Singing In Worship

LOCH A TUATH NEWS March 2002

I am due to speak at a conference in Cardiff this month: the annual theological study conference of the British Evangelical Council, which this year is dealing with the topic "Improving Worship: worship as God intended".

My remit was to prepare a paper entitled "Worshipping the living God", and this will appear on the church website after the Conference. Others deal with topics like "Worship and the Gospel", "Continuity and contemporariness in worship" and "New wineskins for new wine -- from Old Testament to New Testament worship".

At one level, the theme of the conference is a reflection of what the contemporary Christian media is calling "worship wars": there is an apparent tension in churches between traditional and modern styles. Controversies over worship surface in every denomination: chan ann anns an aon aite a tha an t-olc!

At least one of the contributors has raised strong objections to the position of my own church: that of exclusive psalmody in worship. Old arguments are being thrown at us yet again: that we are using Old Covenant forms which are out of place in the New Covenant church. The debate rages from study conferences to the Stornoway Gazette; even ultra conservative organisations like the Banner of Truth are now publishing material refuting the position that exclusive psalmody was the historical position of the church.

I actually think that there are issues facing the church which are of greater importance than the war over psalmody and hymnody, not least the evangelisation of our lost world and the need to cultivate strong expository preaching. The last decade has seen the rise of the 'worship leader' -- the person whose function it is to hit the right beat and strike the right note for the singing -- but it has also seen the eclipse of the preacher.

In my view the biblical pattern is that the preacher IS the worship leader, because the preaching of the Gospel is central to truly biblical worship. Yet we have devalued preaching -- of which the split in our own denomination two years ago was a shocking symptom, and continues to be.

But back to psalmody -- what we sing in our worship is, of course, just as important as what we preach, since there is no part of our worship that is not to be regulated by the Scriptures. But given that the Old Testament saints, the New Testament apostles, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Scottish Church up until the end of the nineteenth century all used the psalms exclusively, the burden of proof rests with those who believe that in singing God's praises in public services of worship we are warranted to add to the hymnbook that God as provided.

Why do I love the psalms? Because they are the inspired Word of God, they speak constantly of Jesus, and a lifetime of singing them has etched the Scriptures on my mind in an incomparable way. What better way to learn the Bible than to sing it over and over again?

That, of course, can never be the whole story. We may have the best hymn book -- but do we have the best singing? After all, as John Stott, keen birdwatcher that he was, reminded us -- one thing we have in common with the birds is the ability to sing; and in his book The Birds our Teachers he reminds us that "the most appropriate of all occasions for singing is the public worship of Almighty God" and that "the joyful song of the redeemed is heard only in Christian churches". Let us make sure that our singing of God's praise is all that it could be!