The Original Psalmist Was an Angsty Hipster

The Original Psalmist Was an Angsty Hipster

Posted by on Mar 13, 2012 in Church Music, Psalms, Songwriting | 2 Comments

Much of the church music we sing on Sundays is inspired by the Psalms.

Typically, from a single verse. Typically, from near the end of the Psalm.

The only problem with this approach is that the entire Psalm is the song – written by one of the original songwriters, King David.

And when we pull a single beautiful line from the Psalm, and center a new song around it, we lose all context of the original.

Because often in the Psalms, David expressed doubt. Fear. Anger. Confusion.

Real emotions. The reality of his heart in the midst of the reality of his circumstances. And only after that emotional release – his honesty before God – is he eventually able to return to a realization of the sovereignty of God – the love of God – despite his circumstances. And give us those beautiful one-liners we focus our songs around today.

But we have removed the prelude. The doubt. The fear. The anger. The confusion.

Because those emotions seem inappropriate for Sunday morning. Yet, they are real.

There are those of us who wish our church music would revert back to the glorious hymns of the past. I want to go back much further – to a time when the original Psalmist was writing angsty hipster music – and bring back true outcry to the modern worship experience.

“What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” by Carl Trueman

“What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” by Carl Trueman

Posted by on Jul 27, 2011 in Psalms, Relevant Reverence | 2 Comments

I often get in e-mail debates from Christians who have listened to my album, “The Fallen Cry” (sung from the voice of the fallen) and seen my claim that these songs are indeed appropriate for a church setting – and they go off on me. I am rarely/never able to convince these people of the merits of these songs for the purposes of corporate worship.

But, I recently came across a writing from Carl R. Trueman, a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, that states my argument much more eloquently than I ever have. It’s worth the read.

“Having experienced — and generally appreciated — worship across the whole evangelical spectrum, from Charismatic to Reformed — I am myself less concerned here with the form of worship than I am with its content. Thus, I would like to make just one observation: the psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, have almost entirely dropped from view in the contemporary Western evangelical scene. I am not certain about why this should be, but I have an instinctive feel that it has more than a little to do with the fact that a high proportion of the psalter is taken up with lamentation, with feeling sad, unhappy, tormented, and broken.

In modern Western culture, these are simply not emotions which have much credibility: sure, people still feel these things, but to admit that they are a normal part of one’s everyday life is tantamount to admitting that one has failed in today’s health, wealth, and happiness society. And, of course, if one does admit to them, one must neither accept them nor take any personal responsibility for them: one must blame one’s parents, sue one’s employer, pop a pill, or check into a clinic in order to have such dysfunctional emotions soothed and one’s self-image restored.

Now, one would not expect the world to have much time for the weakness of the psalmists’ cries. It is very disturbing, however, when these cries of lamentation disappear from the language and worship of the church. Perhaps the Western church feels no need to lament — but then it is sadly deluded about how healthy it really is in terms of numbers, influence and spiritual maturity. Perhaps — and this is more likely — it has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as little short of embarrassing. Yet the human condition is a poor one — and Christians who are aware of the deceitfulness of the human heart and are looking for a better country should know this.

A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party — a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is — or at least should be — all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship? Few Christians in areas where the church has been strongest over recent decades — China, Africa, Eastern Europe – would regard uninterrupted emotional highs as normal Christian experience.

Indeed, the biblical portraits of believers give no room to such a notion. Look at Abraham, Joseph, David, Jeremiah, and the detailed account of the psalmists’ experiences. Much agony, much lamentation, occasional despair — and joy, when it manifests itself — is very different from the frothy triumphalism that has infected so much of our modern Western Christianity. In the psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. Does our contemporary language of worship reflect the horizon of expectation regarding the believer’s experience which the psalter proposes as normative? If not, why not? Is it because the comfortable values of Western middle-class consumerism have silently infiltrated the church and made us consider such cries irrelevant, embarrassing, and signs of abject failure?

I did once suggest at a church meeting that the psalms should take a higher priority in evangelical worship than they generally do — and was told in no uncertain terms by one indignant person that such a view betrayed a heart that had no interest in evangelism. On the contrary, I believe it is the exclusion of the experiences and expectations of the psalmists from our worship — and thus from our horizons of expectation — which has in a large part crippled the evangelistic efforts of the church in the West and turned us all into spiritual pixies.

By excluding the cries of loneliness, dispossession, and desolation from its worship, the church has effectively silenced and excluded the voices of those who are themselves lonely, dispossessed, and desolate, both inside and outside the church. By so doing, it has implicitly endorsed the banal aspirations of consumerism, generated an insipid, trivial and unrealistically triumphalist Christianity, and confirmed its impeccable credentials as a club for the complacent. In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical — and yet I posed the question in all seriousness. Is it any wonder that British evangelicalism, from the Reformed to the Charismatic, is almost entirely a comfortable, middle-class phenomenon?”

–Carl R. Trueman, from “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Christian Focus: 2004) pp. 158-160.

Sticking to Psalms Protects us From Bad Theology

Sticking to Psalms Protects us From Bad Theology

Posted by on Jul 6, 2011 in Church Music, Psalms, Songwriting | No Comments

Some churches today only sing songs that lyrically come straight from the Bible. This conviction requires them to stick largely to the Psalms. Whether you agree with their reasoning or not, here’s the big benefit I see with this approach.

Sticking to Psalms protects us from bad theology.

If we’re writing our own songs, we run the risk of being theologically inaccurate. If we take from the Psalms, we’re safe.

The only problem is – the reason the Psalms were such powerful songs was that they directly reflected the current cry of the people. Their situation. Their fears. Their faith.

If we stick only to scripture, the best we can do is find our closest substitute. Mimicking someone else’s prayer-songs, rather than our own.

Matt Redman Says “The Church Needs its Poets”

Matt Redman Says “The Church Needs its Poets”

Posted by on Jun 21, 2011 in Christian Lyrics, Psalms, Songwriting | No Comments

“The church needs its poets – people who somehow congregationally, biblically and relevantly translate all that’s happening around them into words for the church to sing.” – Matt Redman

That sounds to me like we need a lot of modern-day Davids. So, why are we spending our church services singing about the situational relevance of 3,000 years ago, when we could have modern-day poets sing about the struggles of community within the modern-day church?

No one Uses the Word, “Hosanna”

No one Uses the Word, “Hosanna”

Posted by on Jun 16, 2011 in Christian Lyrics, Church Music, Psalms | No Comments

When’s the last time you used the word “Hosanna” in conversation?

I’m going to guess never. So, why are we using the word in our church songs? Now, I can present an argument for the ‘beauty’ of the word. For the ‘reverence’ of the word. Choosing to use holy phrases to sing of a holy God.

But, in the Psalms (where we’ve hijacked the word) the Psalmist used the word, “Hosanna”, because people used the word “Hosanna”. It was, in itself, a word of great meaning to the Israel community. It meant, “God, save us”.

But, it doesn’t mean that to the modern-day church, because we don’t use the word. And I wonder how many people, if pressed, could even define it? The truth is, we sing it because it sounds ‘holy’. But can a word devoid of meaning really be that?