Singing New Songs for the Future of the Church

Singing new songs is important. The Psalmists repeatedly called for people to “Sing to the LORD a new song.”¹ Not only is there precedent for this in Scripture, it’s also one of the many great traditions passed down to us by our ancestors in the faith. Christians and churches have been writing and singing new songs for millennia. I’m of the opinion that churches should be singing new songs, and maybe even writing them if able. Intentionally avoiding the use of new songs not only harms your congregation, it also threatens the future of the church.

Only Hymnals?

I recently read an article in which the author argued for the use of hymnals in worship. The goal of the author was not merely to make a positive evaluation of hymnals, however. Really, the author wanted to make his opinion clear that churches should only be using hymnals, and that, among other things, they should stop projecting lyrics on screens. I’m not particularly interested in responding point-by-point to that entire article, as others have done, but I do want to comment on one of the arguments he made that stuck out to me. In the midst of his treatise, the author made the claim that using hymnals exclusively actually aids the introduction of new songs to the church by giving them a sense of validity.

Before I continue, let me give two preliminary qualifications. I love old hymns. As someone who is responsible for selecting the songs that my church sings in our worship gatherings, I incorporate old hymns in our gatherings every week. In fact, one of my favorite songs of all time is “Be Thou My Vision,” which is translated from ancient Irish text that scholars date as early as the 6th century and as late as the 11th.²

Second, I have nothing against hymnals. The hymnal is a wonderful tool that has helped churches the world over to worship in song together. Praise God for that!

Now, having said that, I found this argument for using only hymnals to be somewhat perplexing. There are clear advantages to using digital screens/projection to display lyrics when it comes to the ability to incorporate new music in the life of the church. To help you understand why, let me pose the following question: where do you think we got the songs that are currently in our hymnals? They didn’t just fall from the sky. They had to be written and then used by churches. Even the oldest of hymns was once a new song that some church somewhere had to try out.

Now I know that the person who wrote that article isn’t opposed to doing new songs in principle. However, he did make it quite clear that he would have us all restrict the list of songs used in congregational worship to those found in published hymnals, and this is exactly where the argument falls apart.

Songs don’t make it into hymnals by simply existing. They have to be sung. In order for a new song to even be considered for inclusion in a hymnal, it’s likely that it will already need to be in use in multitudes of churches. Or, the writer will need some sort of inside connection with the publisher. And for those songs that don’t fit these criteria, many people would be quite content to just leave them out of the church’s worship entirely. If everyone followed this methodology, we’d never have any new songs! Either that or the only new songs we would ever get would be the ones written by people who are friends of the publishers.

New Songs and the New Testament

This is where I’d like to present an argument of my own and draw a parallel between the spread of new worship songs and the formation of the New Testament. If you think that’s a stretch, just hear me out. The reason that we have Bibles today is because early Christians made untold copies of Christian texts and sent them all over the ancient world for use in the worship of local congregations.³

These copies produced by the early church don’t come to us as whole Bibles neatly arranged with all the books in the exact order we have them in today. Rather, they come to us in short fragments, groups of letters, and smaller collections of books.

The early church painstakingly evaluated these various writings in order to come to an agreement as to what should be included in the Bible. This procedure wasn’t one of selection as much as it was one of recognition. It also wasn’t a top-down process carried out by some hierarchical church authority, contrary to the conspiracies peddled by modern “skeptics.” It was a natural, bottom-up process of churches the world over incorporating the New Testament scriptures in their worship and eventually coming to see that there were some books that they all shared in common.

The grassroots nature of the canonization process is actually a feature, not a bug. If the New Testament canon really had been forced onto churches, we would have less reason to be confident in the authenticity of that canon. We would need to trust in whatever council or hierarchy produced it. In reality, we don’t need to have those concerns. There was no secret council that met to include some books and exclude others. That process took place naturally and the global Christian community eventually came to a basic level of agreement about it. As a result of this process, Christians still share the same scriptures today.⁴

Finding New Songs

In this, I think we see a wonderful analogy to the way that each generation of Christians discovers the new songs that eventually become the “classics” for future generations. New songs are passed from church to church and the ones that leave a lasting impact on the most congregations end up being used all over the world and preserved for years to come. These are the songs from our past that often ended up in hymnals and have stuck around for decades and centuries. They weren’t only included in hymnals because of connections to publishers.

Most of the new songs churches are writing and singing won’t stick around for ages to come, but that’s okay! That’s how it has always been. Even the hymnals some of us still have in our churches are an incredibly narrow selection of the many songs that were written in ages past, and I’d be willing to bet that most churches that use hymnals only implement a relatively small portion of the songs available to them.

There are probably thousands upon thousands of worship songs from church history that have been completely lost to the sands of time. We should thank God that our ancestors in the faith sang the new songs of ages past and found the gems that have been passed on to us. We wouldn’t have “Be Thou My Vision” if churches hadn’t been willing to sing new songs that weren’t already in their hymnals.⁵

It’s an exciting time to be involved in musical worship in the church. We are living at a time of innovation that has provided easier access to new songs for churches than ever. Modern technologies such as computers, TVs, and projectors have enabled new songs to be sent across the world and used by churches all over the planet in a matter of days at little to no cost, rapidly accelerating the proliferation of new songs. Because of this, there are more songs being passed around from church to church than ever before. Many of the songs we are writing and singing today will be used by many generations to come, and we get to be a part of finding them.⁶

To remove yourself from this process by using only songs that are already published in hymnals is to eliminate your voice from finding the new songs that will be passed on to future generations of Christians. Every time you sing a new song with your church, and every time you share a new worship song with a friend, you participate in this great tradition. So, sing new songs! Print them, project them, memorize them; do whatever you must. Do it for the glory of God, and for the future of the church.