The Word we preach: the words we sing

Reform, as a grass roots movement, envisages action coming from members who have thought, studied, discussed and agreed. Discussion papers such as this one are written by individual members for the council of Reform and the wider church. The author alone is responsible for the paper. This paper may be copied freely.

The Word we preach: the words we sing

Introduction: hitting the right note

Music - the key?
Worship - the king?
Praise - the lord?
Jesus is Lord!
Abba, Father!
Come Holy Spirit!

Concluding: Doxology

Introduction: Hitting the right note

From its still recent beginnings Reform has had more important matters on its plate than hymns. So had the Reformation, but that did not stop new vernacular hymnody from becoming one of its enduring fruits. Has the time come to look at what we sing together in the light of the other convictions we hold in common?

This study has two starting-points. One is a booklet similar to this, published in October 1996 by the Fellowship of Word and Spirit, What shall we sing? - Hymns on the move (still available from me for 50p plus postage). I shall repeat very little of that here but we urgently need to move the discussion on further - not to mention the action!

The second impetus to add to what is already in print is Mark Thompson's Reform Paper No. 15. On page 7 the writer quotes Martin Luther ("You are not defending the truth unless you defend it at the point where it is currently under attack:"; compare Paul Helm's 1996 Evangelical Library Lecture One Truth, One Way, p.10). But Mark Thompson comments that the truth is being attacked at so many points that it is hard to know where to start.

It was Sören Kierkegaard who left church in a temper one Sunday morning because the preacher had attacked the abuses in medieval monasticism but not the corruptions of his own day. Mark Thompson describes five vital contemporary battlefields and adds one more. Our present topic may not be in this kind of theological front line, but for many Christians it is a significant part of their spirituality, fills a major segment of their "worship", and eats voraciously into their budget for tapes, CDs, musical instruments, copying and sundry kinds of software.

Jesus is Lord

"Jesus is Lord!" - this basic credal affirmation, reflected in many hymns and songs, has clear New Testament roots. It is heard in Acts 10:36, I Corinthians 12:3, and Philippians 2:11 all in the context of both preaching and praise. We have taken up this glorious theme in All Hail the power of Jesus nameand O Spirit of the living God; more recently, too, with Fred Pratt Green's What shall our greeting be, Timothy Dudley-Smith's Name of all majesty,and Edward Burns' We have a gospel to proclaim -as well as David Mansell's song starting with this very text. Three English words or two Greek ones; but what do they mean?

In our preaching we are familiar with Jesus as our teacher, healer, friend, master, redeemer, saviour, king.... and somehow the uniquely necessary "Lord" sums it all up. Reciprocally, we are his servants as well as disciples, followers and friends, with the status, responsibilities and protection which this gives us. It is hard to think of any more fundamental statement about Jesus Christ; but have we got it right?

We teach that the early Christians refused to acknowledge Caesar as Lord because for them it was Jesus alone who possessed that title, with all its Hebrew and Old Testament overtones. The state and the emperor are neither Lord nor God; nor, for any of us, are power, money, possessions or self, let alone the gods many and lords many of other religions. "Jesus is Lord" is a statement about Jesus, about ourselves, and about other claimants to that title.

In the study already referred to, Ralph Martin says "If there is one motif which pervades the New Testament hymns, it is this ringing assurance that Christ is victor over all man's enemies, and is rightly worshipped as the image of the God who is over all" (Worship in The Early Church p.52). But does not such a claim also tell us something about lordship itself, and the character of a "lord"?

Jesus does not simply replace other names with his own on a pedestal of power, and then proceed (with a little bit of help from his friends?) to fight off all rivals. Yet many of our songs, even more than our sermons, seem to suggest precisely this. For some Christians who have a raw deal at home or at work, or without work, for six days a week among family, friends and enemies, it certainly feels good to sing "power" songs on Sunday, at some length and at some volume. So the slaves in the southern states would sing of Gloryland.

But the One who is the Lord is also he who transforms all concepts of lordship. We love Mark 10:45, but can easily miss the impact of the verses leading up to it. We sing, sometimes grindingly, about every tongue confessing and every knee bowing, from Philippians 2:10-11, but we do need all the eleven verses which open that chapter.

