Proclaimer Blog
The songword bullies
Few things are as likely to stir ire (and lead to an extended post bag) than challenging some of the vocabulary of our best loved songs. It’s extraordinary really. I love hymns and old songs, but I have an equally strong distaste for archaisms. Singing, you see is a ministry of the word (I read that somewhere, in the Bible maybe?) and one, though not the only, reason we use modern Bible translations is that they are comprehensible. If we are to sing the word to one another we need to apply the same criteria.
Why don’t we? It’s in part, at least, because we’ve privatised singing. I’m happy and content singing what I like. It’s not about serving others. If the words mean something to me, then how dare you change them! We had some of the same debates when gradually moving away from the AV and we now need to resist the songword bullies and have the debates again with some of our sung ministry of the word.
I’m still going to sing hymns. Don’t put me down as one of those contemporary music only people. Not me! But in one sense I do want everything to be contemporary, by which I mean understandable. Otherwise we might as well be singing in another language, untranslated. And we all know what the Bible says about that.