What We Sing When We Sing
Trinity is hiring a Director of Music! If you are interested, send your inquiry to Brian@trinitychurchdenver.org
People get kind of weird when they talk about music styles, particularly when it comes to church music. People have preferences and inevitably attempt to devise a moral or theological argument for their preferences. These are rarely “lightly held” preferences, either. I’ve heard of far more people leaving churches because they didn’t like the music than I have about theological concerns, the integrity and leadership of a church’s elders, or a church’s adherence to biblical teaching. The Bible speaks often and clearly to these other issues but scant a word about what instrumentation or which time-signature should mark a church’s singing. While the Bible commands us to sing Psalms (Ephesians 5:19), I’ve met one family in 20 years who left a church because the church wouldn’t sing Psalms. I think there are a few cultural reasons for this historical anomaly. I think much of it has to do with how we’ve been trained to equate real worship with how a church service makes me feel. In a culture where feelings are determinative for almost all standards, people will often leave a church that doesn’t make them feel good - and music is where we’ve been trained to measure our feelings. Worship has become a passive activity in the church. It is something that happens to me and then I measure whether it was good or not based on how I feel about it. In Christianity, feelings shouldn’t determine much of anything - rather they should be directed, disciplined and commanded. We are to be like the psalmist in Psalm 42 - commanding our souls to praise God, to hope in God, to rejoice in God. The emotions are to be compelled by faith.
The Bible commends to us music that should define the content of that faith. We are given the songbook of the Psalms. We are given many hymns sung by the apostolic church. We are given the full range of the Scriptures to shape and guide what we sing.
So where does that leave us with regard to musical styles?
The breadth of musical instruments we find in the Bible is startling. Harps, something-like-banjos, horns, drums, pipes, and a whole lot more. But at the center of all this music is the voices of God’s people, of angels, and of armies. The most important thing to note from the Scriptures is the central place of the gathered people of God singing. This should dominate our worship, regardless of the accompanying instrumentation or the time signature. We are instructed to sing Psalms, hymns, and “Spirit songs.” Music that is saturated with truth and beauty and goodness. Music that instructs the mind and the heart.
At Trinity we’ve employed a number of different styles over the years with all manner of instruments to help. We’ve sung from the Cantus Christi with piano. We’ve sung with a full band of modern instruments. We’ve sung accapella. We’ve sung music written by CityAlight, hymns arranged by Sandra McCracken, and music passed down from the reformation. We’ve had guitars, violins, and hand drums. We’ve experimented with modern arrangements of Psalms written by Brian Sauve and we’ve chanted some of those same Psalms in unison. But as we sit here as a 5 year old church in Denver, Colorado we want to sing music that our church can actually sing. We don’t believe any particular century of musical style has a corner on the right musical arrangement or the correct instrumentation. Much of our music will have modern instrumentation. Some of our music will be old. Some of our music will be newer. But undergirding all of it will be music that is true and beautiful and a desire that our singing be offered in the presence of God in the light of His grace. And as people visit our church, we want to sing and play music that isn’t a foreign language musically or emotionally. So we’ll play with guitars, pianos, violins and we’d love to find the occasional banjo. We’ll always look to stretch our people musically, but mostly we just want to all head in the same direction, singing together loudly, believing what we sing and inviting those around us to come and sing to God with us.