Sing a new song

JOHN L. BELL can't keep from singing. When the CENTURY staff recently met with him, he even taught us a song. Bell is a member of the Wild Goose Resource Group, based in Scotland, which is devoted to helping congregations discover and create "new forms of relevant and participative worship."

A minister in the Church of Scotland, a fellow of the Royal School of Church Music and a member of the Iona Community, Bell is a songwriter and song collector who gives workshops throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. He has edited collections of songs and hymns from the world church (distributed by GIA Publications and Iona Books) and written The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Singing. He is a past convenor of the Church of Scotland's Panel on Worship and currently directs the committee revising that church's hymnal.

We talked with Bell about the importance of congregational singing and the place of song and music in the life of the church.

You are very passionate about the importance of congregational singing. It seems significant that the church is about the only setting left in our culture in which people sing together.

Yes, the culture of music has gradually moved away from a participative mode. In the 1970s everybody sang songs of the Beatles, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Since then we've moved toward a performance mode. When new pop songs come out they are accompanied by a video. The presumption is not that you'll sing the chorus but that you'll watch the performer.

The church should be proud of being countercultural; we believe that music is a community activity and that all God's children can and should sing.

Why is congregational singing so important to the life of the church?

First, because everyone can join in doing it. That sense of being a corporate body comes out in the song of the church more than anything else. We are doing something together for God.

Congregational singing is an identity-shaping activity. In the past it was identity-shaping in the sense that Methodists just sang songs by John Wesley and maybe two or three others, while the Presbyterians (in my country at least) would sing only the Psalms, and the Baptists would sing something more lively. We defined our communities by the songs that we sang.

I think we now are in an era in which communities can be reshaped by what we sing. Are we sectarian, denomination-bound Christians or are we universal Christians? The song of the church will tell us that. It will also tell us whether we are male-dominated or whether the body of Christ is made in God's image as much through its female members as its male members. A great deal of our singing has had images of soldiers and warriors, but never of midwives. God blesses midwives in the Bible, but we've never sung, "Midwives of God arise."

The church's song also reminds the world that voices are meant to do other than just talk. A repeated phrase in the Psalms is: Sing to God a new song. The expectation is that this directive applies to everyone, not just the choir or the temple musicians. And in the book of Revelation we read that in heaven the saints and angels are singing a new song. Part of the job of the church is both to be faithful to God's command and to anticipate heaven.

Since you've mentioned the "new song," we have to ask about how you deal with the tension between singing the traditional songs and singing the new ones.

On one hand you have antique collectors who believe that nothing written after Bach is worth bothering about. And on the other hand you have people who are suspicious of anything not created in the past three or four years. That kind of polarity divides the church according to aesthetic taste, and the church was never meant to be divided on that basis.

It's important to recognize that the church has always had different kinds of music. For the past 400 years church music has been shaped by the organ. Now, I love the organ; it's my favorite instrument. But when the monks sang plain chant, they weren't using the organ. When people set music to folk tunes as Luther did after the Reformation, they weren't primarily thinking of organ music. When Ira Sankey wrote gospel music in 19th-century America, he didn't have the organ in mind. But in parts of the church there has been a subconscious effort to try to make everything sound the same, with a resulting loss of integrity.

Since the 1950s, people have been writing music for accompaniment on the guitar. They sometimes say: this is the way all church music should be. Such a stance is as arrogant about the dominance of the guitar as others are about the organ.

One of your critiques of contemporary Christian music is that it emphasizes only one aspect of human experience.

You can look at much new songwriting that has come out of Australia, Europe and the U.S. since the 1960s and not get a sense that Christ was incarnate. The songs talk a lot about enthroning Jesus in our praises. You never get a Christ who argues, who's angry, who deals with women, who heals people. You never get the full story of faith. In the end these songs are debilitating to faith.