Church music and congregational response

Loving the old hymns and encouraging respect for great music, I incorporated two classy hymns within the worship today, O God Our Help in Ages Past and Crown Him with Many Crowns. Both of these hymns have withstood the test of time and are highly regarded for their quality, their ageless texts, and their musical depth. Plus, I cannot help but mention my own respect and preference for these great hymns. Obviously my opinion is simply my own but is partly based on years of experience and training in high musical art.

Thinking I had found the recipe for the "blended" idea of worship, I surrounded these wonderful hymns with a few modern praise and worship choruses. And the congregation joined in, young and old, singing and praising the Lord. That is until we started the hymns, and suddenly the energy, the singing, the excitement disappeared. Gone. Very few people singing and nobody engaged in the process. Became distraught since I love those hymns. But I must ask the question, Why?

Are hymns old hat? Dinosaurs in an age of pop music? Anachronisms that have some kind of historical significance but little application in today's world? What has gone wrong? Can anything be done about this or should anything be done? Perhaps hymns have had their heyday and that day is gone. Not sure, and I certainly do not have the answers. What follows is conjecture.

Initially I would like to blame the lack of a powerful pipe organ for the problem. A pipe organ can lead a hymn, providing variety of voicing and sound on each stanza that allow for robust, expressive singing from congregants. In an acoustically sound environment, a pipe organ is the grandest of all instruments, bestowing comfort and excitement to anyone listening or singing. While I have mentioned before, and still stand by my assertion, that modern worship is governed at least to an extent by the architecture of the modern church, there remains, regardless of the acoustical properties or lack thereof, validity and power for an organ to lead out on hymns, imparting a high level of musical energy for proper hymn singing. Yet, this argument does not tell the whole story of the perceived problem of poor hymn singing.

I also would like to blame an ironic lack of familiarity on the poor singing. Maybe music ministers, committees, have shied away from singing the great hymns due to their complexity or label of being "high church." The less a particular hymn is sung, the less successful it will be upon its reintroduction. This is human nature in music and is true for hymns and choruses. Crown Him with Many Crowns may indeed be a great hymn but if people have rarely if ever heard it, then it stands to reason people will not sing it well. Point well taken. But in an odd "market" sense, this argument is rather weak. If demand for the so-called "great" hymn were high, would not people want to sing it? If time and value determine great art, then Crown Him ought to, by market rights, be sung with gusto in all churches.

This is not to say that great hymns are solely determined by their popularity, but it would be anathema to ignore popular inclusion of music. An individual can claim the Corvair was an outstanding vehicle, but time and public perception have stated it was not. The same could be true with music, at least to some extent, unless one is comfortable providing leadership to a small niche of people. In that case, a church would need to divide in groups, finding the ones who respond well to Crown Him with Many Crowns. Of course that never happens in our churches...or does it?

But the main problem, if it is a problem, or maybe it is simply a reality, is that congregants are seeking after a different mode of emotional expression in their music preference. Not all people necessarily, for I personally know of many who are comfortable in an entirely hymn-based high church approach, but certainly most, particularly protestants in the evangelical tradition. The world in terms of society and culture has simply progressed and this progress includes music. Rather than culture refining itself in a traditional, embracing of past musical expression mode, society has progressed to desiring a more popular sound, even in our churches.

If this is true, and it seems to be, then part of my responsibility as a music minister is to find music or create experiences using current and past music that will elicit some kind of congregational response--preferably singing to God's Glory. The mistake may not have been in doing two classic hymns, but it could have been not keeping them in the forefront of the experience plus trying to sing them in an older model. Time to reconsider.

But please do not take away the great classical hymns! Change them, add to them, recreate them, but let's keep them active.