Bishop Willimon stuck his toe in the worship wars again, and has gotten a few comments taking him to task. Charles Wesley wrote new hymns after all, they say. Why not let people write new hymns today?
I’m with John Wesley – for the most part – on questions of worship style. We should never let differences in worship style get between us and the crucial things. If someone finds it spiritually uplifting to drone on over and over the same two lines about how fabulous God is, hey, more power to them. I won’t be there, but I pray the Spirit will be.
I say we should let people write new hymns. I’m all for people setting old hymns to more contemporary melodies.
But I agree with Willimon’s critique in part.
I was recently at a church of my own denomination, and I came away frightened, thinking, have I seen the future of the church? The hymns (songs really), anthems, everything had jettisoned the tradition, our language, our metaphors, and our stuff in favor of something called contemporary Christian music. And in my humble opinion, what I heard that day, I just don’t think will lift the luggage in the future. As people were singing, praising some vague thing called ‘God’ who, as far as I could tell, had never done anything in particular, as we were bouncing along praising, I wanted to say, ‘you know there are people out there today who just found out that their cancer is not responding to treatment, or who found out their kids won’t do right, that their marriage won’t survive, or that they can’t keep their jobs, and here we are just bouncing along, grinning, praising God. We’ve got some good stuff for that kind of thing — where is it?
Now, I’m not sure what a rousing chorus of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” does for the guy who just lost his job compared to praise choruses, but I do share some of the bishop’s reaction after many Sundays in contemporary worship.
I say if you can write a hymn like “Amazing Grace” or “How Great Thou Art” or “Hymn of Promise” or “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” or “The Summons” then please do. Let’s sing it. There are contemporary songs that I think have the kind of quality of spiritual and theological depth that the traditonal hymns have. I find “In Christ Alone” a wonderful church hymn, for instance. But too many contemporary songs – including some I like to listen to – are pretty thin or are clearly better as performance pieces than group singing pieces.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
You are spot on. I also agreed a lot with Willimon, but he does sometimes give the impression, if even that’s not his intention, that there should be no new hymns. My thought was the same as yours – some older hymns are no more helpful for the person who lost their job than the newer ones.
Still, “And Can It Be” will have more theology in it than most contemporary worship song books. Sadly, Willimon is right about that. Yet, there are evangelical theologians calling song writers to task on this. Robin Parry, author of The Evangelical Universalist, wrote a book about it after hearing a bad worship CD.
Thanks for the post, Will. And thanks for the link.