In particular we need the "therefore" which begins verse 9. How many of the songs in current use enjoy the climax of the final two verses without giving any hint of how we arrive at such a conclusion! This, surely, is no way to teach; Paul and the Philippians might also suggest that it is no way to sing. There is no by-pass round the cross and the once-crucified Saviour.

To ignore this is to deserve the strictures of the late 20th-century Archdeacon Paley, alias Dr David Nicholls, who claimed that "Sovereign power" was an unscriptural concept of dubious validity, suggesting absolute and arbitrary rule and domination. The Jesus of the New Testament is very different. And the "Archdeacon" was thinking not of a Graham Kendrick song, but of a prayer used by an Anglican commission on something-or-other, who were clearly as much seduced by power as some of our music groups seem to be.

The point of our great affirmation is not only that Jesus is Lord, but that Jesus is Lord: this beaten-up, battered, derided, tortured, crucified man. Naturally we are reluctant to accept all the implications but the credibility gap between words and reality shows up most clearly when we sing our most exuberant and triumphant songs and hymns.

In 1989 Bishop David Sheppard was visiting South Africa, at a time when apartheid ruled and Nelson Mandela was still in prison. At one Anglican service there was a lot of "power talk" about trusting Christ and the Holy Spirit (OK so far!) which was also very critical of the church and its current leadership. It was Grace Sheppard who ventured to ask, "Could you tell us about the things you're afraid of?" Sometimes this question is neither fair nor sensible, since the attitudes of those who disagree with us are not always dictated by fear. On this occasion it opened the floodgates of the people's very real fears.

"I've never been to a township ... I'd be afraid for myself if I did." The bishop's comment (as interviewed for Third Way, Sept 1997) was that "I felt that something had been claimed about power when actually what we were being told was a great deal about fear ... . There is a certain Christianity which limits the world in which God can help you, and then makes terrific claims about Christ in that tiny world".On a smaller and almost ridiculous scale nearer home was the local free church where the service ended with one of the many songs about marching on the land, claiming the victory, expelling Satan and taking over his former territory and so forth - accompanied by much waving, clapping, repeats, and volume. The slightly jarring note was that a few minutes earlier we had been told that the evening service was folding up owing to lack of support.

Ridiculous? That is a hard word; but in many inner-city churches the songs we sing about Jesus our Iord can lie sadly at variance with the life that we know. Can we redress this imbalance and somehow bridge the gap between our lyrics and our daily expectations?

The days may never return when to use one particular hymn-book was an authentic badge of evangelical Anglicanism. There may be a "right" first choice for every church, but no single book is the best for everyone. Some of us are understandably wary of hymnals from a "catholic" stable with their occasional altars, priests and eucharistic feasts, not to mention an unprotestant devotion to Mary or "the saints". But some who would never splash out on a new set of English Hymnals or A and M's seem strangely complacent about the different extravagances of Mission Praise or Songs and Hymns of Fellowship. We have been freely using words like Lord and King, Master and Son. On a different front altogether evangelicals have to wrestle with a quite different enemy of the gospel. Or is it an enemy?

Michael Saward is not the only one to wonder why his own hymn Christ Triumphant (which of course includes "Suffering Servant, scorned, ill-treated") has made so little headway in the United States. In many other parts of the globe it is in wide and regular use. Only recently did a possible answer to this odd situation emerge. Many north Americans will now refuse to print in their hymnals any text including the aggressively masculine title "Son of Man". Can this be true? To test the waters, or at least to provide a current snapshot of them, we move on from the Son to the Father.

Abba, Father!

If the searching probe in the claim that "Jesus is Lord" is often missed by our power-conscious or power-craving churches and authors, where the decibels suggest that might is right, the threat to our knowing God as Father comes from a different direction.

Some hymn-choosers, uneasy with the pastoral and theological sub-texts of power-singing, turn with optimistic relief to another growing area of writing which is apparently also more interesting. It divides hymnody down the middle; some collections of hymns and songs give it the lion's share of their modern choices, while others are more wary of its topics or totally unaware of its existence. It is usually written with far greater competence, flair, discipline and originality.

