convinced me to attempt the syndicated version of Millionaire. My standard reason for holding that request at bay would be that I had no clue on who these hip-hop artists are, and inevitably I would get a question asking me about what the “Z” in “Jay Z.” is supposed to stand for and I’d be clueless. Still, the insistence wore me down.

When I finally called the contestant testing number, I sat patiently awaiting my first question. That question: “Rearrange the following letters to spell the name of this popular rap group.” I spent so much time laughing hysterically that I didn’t even hear the letters. So I bombed on the first question. You know, that very fateful question I knew would be my undoing. Needless to say, I suspected I wouldn’t get a question about Marcel Proust or Carl Fabergé.

And this is what all this blabbering means so far: I don’t know—and I’m better for it.

With 2008 just around the bend, I can honestly say that the new year won’t find me worried about the latest movie releases. Couldn’t tell you the Oscar-worthy films from this year, either. I don’t know what they are—and I’m better for it.

People drop names of celebrities. Blogs talk about this star or that. I stand in line at the grocery store and must face down a rack of tabloids that trumpet which strumpet of the moment’s having an illegitimate child, who’s divorcing whom, and shocking pictures of “here today, gone tomorrow” stars without their makeup. You know, the beautiful people. I don’t know who they are—and I’m better for it.

I can’t tell you what’s happening on Lost or 24. To me, TV doesn’t matter except for the rare event like 9/11. I can’t tell you the last TV show I watched. I don’t know the latest shows—and I’m better for it.

I walked into a bookstore the other day and recognized few names on the “New and Notable” shelf. Even the book world seems to be otherwordly lately, like some alternate plane of existence that somehow intersects the plane of my life at only one or two points. Euclid would not be happy with the mangling that gives his geometric precisions, I’m sure. The point remains: I don’t know the latest books and authors—and I’m better for it.

I’m also losing touch with the blogosphere. I haven’t had the opportunity to read too many other blogs lately. I should suspect that a few people feel the same way about this one. Such is life.

All I know lately is that the Church in America has this obsession with culture that borders on the unhinged. We’re either slaves to it or we’re fighting it so hard that it distracts us from what is true, ultimately making us just a different type of slave. We seem to either love bathing in culture, especially under the guise of relevance, or as some sort of immunity potion, as if immersing ourselves in it will somehow mitigate its effects.

Here’s what the Bible says about all this:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ…
—Philippians 3:7-8

I think, as I look back over this year, that the one spiritual truth that emerges more than any other is that nothing else matters but Jesus. Peter once asked the perfect rhetorical question, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” We seem to be unsure how to answer that question. To the culture? To all the things we know? To our houses packed with things we can’t take with us and only tie us down to earth?

What does a church look like that lives only for Jesus? That desires only to know Him, forsaking all the cultural ties that bind and hamper?

I can tell you this much: that church would be a glorious thing. I pray that I live long enough to see it this side of heaven.

So I don’t know about a bunch of perishable things—and I’m better for it. Let’s pray we can all be better for it sooner than later.