Here is a book on my favorite part of the music ministry of our church, and that is congregational singing. Maybe I am on a David Cloud kick. He is the author; this is the same author as last week’s book review, but this time it is a review of the book called Transforming Congregational Singing for the 21st Century. I just finished it a couple of days ago, a big old thick book, and put my review up on my Goodreads channel. I will link that in the description of the video below. Here is a mix of some good things as well as some weaker arguments that I think are a little less than convincing, but I just respect anyone who is trying to dive into this topic of music. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and I have been reviewing books from our resource desk. So today’s highlight is from this book here.
Hymn Stories and Practical Help
My first takeaway is that roughly half of the book, and it is about 540 pages or so, over 250 pages, deals with some kind of hymn story or author bio, just looking at hymns throughout the centuries. Now, I have read tons of these hymn stories, because in our weekly bulletin we have a hymn story for each of the three hymns we are singing that day. At our church we are taking about a month per year to just teach and preach on music, and specifically congregational singing, so I appreciate that. With all the study I have done, this is just adding fuel to the fire, so to speak. This is a valuable tool for our church when we are focusing on congregational singing. We will typically learn new songs every year in that time period especially, and we have created our own songbook, and we have done some things like ear training in our services to try to help the whole congregation sing a little bit better. So I appreciate both the practical and the philosophical aspects of this book. Love them or hate them, at least Cloud is addressing some things that few others are, and whether you agree or disagree with his reasons, at least you know where he stands, and I appreciate that very much. Now, as a musician myself, I remain unconvinced by some of the musical arguments he brings. There are a few gaps, I think, in some of the logic, but again, I respect the effort.
What I Enjoyed
I enjoyed several things about the book. First, I enjoyed his emphasis on psalm singing. I am preaching through the Psalms right now on Sunday nights, and I have found music to go with several of the psalms we have been preaching and focusing on, and I have loved that. For several years I have been wanting to incorporate psalms better. He has a whole chapter on singing the psalms and the history of psalters, and I just found that really, really interesting. I appreciated the various philosophies of psalters: should we take the words of Scripture expressly and just put them to music, or what about the psalters that have been rewritten for Christians? I lean toward the more Christianized versions of the psalters, where Christ is brought into the Psalms, and I really appreciated singing through the Psalms over the past couple of months in our church. Number two, the emphasis on spiritual songs, and I appreciated that: songs that feed the spirit and not the body, which means focusing on songs that are saturated in the truth. That leads to the third takeaway I enjoyed from the book, which is that we weigh even our beloved hymns by the same measures we would use for any contemporary Christian music or any songs of today. Under those same criteria, many revivalist hymns fall victim to the very same arguments we sling against CCM, and I just appreciated that. Almost nobody says that out loud. I appreciated what I felt was a pretty fair balance in the book in that regard. He left room to use some of the revivalist-style songs, but warned that if we use them exclusively, we are not going to have spiritual songs as a teaching tool, as an admonition, as a doctrine-rich tool for teaching people. It was really interesting to see how often Spurgeon and John Newton and others would write hymns to go with their sermons as a tool to teach. Many of the revivalist songs, he said, were fairly weak in doctrine, because they were evangelistic tools to appeal to a broad audience. They were not very doctrine-rich; they were very inspirational. That is okay to a degree, but if that is the only diet of your church music, I think it is a fair warning that it might be a doctrinally weak church because of doctrinally weak singing. So I appreciated that warning. Number four, I found many new songs I would like to teach our congregation. There were many songs I had never heard of, just some treasures out there, far better, in my opinion, than some of the new stuff I have come across, and sometimes better than what we are currently singing. I have got to be able to admit that. So I appreciated some rich new songs that I hope to introduce to our church soon. Number five, I appreciated the effort to put objective criteria on how to weigh church music. That is a difficult thing to do. Music is inherently emotional, so it is much more of a subjective discussion. It is hard to put parameters on something that is emotionally driven by nature, and music itself is largely a reflection of our culture. There is Indian