It is hard to label this wide river of verse without being either unfairly critical or unguardedly enthusiastic. The authors are often from traditional free church denominations; in the USA they often monopolise church structures, hymnal committees and hymn promotions. Sooner or later we shall need to use the word "Liberal". This however is a clumsy description for a wide range of understanding, some of which shows reverence for the Bible and a love of the liberating Gospel of Christ. Some of it, on the contrary, is not so much liberal as tyrannical.

Curiously, some of their vocabulary overlaps with that of the "renewal" or charismatic authors. Dance, wings, dove, peace, new ... but a closer looks shows a profoundly differing perspective on such words. Unlike most charismatic Christians they have generally turned their backs on king, prince, army, battle, power, exalt and so on, while creed, law, code, dogma, holy, righteous, and sometimes church or good are introduced only in negative ways. The Sydney Carter of the 1960s, though in some ways unique, certainly influenced others. So in Lord of the dance and When I needed a neighbour,"holy" and "creed" respectively are used in a pejorative sense. With this latter still a school favourite, in the absence of anything more convincing, generations of children grow up knowing nothing whatever about the Creed except that it doesn't matter.

What are the special buzz-words of the liberals? Among them are gender, woman, sister, mother (noun or verb), risk, dare, poor, doubt, world, vulnerable, etc. Darkness is used positively, sin, if used at all, is usually structural and is discovered in others rather than ourselves. With much of this there may be nothing wrong; but the words resonate with the constituency just as sovereign, elect, grace, blood, ransom and so on do elsewhere. And "Calvary", though found once only in Scripture, still reverberates widely across the spectrum.

At this point we might be inclined to thank God that some hymns at least have climbed out of their rut - whether ecclesiastical, denominational, or evangelical. But the one thing worse than a deep old rut, whether Sankey, CSSM, or A and M, is a deep new one. There are plenty of signs that should warn us against simply switching ruts.

If the first thing people remember about any hymn is the tune (discuss?) the next has to be its first line. That is how a hymn is identified, known and found, minus a few exceptions which have acquired titles from their tune (Jerusalem), chorus (How great thou art) or features (The Doxology). While Methodism is by no means the sole pioneer of liberal vocabulary, it does provide some good examples at this point.

The classic Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, which John Wesley edited in 1771, has 525 items. It is not a complete church hymn-book, but that does not affect the argument. To use a statistic which can easily be checked, here are 24 hymns starting with the word "Father" and another ten including it elsewhere in the opening line; put together, these make up some 6.5% of the total.

The next major landmark in Methodist hymnals came in 1933 (MHB); this emphatically was a church hymn-book, with 984 items - ten hymns per Sunday for nearly two years with no repeats! 21 of these begin with "Father" - another seventeen first lines have the word at other points - total 38, or just under 4% and a little over.

Thus far, such variations hardly seem significant. For the record, the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book of happy memory scores just over 4.5%; Hymns for Today's Church (1982) 5%, while other mainstream books show no great variation. Evangelical collections seem to score marginaIly higher; that is all.

Turn with me now to the United Methodist Hymnal from Nashville, Tennessee (Music City USA), 1989. Here the figure is well below two per cent. The only three hymns starting "Father" are versions of ancient texts, of the rest, eight are paraphrases of the Lord's Prayer and two are Glorias. This selection followed a very public debate during which traditional and evangelical voices managed to claw back some ground lost in the earlier draft lists - on the practical basis that their churches were not prepared to pay for what appeared to be emerging from the centre.

The Canadians, meanwhile, do it their way. In Voices United from the United Church of Canada (1996) not a single hymn starts with "Father". There are five first-line "Fathers" - less than one percent - two of which are "Lord's Prayer" versions. There are, incidentally, four "Mothers" and one "Jehovah". In hymns where "Father" used to appear, the word is replaced with "parent", "maker" or other rearrangements of the line; where it is retained it is sometimes balanced with "Mother". The poem-turned-hymn which always scores highly in British voting for "favourite hymns", Dear Lord and Father of Mankind commits three faux-pas in what has become its opening line (eight syllables, six words) and which was a turning point in the Quaker Whittier's original text. So Canadians and others are now faced with Dear God Who Loves All Humankind; dear God indeed.

