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.