music, and Eastern music, and Western music, and there are a few inherent principles in music, but our music is not the same as the music in Jesus’ day. So this is a difficult topic to articulate, but he tries to put some of these objective boundaries on our music. I think there were some great attempts, and some attempts that somebody of an opposing opinion might read and say, “Well, I remain unconvinced.” But again, I appreciate that he is at least addressing things like vocal fry, and vocal slides, and breathiness, and improv, and syncopation, and unresolved chords. He addresses many, many different aspects of music. Even if parts are unconvincing when I read them through the lens of someone who would disagree with him, taken as a whole, I would still agree with him. We want to be careful about the showiness of the world’s music and guard against it in our church music. Trying to write broadly, to a broad group like this, man, that is a difficult task, and it was not perfectly done. I marked a lot in my book. But I appreciate any book that makes me wrestle through these things for myself. Any book that makes me wrestle a little bit is a pretty good book. Now, from his other writings on music, I actually expected a bit more of that combative, in-your-face material, but this book was comparatively toned down. If this is the only book of his you read, you might say, “Wow, I did not think it was combative at all.” I am saying that compared to the rest of what he has written, this was calm. To each his own on that; I just thought this had some balance to it.
What Is in the Book
All in all, it is a good book. We are using it at our church resource desk to try to provide a Baptist perspective on congregational singing. I gave it four stars. Maybe that is a bit high, but three stars felt a little too low. The table of contents just shows the value this book can bring. It reads a little like a collection of blog posts; that is not a criticism, just an observation. There are a few places throughout the book where it repeats itself, but overall I would say it is a helpful book. Beyond the introduction, it reviews Rippon’s Baptist hymnal, kind of a time machine, going back through hundreds of years of history and heritage in a church. Then it has a section, a New Testament manual for congregational singing, that read somewhat like a sermon through Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” That was a good section. Then a section on singing the psalms, and then almost two hundred pages of learning from the past, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, going through the different hymn writers throughout the centuries, and especially the nineteenth century, the revivalist era, weighing some of our favorites. Then there is a section on weighing the music, and that is where it goes into some of that objective data to try to nail down what style of music would be biblical and what would not, and the arguments there are maybe a little hit or miss. Then he goes into a section on weighing the lyrics: beware of false doctrine, and avoid a heavy diet of simplistic songs and revivalist songs. Then he encourages believers to study the hymns, and I appreciated that. There is a history of people who would study the hymns and bring them into family devotions and have that as a regular part of their lives, studying the Scriptures and studying what others have sung in a poetic way about the Scriptures. Then come some practical tips on how to expand the church’s repertoire, how to train the song leader in leading the congregation in congregational singing, some sample standards for music personnel, those involved in special music, and then another church history, one Baptist church and 350 years of biblical singing. So that gives you a little snapshot of what the book is about. It gives you lots and lots of ideas for new songs, and it is not trying to get you stuck in the past or stuck in a certain style of music. I just appreciated that the encouragement is to be biblical in our singing, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that feed the spirit more than the body. If we emphasize that, then we are going to emphasize the spirit and sing unto the Lord.
Give unto the LORD the Glory
I just preached last night from Psalm 96 and Psalm 98, on singing a new song unto the Lord. Since it is a spiritual work, we want to give the Lord the glory that is due unto His name. We cannot give Him anything physical, but we can give Him things that are spiritual. Psalm 96:8–9 says, “Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts. O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.” Those are spiritual things we can give to God. So I believe that in our worship of Him, in our glory and our praise of Him, we want to give Him what matches the character and nature of God. In our reflection of that, we just want to do the best we can, and I want to encourage our congregation to do the best we can as a congregation, to come to every single service ready to give the Lord the glory that is due His name. So I hope this video can be a help to you, church. God bless you, and please continue to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We will see you in the next video.