How has all this, and more, come to be? I suggest a possible six stages in the process, each one inching down almost imperceptibly from the one before.

God has many names and titles. Undeniable, surely; but the gap between Watts' Join all the Glorious Names and Wren's Bring Many Names is deep and wide. ln spite of the Bible references given as footnotes for the latter, Scripture is not infinitely flexible in its styles of addressing the Deity.
So it doesn't matter what we call God. So long, that is, as we don't call him "him".
But some titles are actually better (more helpful, more credible) than others,- the king-judge-lawgiver mode is to be discouraged. Curiously, Voices United lists Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah (unchanged) shortly after Great is Thy FaithfuIness, God our Creator (Spot the difference).
By the same token "Mother" is a title to be positiveIy encouraged, alongside the delightfully ambiguous "Partner" and "Lover". Charles Wesley of course wrote Jesu Lover... but even then brother John was not so keen, omitting it from his 1771 book. "Friend", though, can be an excellent rediscovery when it is used carefully and Biblically.
Alongside the divine titles a pincer-movement is also operating. In this, the typical vocabulary promotes what is new and diminishes what is old. So new beginnings, tomorrow, the dawn of a new age, are all good (and why not?); tradition, the past, yesterday, are not. New or old "I" remains a highly desirable opening.
And come to think of it, perhaps it does matter what we call God - reversing no.2 fairly soon. All the master, sovereign, king and lord words will have to go the same way as men, brothers and even man - and "Father" along with them.

There are obvious limitations in random surveys of the use of single word in assorted first lines. But writers have usually paid special attention to their opening phrase; ideally it sets the agenda for the rest of the hymn. The predominance of the first person singular pronoun in so so much recent writing has concerned many people, but we need not jettison the hymns (or Psalms) of personal devotion and experience so long as they are balanced elsewhere and may be sung congregationally.

Those who deliberately set out to marginalise, minimise or exclude God the Father from our common texts have their own assorted reasons which are part of the larger picture. I simply want to draw attention here to a process affecting what we sing, or the books we may choose, in its denial of a fundamental theological truth - perhaps the fundamental theological truth. To say nothing more, we stand to lose the heart of the Sermon on the Mount (once, at least, important to the liberal tradition) if we cannot bear the word "Father"; and still more from the New Testament letters of Paul, Peter, James and John.

One of the reasons sometimes given for its deletion is that human fathers are by and large a rotten bunch. This does not seem to have prevented the greatest of all hymnwriters from glorifying his heavenly Father, the Father of everlasting love, whatever the sometimes scandalous failings of Samuel Wesley Senr.

Hand in hand with this theological shift in the words of hymns and liturgies comes the new focus on women's leadership. The various "women have a raw deal" hymns have begun to include hymns specifically promoting "women priests". One unintentionally humorous effort starts by praising the God who recognises no gender distinctions at all, but somewhat spoils the effect by its final stanza, concluding how much better women are than men!

Another opening verse includes "Stand up, Mary! You are a priest and a prophet." Author's footnote: "By 1996, I would have hoped ... that this sort of protest (my underlining) was no longer necessary". Verse 2: "Where Church tradition gags and binds, roll the stone away; where words exclude and bias blinds (Try singing that), roll the stone away ..." Next, please: "Where men entomb the truth of Christ (so we can use the m-word!), roll the stone away; where women's worth is underpriced, roll the stone away." What sort of men, let alone women, would want to sing such lines as these? What will it do to the people who sing it, or the quest for inclusive hymns which include the whole congregation?

For some years I have struggled in small and local ways for women to have greater recognition as writers, editors, commentators, scholars and critics in the world of hymnody; see for example News of Hymnody no.23, July 1987. It is still scandalous how many reference books and hymn "Companions" treat women in a cursory and patronising way, and how many editorial committees are virtually for men only. But the battle for a truer Biblical feminism (justice, if you prefer) is only brought into disrepute by hymnals which have been hijacked for a partisan cause.

