Prayer, praise and singing in church
Tony Payne / Briefing #178 / May 1996 /
Our series of articles on prayer and praise stimulated a number of responses, the majority of them being short notes and calls about how helpful the material had been.
On the subject of prayer, and particularly the Top Shelf book recommendations, Tom Cannon from Melbourne dropped us some email:
Good work on prayer, particularly the advice to read Calvin on the subject. As for books published in the last 20 years ... you obviously have not read “Pray with your eyes open” by Richard Pratt (published by Presbyterian and Reformed). Maybe not a masterpiece, but very biblical, and not a hint of muddled mysticism. Pratt is an Old Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando (and will be lecturing at the Sydney Presbyterian Theological Centre in July).
A couple of people also recommended Spurgeon's 12 Sermons on Prayer and Bunyan's Prayer as worthy additions to the Prayer Top Shelf.
The article on ‘praise’ prompted Margaret Stuart to ponder why we sing in church in the first place:
Sometimes it seems like church meetings use singing
- to settle everyone down at the beginning of the service and wait for the stragglers to come in;
- to allow passing a plate around for money to be less socially icky;
- to give us all a chance to stretch before and after the sermon.
All of these are quite valid, but it strikes me that we could sing ANYTHING to facilitate this. And looking around the congregation, some people COULD be singing anything, because they aren't thinking!
My conclusion is that perhaps we can do without singing in church, and sometimes I think that might be a good idea. When the average Aussie only sings in public when they are drunk or when it is someone's birthday, how awesomely horrible must it be to walk into a church and have to not only sing, but sing stuff you don't know, unsupported by anything more potent than communion wine?
The scary thing is that I love singing and I couldn't get by without it!
I have some sympathy with Margaret's views. Many Christians seem to regard music almost as a sacred activity in itself, without which true ‘worship’ or ‘praise’ could not take place. However, this misunderstands not only ‘worship’ and ‘praise’ but the place of music in relation to them. In the New Testament, singing is portrayed as a helpful and worthwhile corporate activity, both as a means of teaching and encouraging one another (as in Col 3:16), and as a natural human way to express the inexpressible joy that is ours in Christ (Jas 5:13). I think it would be strange if we never sang, but Margaret is right to see that music is a pragmatic element in our church meetings, rather than an essential one. As such, it is an element which we are also free not to use if the needs of the moment so dictate.
