Our church family considers several important biblical balances of music-making. You may know some of the vociferous debates that Christians have had over the centuries about them. You may make very different choices than we do. No matter what the music at your church looks like, you probably still consider how to balance these issues.
SINGING AND PLAYING
We sing and also play. Instruments are easily implied in Ephesians 5:19 and are commanded throughout the psalms. Song, however, is the core of our music. Even most of our instrumental pieces are arrangements of songs. There’s nothing wrong with purely instrumental music, but during musical selections we try to make it easy to meditate on biblical lyrics—even when no one’s singing. In fact, we often include a cappella singing at some point in most of our Sunday morning services.
PARTICIPATING AND PRESENTING
We make music all together and also listen to each other. Some academics distinguish “participatory” and “presentational” music, and we definitely want to have both.
The biblical case for participatory music is simple. The Bible commands us to make music together. No one gets to leave music for everyone else to do. Paul didn’t address the commands of Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 to the most musically skilled or those with the most free time. The heart of our music program is the congregation’s own singing.
Presentational music is not commanded in the New Testament with the same force as participational music. But based on the participles in Colossians 3:16 (“teaching and admonishing”) as well as many descriptive passages in the psalms, we see biblical precedent for musical presentations. Just as we have individuals lead in prayer during worship services, we give lay leaders opportunities to prepare music selections ahead of time, using their musical skills for the good of our church family. That’s one of the reasons our choir sings in almost every Sunday service and that a service without at least one more musical presentation is rare.
It’s a high calling to present sacred music or Bible lessons to others, and we have several accountability measures in place to help ensure that musical presentations do bring about as much good for the church family as possible. Most of those measures apply even for presentations with a wide participational base, such as our church choir. A church-wide worshipful response to the greatness and goodness of God is always our goal. And participation music—congregational singing—is our primary method for achieving it.
OLD AND NEW
We use old and also new songs. The core of our repertoire is a fairly small set of widely known psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs that have helped Christians for centuries: “I Sing the Mighty Power of God,” “And Can It Be”, and “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” come readily to mind. We also want to reflect the songs that have helped our own church family, including songs that aren’t as widely popular anymore but have lived inside many of us for many years.
On the other hand, Scripture commands us to sing “a new song”—and however you interpret those passages, we think “new” should at least mean “written during our lifetime.” And since God has blessed us with a mixture of people from children to octogenarians and even above, we want that “lifetime” to include songs less than 20 years old. Occasionally, we even get to hear what you might call world premieres from songwriters in our own church family.
PSALMS AND HYMNS
We sing psalms—even though many of our church family don’t know very many. That’s because the biblical commands to sing often include the command to sing from God’s own songbook. “A Mighty Fortress” comes from Psalm 46, “Joy to the World’ from Psalm 98, and the psalm behind “As the Deer” isn’t hard to find. But if we’re going to have new songs, we have to include some new lyrics. And that leads us into our last balance.
OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE
If the only thing our songs discuss is the way we feel about God or even what He’s done for us, we are missing out on so much. In ancient Greece, a “hymn” usually referred to a song of praise, listing not actions but attributes of the deity it addressed. And songs like “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “Immortal, Invisible” are simply good for us to consider. But it’s one thing to sing the truth—and another to mean it. That’s why we allow room for songs like “Oh, How I Love Jesus” or “Complete in Thee,” with its chorus reveling in what God has done, is doing, and will do to me:
Yea, justified, O blessed thought!
And sanctified, salvation wrought!
Thy blood hath pardon bought for me,
And glorified I too shall be.
Some songs do a great job at both (“His Robes for Mine”, “In Christ Alone”). But we are also happy to make room for a whole song about God’s greatness followed by a whole song about our love for Him.
CONCLUSION
None of these balances is a matter of first importance. God may very well want your church’s music program to sound very different from ours. But taken together, these balances help ensure some real variety in our church’s music. There are many more balances we could discuss: rejoicing and lamenting, folk music and art music (“classical”) come quickly to mind. But even when our services were online only, these five balances definitely influenced our planning every single week. Perhaps naming these five can help your church too.
Bio
Dr. Todd Jones is the music pastor at Morningside Baptist Church in Greenville, SC and the husband of Lorna. Todd and Lorna live in Greenville, SC with their rambunctious son, three dramatic daughters, and protective miniature Schnauzer. An earlier version of this article appeared at Morningside Baptist Church and is reposted here with permission.