It seems equally ridiculous that a school of thought which has so often blotted out any hint of divine wrath or judgement from its hymns, should now so clearly be claiming the role of judge for itself. The note of condemnation is never far away; we always seem to be repenting of the sins of other people - all of which seems more like an accusation-session than the praise of God. Even in 1979, Erik Routley was noting Sydney Carter's "Fairly settled frown" and "exasperated censoriousness" - even in Lord of the dance (A Panorama of Christian Hymnody GIA, Chicago).But Carter's successors have far outstripped him in their criticism, within their hymns, of other Christians.

So the liberal movement has affected both the way we write new hymns, and how we change older ones. To slip in one further note on "updating", is it ever right to change the words of great hymnwriters from ages past? I tried to explore this first in Hymns in Today's Language? (Grove Books 1982). One who thinks it is not is the academic Barry Spurr of the University of Sydney. His strong complaints about all modernisation of any kind were rather eccentrically noted in Churchman 9195 no.2, and he contributes a curious mix of opinions to the St Mark's Review (Canberra) no. 152, Summer 1993.

After valiantly defending The Lord's my shepherd, surely against his own literary instincts and apparently against all other ways of singing Psalm 23, Dr Spurr picks up Michael Baughen's comment on the line "which wert and art and evermore shalt be". "How on earth can you sing that in Toxteth?" asked the bishop. In a classic response that says it all, Barry Spurr informs his readers that "not everyone lives in Toxteth". No, Dr Spurr; and if you had your way and we went on singing unintelligibly archaic phrase or whole hymns, no Christians ever would. Nor in Peckham neither; the cultural elite can afford to ignore whole swathes of our urban population, but not everyone can. How fitting that we are now due to invoke afresh the third Person of the Holy Trinity!

Come Holy Spirit!

The days are long gone, if they ever were, when the Spirit of the living God was even the perceived monopoly of the Pentecostal strand of Christendom. Iona's "Wild Goose" image has become a powerful force in hymnody, and the Spirit is certainly a favourite "Person" in the liberal strand quoted in the previous section. Could this be because such authors and churches feel free to sail away without too much regard for those tiresome old gags and biases of "tradition"? The Spirit becomes a convenient motif embracing multi-faith, new-age and do-it-yourself philosophies; he, or (increasingly) she, is ignored no longer.

So who or what is this "Spirit"? We hear much of freedom, openness and love; less, I think, of the Spirit of truth or of grace, or (essentially) of the Holy Spirit. I leave to others the task of trying a word-count on the Spirit from the "Fatherless" hymnals. The holiness of the Spirit - that is, of God himself - cannot be seen any more than his love can be seen. But it is and must be made visible in his holy people, the holy catholic church, called to be the saints of God. Alongside the liberal theological agenda comes the parallel programme of a downgrade in ethics.

Some of our grandparents used to sing what were called "Temperance hymns". They should probably have been called "Abstinence hymns", and today they seem an easy target for humour - as if somehow we had now tamed the threat of alcohol-abuse. Or is it that we have more sophisticated choruses in our contemporary church "charts"? Ironically, one religious weekly was indulging in this mocking sport at the same time as it moralised on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, at the hands of a drunken driver.

What did the anti-drink hymns say? They are filled with compassion for the victims, anger at the peddlers and profiteers, and hope in the rescue-act of God. Is it timely to compare such dated verses with a new and growing genre of writing which refers, explicitly or otherwise, to HIV and AIDS? Like some prayers from a similar stable, the only anger visible here is reserved for anyone questioning the lifestyle in which AIDS flourishes. When they speak of hysteria, hatred and fear, we think we know who is being caricatured. In the expected emphasis on compassion, care and a deliberately ambiguous "love" there is little suggestion of the need or possibility of change. Unlike the Band of Hope they do not make repentance or a change of heart a big issue. It is like having a section of hymns devoted to lung cancer or road-accident victims without any reference to possible causes.

