Comment on praise songs


Mere Orthodoxy had an excellent post on praise songs, and I wanted to comment

Matt Anderson, friend and blogger at Mere Orthodoxy, posted recently on the undying debate between praise songs and hymns. I started to comment there, but then my comment started growing so long I thought it would be easier to post it here. Read Matt's post first to get the proper context.


First off, let me grant wholeheatedly your second cheer. Though I am not a big fan of praise songs, I have to commend them for making scripture verses easily memorizable. Almost all of the bible verses I can rattle off by memory are ones that I used to sing (Psalm 5, etc).

Cheer #1 - When telling your wife you love her, is it more meaningful to just say I love you, or to sit down and write her poetry? One obviously requires more effort and is beautiful, though both could convey love.

Cheer #3 - This assumes that the individual is the most important part of the worship service and that we are gathered as individuals, not as a community of believers (or better yet, the entire church catholic). I think this underscores the big difference between those who like more traditional services and those who like contemporary. Traditional folks, like myself, see the overemphasis on the individual in society (particularly American society) and think the worship service shouldn't reinforce this. We see worship as a gathering together of God's people as a whole - not as just a bunch of individuals. This is why we like to recite confessions and prayers together, whereas contemporary-minded evangelicals would recoil at this thought because it would be inauthentic for the individual not to say whatever is personally on his mind.

Jeer #1 - I think you have hit the nail on the head here. This, along with the individual/community difference, may be the heart of the matter. For me, its not a debate about hymns vs. praise songs - both can be good, and just because something is writtten recently doesn't make it instantly bad - but rather a question of do we want to throw out long standing traditions just for what we think will be hip and bring people in? In our service at my Lutheran church, we read an Old Testament passage, responsively read a Psalm, read a New Testament passage and a Gospel passage. This along with the sermon (which properly understood should proclaim the texts we just heard - of which my pastor does a good job)

The other difference, along the same lines, is prayer. In our traditional service, it seems like we're always praying - we pray to begin the service, we pray to end the service, we pray together for confession, we pray before the sermon, we pray for all the concerns of our individual members as a body..... you get the idea. I don't remember a lot of prayer being in the more contemporary services unless it was highly directed - like the sinner's prayer after an altar call - or individualistic in nature (time of silence for individuals to pray, but not corporate prayer).


One last thought - I recently went to an ice cream social with a local Presbyterian church. To open the event, we sang hymn version of Psalm 100 together. There was probably a 100+ people singing in 4 part harmony and it was beautiful - I mean knock your socks off pretty. How sad that we might not have many churches left who have ever even heard all 4 parts and who will no longer remember how to sing hymns because we have thrown them out in favor of the uni-melody of praise songs.

Posted: Wed - July 4, 2007 at 09:39 AM | | | | | | |

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