What does the church have to sing about?

Up to 30% of an average Sunday service can be singing or other music. Unless your preacher is paid by the minute, of course, when anything is possible and Sunday roasts risk being burnt.

This is a guesstimate, but one born of long experience. If you count 5 hymns (at least three minutes each) plus introits and music over communion, sung liturgical prayers (if that is your tradition), chants or background music for prayers or readings (if that is yours) or the inevitable organ voluntaries (for traditions that are left) it is easy to see how an hour-long service can contain 20 minutes or more of music. Where would worship be without it?

Possibly better off, I venture to suggest, without at least some of it. And this is a musician talking. First, that music before the service. What is wrong with silence (for prayer)? Or chatting for that matter (for fellowship)? If a musical signal is required, ten seconds of musical 'worship alert' in an appropriate mood could be as effective, and more appropriate, than minutes of liturgical muzak whose only function is to stop at a given signal to indicate that the 'real thing' is about to start.

And then those hymns, or at least any of them with more than four verses. Those little asterisks mean something - these verses are optional. Yes, the president must announce which verses are not to be sung! There is nothing in canon law against it, I assure you. Hymns of five and six verses(or heaven preserve us, more than six verses) are justified only in vast buildings, where liturgical processions take time, or in ordinary churches at the offertory/collection where there is most liturgical action to cover, or where the words really are of exceptional quality (which is rarer than we think). Five verses of a six-line hymn between the epistle and the gospel is a distraction from the sequence of the readings, not an opportunity to praise God. For many small congregations, two or three verses for an opening or closing hymn will be perfectly adquate, and would avoid the spiritual suffocation of lurching one's way through yet another verse of a mediocre (but thematically impeccable) hymn sung too slowly by an uncertain and scattered group of worshippers.

Music over communion can of course be beautiful. But once in a while, let us remember that it is silence, not music, that is golden. Once a month give the organist, music group or choir a rest. And not for a whole liturgical season, please. Sundays in Lent are not fast days, musically or in any other way.

Background music for prayers and readings, or chants between them, are a matter of taste. But let it be good taste, and ring the changes here as in any matter of aesthetic judgement. Liturgical seasons offer opportunity here, however un-liturgical you may feel.

To summarise, rather than adding music (or words) to our worship, look for opportunities to introduce more silence. This is a whole topic in itself. But does it take a musician to appreciate the value of no sounds at all as a spiritual experience? One motto for improvising musicians goes: 'Before you make a sound, ask yourself if it will be more meaningful than the silence it will break.'

Good advice for liturgists. And if you will forgive the musical pun, sometimes a rest is as good as a change.

In the late eighties the United Reformed Church in the UK published a new hymnal 'Rejoice and Sing!. My friend of the time, daughter of an elder and a minister (at different churches), delighted in mis-hearing the proposed title as 'Rejoice and Sin!' Stern looks from St Paul in heaven, no doubt, and giggles from the rest of us.

But singing and sinning have a long history. St Augustine, whose neurosis about sin (original or otherwise) has permeated nearly all Christian thought, wrote in his confessions that 'Whenever I am more moved by the music than by what is being sung I know I have sinned grievously.'

Whether this stopped him being moved by music I don't know, but I guess he was no philistine. The problem, of course, is words. The history of church music is in no small measure the history of how music has sought equal status with words, and been subjugated at almost every turn. Augustine starts the trouble, Gregory perpetuates it, and the counter-reformation seals the matter. Since the 17th century church music, having been the greatest art music of the greatest musicians for a thousand years, yielded its laurel to opera and secular music. And opera had no qualms about letting its liberated music speak louder than its often paltry words.

The problem survives today. I have had a choral setting of the old Sarum prayer 'God be in my head' rejected by a publisher on the grounds that 'there is already a setting of these words in the repertoire', as if this alone was reason enough. Had he looked at my score? Had he thought whether my music (very different from either Walford Davies or Rutter) might give worshippers a different experience of these words? If he had done so, he might have rejected my work on any number of musical grounds. But no. Words were the priority.

Mendelssohn is famous for saying that music cannot be put into words, not because it is too vague, but because it is too precise. Yes! A thousand times yes! We must read a whole sentence or paragraph to grasp a writer's latest thought, taking seconds or more. But a composer's or performer's momentary changes in harmony, dynamic, rhythm or timbre can instantly change our world of experience as we listen to music, a dozen times perhaps in the time it takes to read one written thought. When it comes to influencing or expressing our lived experience, music is infinitely faster and more precise than words.

Is it then that the church is against 'lived experience', preferring eternal and unchanging truths? Jeremy Begbie puts forward (in Theology, Music and Time) the view that music is essentially incarnational. It is not about eternity, but about time, about now, about God with us in the moment.

Seen in that light, church music could be a lot more exciting than it's usual predictable self, seeking ever different kinds of 'lived experience' through different tones, rhythms, timbres, rather than evermore of the 'eternal same', be it hymns, choruses or chants for organ, guitar or choir.

And I might be getting a royalty cheque from my publisher.

For Paddington Station (London), get the tube to Lancaster Gate and walk. Good advice, but in the lift as you ascend from the tube, there is a poster advertising the local church. (I'll be discrete and not name the church.) Service times, denomination, address .. OK. But what else does it want to tell us about it's life?

Professional Choir at all services.

What's going on here? Is it a monastery, with 'professed/professional' monks or nuns? No. Is it some relic of the private chapel, singing mass for the soul of some long deceased benefactor? No. It is a mainstream church, in a wealthy part of London no doubt, but an ordinary part of the body of Christ living out its Christian mission in the big city. And all it wants to say about the spiritual life of its congregation is that it pays professionals to sing every time it meets for worship.

I've no doubt they are excellent, and as a musician I know what an important source of income such work can be for struggling young singers. But is this really the most important thing about this church's life? What of its ministry to the young, the old, the family, the single person? What of its sacramental life? Its social life? What are the issues it sees itself engaging with in its community?

Not to mention the daft question, does anyone actually sing here without being paid for it?

So much for my first rant. Choirs can be a beautiful enrichment of worship. I could lose every orchestral piece ever written if I could keep the choral repertoire. But if the choir has become the most attractive feature of your church, I hear Amos in the distance, quoting God (and I approximate):

How I hate your noisy songs! What I want is justice, not sacrifice.

Look for something better to put on your church poster.