Nor is penitence much found in the equally new stream of "divorce" hymns (though they are not so labelled!). Such texts usually demand acceptance by everyone of a new start - but not by the old spouses. This new start inevitability means remarriage, or at least a new "partner", with no suggestion that broken relationships might ever be renewed by the Holy Spirit. Acceptance and reconciliation do not apparently apply to the forsaking or forsaken wife or husband; nor do the children get much of a look in. This "Spirit" apparently releases us from old obligations and ties in the name of freedom and fulfilment, gives us carte blanche to make new ones (for a time?) and smooths over any awkward questions about the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is sometimes alleged that a new puritanism is obsessed with the private delights of the bedroom. If we are to be whole and holy people these were never entirely irrelevant; in the new hymns scene we are being introduced to them inch by inch in what we are invited to sing. Your Sunday morning congregation may not be quite ready for lines about stroking the naked flesh, but believe me, some of today's writers across the Atlantic are having great fun spicing up their hymnals with such revelations.

It is no part of our task to replace the warm, emotional hymns of renewal and revival, or the strong "body" hymns of liberalism, with some cold, cerebral evangelical ones; that last phrase has to be a contradiction in terms! But Wesley (and Watts in some of his less-known hymns) showed in his day that we do not have to choose between the head and the heart.

The Holy Spirit both pours out the love of God and teaches the truth of God: Romans 5and John 16.But it is always the love and truth of God, and he is the Holy Spirit. If without holiness no-one shall see the Lord, so without holiness we shall never have worthy hymns to sing. Sadly, some of the more "daring" or "liberated" texts are being produced almost as self-justification by those who abandon the quest for holiness, first in their lives and then in their writing. There is no reason for us to follow.

The Holy Spirit is the Comforter, Advocate or Helper (Paraclete); he is Friend, Intercessor, Life-giver and Fruit-grower. For the purpose of this booklet, he is also the great Communicator. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us and inspires us to call God our Father (Romans 8:12-17)and Jesus our Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3).Those who feel unable to use such names for the Creator and the Saviour, or who have made themselves unable, surely indicate some deficiency in their grasp of the Spirit, or in the Spirit's indwelling with them.

But this Spirit also communicates to God's children all the time and everywhere, not least when they meet together to hear God's word and to sing his praise. Ephesians 5:18-21links hymns very closely with the Holy Spirit; we may notice also the presence of the Father and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What happens when we sing has much to do with the Spirit's activity; hymns are never a static message on a page or a screen.

Incidentally, the screen may appear the more vibrant and flexible of the two options, but the page of the hymnal has a rich reference which the screen does not give. The text relates to other hymns before and after (less so if they are arranged alphabetically); to others in that particular section; to other hymns on that topic, or for that season, or of that period, or by that author. A book gives the congregation time to look at the words before, during and after the singing; it is a treasure that we dispense with at our peril.

We can argue that New Testament Christians had no hymnals in their hands, nor did so for more than a thousand years; or that our brothers and sisters in many countries today have none either. But I do not hear that advanced as an argument for more learning by heart and the abandonment of all technology; disposing of the hymn-books always seems to lead to more expense, not less. To quote a contemporary expert at home with webs, nets and super-highways, "A book is still the most efficient thing around". If only the choice was a bit more straightforward!

But to close this section near its starting -point - let us never quench the genuine outpouring of Biblical songs in the broad Pentecostal tradition which so many Afro-Caribbean Christians and their British-born children are enriching the church in these islands. So long as we keep being stirred by such work as The Reason Why We Sing by Clifton Clarke (Grove Books 1997) we cannot imagine we have all the answers; in enjoying that while not accepting all of it I am conscious of being a white British male Protestant who is nearly sixty!

In wanting to hold on to our books, or some of them, I am far from wanting to banish other ways of learning, reading, or singing. In being wary of accepting any charismatic package, old-style or new, I want to keep in step with the Spirit and not join the quenching-brigade. Come, Holy Spirit!

Concluding: Doxology

"I'd rather they went to heaven singing drivel than go to hell singing great hymns." You may have heard or thought something as evangelically-sounding as that; just the kind of sentiment pilloried by John King in The Evangelicals (Hodder and Stoughton 1969) where our love of hymns is noted but our "Fibreless words and music" are deplored. Evangelically-sounding; but is it evangelically sound?

