Mumblo jumblo

Today, two times over, I was reminded of why men need to be in the habit of using microphones when they speak in church gatherings.  Otherwise rational, sensical men can overestimate their voice volume in a sort of false machismo: “Oh, I don’t need to use one of those.” And often, what they say, unamplified, is wasted.

The very “meaningful” essence of what I picked up from one of the communion prayers today was “mumble, mumble, mumble.”  I also completely missed any sense of (what I assume was) a sincere, heartfelt confession from another man who needed a mic but didn’t realize it.

When speaking publicly–no matter your gender–it is important to speak a) slowly and b) at an audible volume. Otherwise, you may not be understood … and then, why speak?

MM: theology and song variants

This “Monday Music” installment will deal briefly with the implications of variations in songs.

Having lived in quite a few states, and having sung Christian songs and hymns in all of them and more, I notice regional variants.  You know—the common-practice-here, but never-heard-it-that-way-elsewhere discrepancies of text, tune, rhythm, and even harmony.  One of my (least) favorites is the adulteration of Michael Card’s beautiful prayer “Jesus, Let Us Come To Know You.”  The song was originally in quadruple time, but in someone’s presumably innocent, but illegal, translation to an a cappella, congregational setting, it was morphed into triple meter, resulting in a change of the basic character of the song.  Nevermind that in actual practice, this song is typically sung in something between triple and quadruple meter; the point is that songs can often find themselves changed.  Practices can be different from place to place, or from denomination to denomination.

Most of these variants, I think, are de facto results of carelessness and are relatively harmless.  Some changes are quite intentional, however—such as the word change from “Come We that Love the Lord” to “Come Ye that Love the Lord” or the change from “Come, Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing” to the less immanent “O Thou Fount,” and the watering down of Bob Kauflin’s original harmonies in “I Stand in Awe of You.”  Even the venerable “Holy, Holy, Holy” appears in some hymnals with the more conceptually worshipful “God over all, and blest eternally” instead of the mainline orthodoxy in the original “God in three Persons—blessed Trinity.”  I can’t say whether this was a theological move or not, but I know I prefer the former.

In recent decades, our denomination’s semi-obsession with using language that acknowledges the Holy Spirit led to changing Bill Maxwell’s popular “Light the Fire.”  His words were “You breathe new life right through me,” but in a move toward the more explicit, however less subtly poetic, our people caught onto the song with this replacement line: “Your Spirit moves right through me.”

Last Sunday, our preacher led the children’s song “My God Is So Big,” and he added something I hadn’t heard before.  Following the words “There’s nothing my God cannot do,” I was accustomed to two stompings of feet or clappings of hands, but Peter sang the words “for you” in the place of those two emphatic quarter notes.  Most of those in the congregation seemed to know it this way, too.  I don’t know which version is the original, but I was immediately impressed that the theology of this song is better without the “for you.”

What do you think about this particular variant, or others that may come to mind?