Sing With the Local Church
Sing Together
The Giant’s Causeway is a world heritage site minutes away from our front door in Northern Ireland. It is a geological marvel, consisting of forty thousand naturally occurring and mostly hexagonally shaped rocks, joined together at varying heights and rising up beside the wild Antrim coastline. Through many different weathers (most frequently rain) people come from all over the world to climb on the rocks and look out onto the waves.
Like these multi-angled stones, even with our sharp points and rough edges we who are God’s people are being built together upon the solid Rock that is our Lord Jesus. The church is the only structure that will stand forever. Nothing—not even the very storms of hell—will prevail over it. Today, as you read, people from every nation, tribe, and tongue are coming to take refuge from the waves, just as we have done.
Sing As Living Stones
We are reminded that we are not the center of the universe, but just one voice and heart among the great worldwide throng of people praising the One who is. And we remind each other of all this as we sing together.
You Can’t Sing Together if You Go It Alone
Think about the churches to whom Paul was writing in the decades after Christ’s ascension. Each was an eclectic collection of tastes, experiences, and backgrounds. They contained both the educated and the unschooled, those with plenty in their pockets and those struggling to make ends meet. They came from a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds, with many resulting tensions. They were susceptible to the vicious winds of false teaching and exposed to the waves of persecution that had begun to sweep through the Roman Empire. They had nothing in common, except that they had everything that mattered in common: faith in Christ, who joined them by His Spirit. And Paul told them that a sign of this would be seen in their congregational singing:
So when you are called to sing at church, stop drinking your coffee for a moment, put your phone away, and look around and listen to the people standing about you. You are not an only child. This is your family.
When we see our singing together in this way, we will happily compromise when it comes to the style of the music, the instruments used in the music, and so on.
Singing Together Will Help Reclaim the Millenial Generation.
Most churches are painfully and personally aware of the significant drop-out of late teens and twenty-somethings from church, and often from Christian faith altogether. David Kinnaman, the president of the research company Barna Group, writes in his book You Lost Me: “The ages eighteen to twenty-nine are the black hole of church attendance.”
Creativity
Given that the standard of production and use of technology are extremely high in so much we digest outside of church services, it is often the most simple thing done well and sincerely in church that will make the most significant impression. A stunning melody with clear and moving lyrics, sung with gusto and authenticity by a congregation, is a more powerful statement than a song that’s difficult to play or is awkward for the congregation to sing.
Communication
Biblically rich content in songs, sung by people who look like they mean what they are saying, helps teach the gospel as something that is credible and powerful rather than cultural and optional.
Community
We live in an increasingly fragmented age, where social media creates niches in which we can live without ever hearing from or thinking about the perspective of anyone older than us, younger than us, who is different than us, or disagrees with us. We are more connected than ever before, and lonelier than ever before. And our churches are often, sadly, not so different. We are whisked from the baby room to the toddler room, to children’s church and then on to student ministry, to a church full of college students, and so it goes. A church that sings together—across generations, standing side by side, putting community unity before personal preferences—is making a powerful and attractive statement to those who yearn for community more authentic than can be enjoyed online and friendship deeper than is found in counting your Facebook friends.
Singing Together Shapes Our Legacy
Antoni Gaudi, the great Spanish architect, laid the first stone of his Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, in 1882. It is due to be completed by 2026, by which point construction will have taken 144 years. Gaudi died long ago without seeing its completion, and many others have added their expertise to his. But his cathedral will stand as an enduring legacy. He has left something beautiful behind.