I’m yet to work out how many parts this post will have. Planning music for services is such an important topic for churches today, and my own thinking is constantly evolving. What I do know is that I need to start with some background.
The thing I want to say today is that music is the new liturgy. And to show you what I mean, let me briefly tell a bit of historical background.
I’m from the Anglican tradition, which traces its roots back to the English Reformation in the 1500s. Aside from the fact that prior to the Reformation, your local English parish church had the Catholic mass said entirely in Latin, additionally the services and the ministry had theological problems that the reformers needed to address. Basically, the people weren’t being taught Biblical truths on a Sunday, and they couldn’t understand it anyway, because it was in a language that the average person didn’t know.
So Archbishop Cranmer’s strategy was to implement the English Prayer Book. The best known of these was the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which although introduced long after Cranmer’s death, was substantially based on the prayer books instituted by Cranmer in the mid 1500s. The advantage of implementing a prayer book was that it didn’t matter how bad the preacher was, people would still hear the gospel every Sunday.
The prayer book gave intelligible, memorable, Biblically-rich, personally engaging content to every single church service. To many people today, prayer book services can seem anything but engaging. But at the time, this was truly revolutionary.
There were two aspects of Cranmer’s prayer books that made a great impact:
- A gospel logic with lots of Bible content
- Congregational participation
1. A gospel logic – The communion services are a great example of what I mean. The services would begin with prayers and readings reminding the people of their need to repent of sin. This would then lead to a general confession of sin, followed by words of assurance of salvation, drawn from the Scriptures. This would lead into words of thanks and praise, and then to the communion itself. The point is, through using the prayer book regularly, the people would have that logic of God’s holiness requiring people to repent, followed by God’s forgiveness, leading to the people’s thanks and praise. You would learn these truths if you went to prayer book services frequently.
2. Congregational participation – It helped that the services were in English. But it also helped that there were large swathes of the service that the people said with their own mouths. It didn’t matter if they couldn’t read, because you would learn them off by heart by joining in with the congregation around you. So throughout your daily work and family life, you would have the words of the gospel ringing in your ears because you knew the prayers and verses off by heart.
Perhaps just as significant as saying the creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, and numerous other Biblically rich prayers and readings, there were the physical actions that went along with the various sections of the service that would reinforce them. The people said confessions on their knees, they would often stand for words of praise, and of course they would receive the elements of communion by standing up, walking to the front, reaching out their hands and consuming the bread and wine with their mouths. People were physically acting out their response to the gospel.
There is much about this historical tradition that was a powerful testimony to the gospel in the lives of the regular gatherings of God’s people. People came to know God through the prayer books, even if the preacher was dull or theologically suspect.
However, in the modern church, we’ve thrown out the prayer book.
There are a number of reasons why this was a good move: today’s church prefers informality, a post-Christian society needs to build bridges rather than erect barriers for the outsider, etc.
But we have lost a great deal. And not only should we consider what we’ve lost by removing that regular, Biblically-rich, congregationally-oriented service content, we need to consider what we’ve replaced it with… singing. Lots of singing.
So my question is simple: Is the singing in your church up to the task of replacing what we once had with the prayer book?
Yes, singing is congregational… yes, it’s memorable and personally engaging. But is it Biblically rich, capturing the glory of God, the depravity of sin and the wonder of the gospel? Is it Biblically balanced, not only telling God how much we love him, but also reflecting the breadth of topics in the Bible, ranging from God’s righteous wrath and judgement, his holiness, wisdom and love right through to the bountiful provisions of God to human kind, especially in giving us the revelation of his Son and of his work for us on the cross and in the resurrection?
Plumbing the depth and surveying the breadth of the Bible in our services is one of the great challenges of planning music. It is a task often given to those in the congregation with musical skills. But the selection of songs must also have the input of those in the congregation with deep Biblical insight.
Think of the opportunity to minister to the congregation like the prayer book would have ministered in days of old. Regardless of the preacher or the service leader, the singing can deeply implant the things of God in our hearts and minds, giving people tunes and lyrics to sing for their whole life, and in the gathering itself to lift each other’s spirits continually by singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in our hearts to God.
Yes I think music can fill these shoes. But I want to encourage both musical and pastoral leaders to rise to the challenge. Music that is faithful to the Bible doesn’t have to be boring or complex. After all, there’s nothing boring or complex about the gospel.