It should not be hard to spot the false alternatives; this does not have to be the choice! A better question is whether people are more likely to get to heaven, or enter the kingdom, if the church gives them only drivel to sing. By the grace of God may our souls arrive in peace, where eventually all the redeemed will have a nobler, sweeter song on their lips.

Who meanwhile shall judge what is noble and sweet? We must always respect the Christian consensus; it is no use trying to persuade people to sing classics which never catch on, or to clap and shout if they prefer to express their devotion in other ways. On the bottom line, we are not going to sell a product that nobody wants. No-one can predict what spiritual chemistry (physics?) will spark off the electricity which gives life at once to both text and congregation.

For both need the fire; the Holy Spirit is the Life-giver. Unlike a great painting or sculpture, and more like a piece of music, a hymn is recreated every time it is sung. It has even more possibilities than a concerto! The way it is placed, introduced, led, played, sung; the contrasting speed or emphasis; whether it is all sung by all, or shared out in parts; whether we stand, sit, kneel or move around; whether we fully understand or approve what we are asked to sing, and whether what happens next will hinder or help - all these factors and more will influence the product being created and the effect it will have on those who participate. Even now, have I omitted what for some is the main question. Do we know it?

How can we help forward the process of making something fresh and valuable; a truly "new song" each time we sing, from the raw materials which may be a week old or a thousand years? By praying and singing constantly in our hearts not only "Come, Holy Spirit" but "Veni Creator" - Creator Spirit, come!

Yes, in normal circumstances we shall move away from the Latin. I cannot believe that the apostle who was "All things to all people" in the best and original sense would have tried to evangelise, pastor or sing in Toxteth or Peckham with a language as remote as medieval Latin is to most of us. Nor do I believe that he would tolerate drivel-hymns, any more than drivel-sermons, among the heavenward-marching pilgrims.

A recent conference attended by many who will read this used a selection of hymns comprising three or four classics from previous centuries together with a larger handful from today's song-culture. As it happens, an earlier conference this year heard a gifted music-leader say "We mainly use the new songs - but we love the old hymns too!" Many churches and some books, have a similar diet of new songs and old hymns - and consider themselves comprehensively tolerant and inclusive. Of course I have, as a writer, a personal stake in the use of "real hymns" which are contemporary, Biblical, and not drivel. This interest stems from my conviction that, under God, the health of the churches depends on getting this right.

We have touched already on the"Song of Christ's glory" in Philippians 2 and the vital "Therefore" in verse 9. The cross is pivotal for the glory. But the Song is not just about doctrine, Christology or even "worship"; in context, it concerns our attitudes to one another in heart, mind and action. Such concerns must show in our singing.

To insist on everyone else fitting in with our own favourite style in words or music is a total contradiction of the subject of the songs. If Philippians has the text of the hymn, the urgings of Ephesians 5 andColossians 3 come very close to the same point. There is more here, too, than meets the eye.

The conclusion of this part of the Ephesian letter (5:20-21)is not only to give thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, but also to "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ". As Colossians introduces the same theme (3:12ff) Paul prepares the ground by speaking about forgiving grievances and being clothed with love; about letting the peace of Christ be the final referee, and God's word having the last word. Had the apostle just come back from the prison choir-practice, or from a PCC debating whether or not to replace the old hymn-books?

At the same time, Paul of all people would hardly be content with a musical diet which was proving a subtle doorway for false teaching, unhealthy emphases, or mere self-indulgence by any one party or group. Ultimately the unity and holiness of the people of God must be that unity and holiness of the Godhead, as the Lord Jesus prays in John 17- presumably just before the hymn they sang that night.

So we shall always want to preserve some form of the Doxology. Perhaps we shall use many forms, depending on whether we finally banish "Holy Ghost" from our vocabulary, as a misleading title for today and tomorrow. We shall resist attempts to replace the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with "Life-maker, pain-bearer, love-giver", or similar options. These may be helpful footnotes to the text, but like the metrical substitute creeds, they make a powerful statement by what they omit. Such phrases are not enough.

We shall rather want to continue exploring and glorying in the unsearchable riches of the One God in Three Persons, in all our songs and hymns, in our churches, and in our way of life. Then heaven will go on calling the tune, while earth repeats the long "Amen!"

Chris Idle