Preparing For Worship: May 17, 2009 "Hymn Sunday"

This Sunday I have something very special planned for our worship singing time together:  We are going to have a mini "Church History Experience."  Let me explain. My generation has been the one to solidify the contemporary "worship team" environment in many churches across the world, and for many who have come to church for the first time in the last ten years, wouldn't know anything different.  

The fact is, the church worship team is still a very recent development in church history.  From the 1800s up until the late 1980s and early 1990s, most churches sang their hymns not with a band made up of drums, bass, guitars, and keyboards, but with an organ or piano, and a choir.  The congregation used to read and sing along with lyrics that weren't projected onto a big screen, but that were printed in their hymnals! 

The choir was really the driving force behind this style of congregational worship, and they really were the worship team of their time.  The choir would often perform special anthems on particular Sundays in the liturgical calendar, or as a call to worship. 

The shift from the choir to worship team setting took most of the 1990s to occur, and the debate has raged since the beginning of whether one style was better or more "right" than the other, but the worship team has proven that it is here to stay, and much of the 2000s has experienced this as the norm.

Wherever you may fall on the scale of preference or conviction in this area, I believe that it's important to know and appreciate where the church as we know it has come from.  The church is a living and changing organism, and no point in history exists in a vacuum, but is a result of ebb and flow, and action and reaction.

More importantly, God doesn't have a favorite musical style. He created music as a beautiful and many faceted gift that we are to offer back up to him in all its forms and styles.  It's like any external act or offering; God looks at the heart behind it, not necessarily at the thing itself.  So whether we're singing with an organ, a 60-piece orchestra, or drums and electric guitars; if the desire of our heart is to lift up and honor the name of the Lord, he will be pleased

So, this Sunday we are going to travel back to the time of hymnals and organs for our worship singing!  We don't have a choir (yet!), but maybe after this Sunday there will be enough interest...(hint hint).

We're going to sing hymns that we already sing here at Crossroads so you won't have to learn all new songs, but we're just going to sing them in a new (or old, depending on how you look at it!) way.

We'll start with "All Creatures of Our God and King" and "The Solid Rock" as our call to worship.  Pastor Todd will come and lead in prayer and have us greet each other and visitors.  I'll come and explain a little bit about the hymnals and how the printed music works, and I'm going to do a little experiement with what we in the music biz call "sight reading." :)

We'll sing "Immortal, Invisible God, Only Wise," and then Pastor Todd will come and preach to us from Matthew 7 about The Truth of Falsehood.

After the sermon, we'll sing one NEW hymn (meaning it's been written in the last decade or so), "In Christ Alone" reminding ourselves that our hope isn't in something as silly as mysic style, but it's in Christ who took the wrath of God for us that we might have eternal life!