I was visiting my parents recently. As I sometimes do when I visit them, I sat down at the piano and started playing and singing some hymns. As I was doing that, my mom said something to the effect of, “I love hearing these hymns. It reminds me of going to church when I was young.”
The reason that struck me so much is that my mom is 86 years old. She was young in the 1930s. Yet, many of those hymns are hymns that remain in the United Methodist hymnal. Not all of them, of course. There have been some changes to the hymnal over the years, and there have been some supplemental hymnals published. Still, in many United Methodist churches, you’ll hear the same hymns that were sung in church seventy and eighty years ago.
Now, the fact that these hymns are seventy or more years old does not automatically make them bad. I love a lot of them myself. Still, name another thing in our society that has stayed the same over seventy or eighty years. There may be some, but it’s a pretty short list.
Eighty years ago, not only was there no internet, a lot of places didn’t even have telephones. If you wanted to communicate with someone over a distance, you wrote a letter, which might take several days to get where it was supposed to go. Eighty years ago, not only was airplane travel still a novelty, many people still rode horses to get where they wanted to go. And, of course, the music of eighty years ago was quite different from the music of today.
It may be nice to feel one is lending stability to an unstable world. Still, for many people, singing the hymns of eighty years ago in church is as foreign as riding a horse to get to church. It’s not that it would be wrong, exactly. It’s just that it would seem like a really unusual thing to do.
While I was visiting my parents, my mom told me something else, something I don’t remember hearing before. She said that when my grandfather was a pastor in Youngstown, Ohio, back in the 1920s, he would sometimes arrange to have Charlie Chaplin movies shown in the church to help draw a crowd for services. For those of you too young to know, Charlie Chaplin was the most famous movie comedian of his day. So, in other words, what my grandfather was doing was using what was popular at the time in order to get people to church so he could share God’s word and God’s love with them.
That, in turn, reminded me of what people like Martin Luther and Charles Wesley used to do to write hymns. They would take tunes that were popular in their time and put Christian words to them. Again, they were using what was popular the time so they could share God’s word and God’s love with them.
Sometimes we like to think of “contemporary” worship services as something new and different. As we read in Ecclesiastes, though, there really is nothing new under the sun. My grandfather was doing a contemporary worship service in the 1920s. It looked different from what we do today because the times are different today, but the principle was the same. Start with where people are and with things that are familiar to them and use those things to share God’s word and God’s love with them.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the hymns that were popular in the 1920s and the 1930s. I’m not saying we should get rid of them entirely. The message they have is still a message that we need. However, using what was popular in the 1920s to communicate with people in 2012 will seem as unusual to them as would riding a horse to church in 2012. As the churches of our parish move forward, let’s use what’s popular today to reach the people of today. Let’s start where people are and use what’s familiar to them to share God’s word and God’s love with them.
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