Kathleen Norris, the American poet and author well known for her meditations on the Christian faith (The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace), refers to hymns as “the Protestant liturgy” in one of her books.
When I first encountered that phrase, I thought about it for a moment: “Yes, that's it exactly.” We all have a liturgy in our Presbyterian churches and it is the hymns we sing week by week. For many of us there is more to liturgy than that, but this much at least we all share. The hymns we sing constitute one of the main vehicles for our praise and worship.
Therefore, they should be well chosen to convey the worship of the congregation and to coordinate with the central theme of the service, usually expressed in the sermon.
And, secondly, they should be well-rehearsed by the organist, who is to grasp the sense and movement of the hymn and play in a manner that supports the singing of the congregation. That means not too fast and not too slow. The crazy idea that imaginative playing of hymns means always playing them at top speed has to be forgotten. The organist is leading the congregation in its liturgy and should play in accordance with the meaning and purpose of the hymn, allowing time for the congregation to breathe between lines, encouraging and supporting their praise of God by the manner of his or her playing.
Thirdly, the best hymns are about God and not about ourselves. As Rick Warren says in The Purpose-Driven Life, “It's not all about you.” Be suspicious of hymns that use the words “I, me, mine” too often. The point of worshipping God is worshipping God. The very word “liturgy” means “the work of the people.” We go to church to do something and to do it together: to offer the worship that belongs to God. The test of worship is not feeling good but actually offering that worship week by week. Our best hymns aid us marvelously in this regard.
Modern worship may well be in the process of being corrupted. The culture of self-centredness has allied itself with a culture of entertainment and has long since invaded our churches. We therefore use profoundly unbiblical criteria to assess worship, thinking that we are being both biblical and spiritual.
But is it biblical to be so self-centred? It is the church corporately that is the body of Christ: the emphasis is on the totality of the church and not the individual. We are the body of Christ together and then individually parts of it. Is it biblical to reduce so much to our feelings? A modern Christian preacher wrote this scathing comment on modern spirituality: “Spirituality is about being good, not about feeling good.”
For 2,000 years Christians understood only too clearly what their job, their liturgy, their work was: to gather in community to do something, to offer the worship that belongs to God. Are we now in danger of changing that so that “church” means feeling good, being entertained, being amused?
No sane person would assert that feelings don't matter: of course they do. No one that I know is opposed to jokes, amusement and human warmth. Of course we all want and value these things. But that is a very different matter than asserting that we go to church to be entertained.
“God is a Spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth for the Father seeks such to worship Him.” And why does God seek our worship? It is for our sake, not His. We are fulfilled as human beings as we relate to our Maker and Saviour in the act of worship. The creature made in the image of God seeks that after which s/he has been made. But the benefit of that can only occur when we actually worship God and not ourselves. The corruption of worship is a profound corruption of human destiny and the design of God for our lives as we seek to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
