This Sunday at Seneca Presbyterian Church we will be celebrating worship. We will welcome David Gambrell, an Associate for Worship from the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) - our "mother" denomination. David is coming to introduce a new hymnal that our denomination is publishing entitled Glory to God. In the weeks to come, we at SPC will be deciding if this hymnal can be a tool for deepening our experience of God in worship.Our choir will be singing one of the selections from the new hymnal that may be new to us. It is "Here in This Place" by Marty Haugen, sometimes called "Gather Us In." I once had the privilege of meeting Marty. It was at a spirituality conference at Montreat - our denomination's conference center in western North Carolina. My ministerial duties at the time were focused on education. The conference was introducing Way to Live - a book about spiritual practices for teens. That feature was my motivation for attending the conference, but I came away with so much more.
Marty was the musician for the conference. Because our group was small - about thirty - we had a wonderful opportunity to get to know him and experience much of his music. He offered us a concert devoted to the hymns and songs he has composed across a lifetime, but it was actually more of a sing-a-long than concert. As he introduced his songs and then led us in the singing, I was drawn to the depth of his theology and to his melodies. But most of all, I was drawn to the person who spoke so eloquently of the place of music in worship. After the concert, I thanked him for reminding me that the music of worship is the sung prayers of the people. His reply was, "No, thank you."
Ask any theologian from any Christian tradition and they will define worship/liturgy as the "work of the people." When we gather to worship God, we see the congregation of God's people "at work." We engage in practices that have formed and nurtured faith for centuries. We welcome each other in God's name. We praise God. We pray to God. We confess our sins. We receive God's forgiveness offered to us in the name and by the power of Jesus Christ. We hear God's Word and then seek to understand and live it more deeply. We affirm what we believe. We pray for one another. We dedicate our lives to serve God as disciples of Jesus Christ. And we sing.
The role of the worship leaders - pastor, liturgist, choir - is to help the congregation do its work. Yet too often they are the ones perceived as the workers - or even worse, the performers. That can be especially true with music. The worship leaders who are musicians - for us our organist and choir and band - do offer to us the gift of their talents. They work hard and prepare well in order to offer that gift. Listening to them with the heart of faith deepens our faith. I once had a seminary professor who said frequently that just listening to St. Matthew's Passion was an altar call for him. So the music of worship is often the sung prayers of the choir and the organ - and the guitarist and the drummer and the keyboardist. But if that is how we perceive the primary role of music in worship, we shortchange ourselves.
For in the end, it is what we do that draws us most deeply to God. And that includes singing, on pitch or not.
I'm looking forward to learning more about our denomination's new hymnal. I am anxious to see how Glory to God can serve us by offering the workers of worship - the congregation - greater opportunity to deepen our faith. Because when we sing, we praise God; we confess our sins; we affirm what we believe; we seek to understand and live the faith we profess. We do all that in concert - in melody - with all those who worship with us. And that, my friends, is a gift to God.
