When the Psalms Stop Marching In

Why Psalmless Churches Invite Their Own Slow Death

Churches that regularly sing the Psalms like they mean it are more likely to remain standing over the long haul than churches that don't.

I have come to the realisation that churches that do not make a point of singing (and meaning) the psalms in our time are willingly giving themselves over to a form of long-term cancer.

The Thing About Psalms

There are many different reasons why churches decay and decline. It’s rarely just one or two things, and there is no magical one-size-fits-all solution. But a Church’s health depends largely on its faith, on whether it is willing to hear and do the Word of God without shame. And just as there are things which churches can do to be more faithful, there are also things churches can stop doing which invite faithlessness, especially over the long haul, where what starts happening to them will not seem especially dramatic, but it will still be happening.

In my last four posts I’ve been speaking about ways in which the Church allows itself to be conquered in the face of the stronger cultural advance of Islam. One of the reasons the Church lost its confidence—and in turn, the culture of the West upon which the Church was so influential—is that it stopped owning and proclaiming its convictions unashamedly before its mockers and scoffers.

This is where the psalms come in. The psalter contains within it the keys to so much else in Scripture which modern churches spend so much of their time trying to avoid. And there are few better ways to own and reinforce your convictions than to sing them out loud on a regular basis. It’s almost as if God made the Psalms as interesting and challenging as he did for good reason!

What’s so special about the psalms? Aren’t they just songs, giving us a few starters-for-ten for inspiration for all the many other songs which we might write ourselves to praise Him? No, actually. There is a qualitative difference between the psalms and any other songs. They are God’s inspired songs, the songs we are called to sing, the songs Jesus himself sang. They ought to be the lamp for all other songs we sing, not on a mere even footing with the rest, like some bonus hymnbook placed in our Bibles for convenience in case we don’t have anything more interesting to hand. The Psalms are supposed to lead us in our worship.

The Worship We Choose

Evangelical churches have so often basked in our freedom to sing however we like as long as it’s not obviously heretical (though subtle heresies often creep in unannounced). There certainly is an important sense of Christian liberty in worship which should not be lost here. But over time the kind of worship we choose will form us in a particular way. An approach which elevates “freedom” above all else may be especially prone to wander from the Word when something more immediately appealing comes to mind.

It’s true, as Gandalf famously said, that “not all who wander are lost”. However, as the psalmist also said—and with far greater consequence—

“Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.”

—Psalm 1:1-4

It seems that the way to long-term fruitfulness and faithfulness is to delight in the Word of God, to meditate on it regularly, to refuse to be diverted from it by joining the cultural forces which sway us to drift off the path.

Because the modern Church has so prized the freedom of not-necessarily-singing-the-psalms (arguably another species of the legalism of anti-legalism) neglected swathes of Scriptural truth, especially the kind that does not gel with the zeitgeists of our cultural or ecclesial moment. There are parts of the psalms which most compromised evangelical leaders of our time would judge as having an “inappropriate tone”, and which become even more “inappropriate” because you are singing them.

In our own church now we sing one or two psalms every service. You often find yourself singing lines that surprise you, with truths that you notice especially because you are singing them, as though you’ve never actually heard them properly before until you hear them coming out of your own voice box. “Does it really say that? Am I really allowed to sing that?” Yes, you are. Jesus did too.

Perhaps some contemporary worshippers try to convince themselves that they will “eventually” get round to singing some of the neglected psalms at some point, but somehow they never manage it, leaving perhaps 80 or 90% of the content of the psalms out of their worship for the rest of their lives. Where did it say in the New Testament that you were allowed to disregard the psalms you don’t like?

I am certainly not an advocate of “exclusive psalmody”—where you refuse to sing anything but the psalms—but I can see why some people want to reach that conclusion, even if it contradicts Paul’s encouragement in Eph. 5:19 to “sing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”, for example. But the modern Church has largely forgotten that it seems no coincidence that the psalms are mentioned first, as a kind of foundation for any subsequent hymns and songs. The psalms are meant to inform the rest not to become merely cherrypicked for a little inoffensive inspiration for a line here and there.

We have wasted too many worship times. We have come to them looking merely for a personal experience rather than to be trained by them and brought into greater confessional solidarity in worship to this strange and glorious God, a God who quite unexpectedly appears to love us more than we could ever express, more than we could ever feel. We have often gotten stuck merely on the fact that he loves us. We have taken this aspect for ourselves, stealing away to perpetually tell ourselves over and over again that he loves us (“Oh, how he loves us…”).

This would not in itself be a problem if we weren’t so lopsided, if we were not simultaneously neglecting much else about Him and how He relates to us. We have been taught a myopically narrow view of God and his kingdom, one that shrinks not only our theological mind but our heart and stomach too. As Anthony Esolen has said, in a book called Defending Boyhood:

“Bad music lets the chest cave in…An elderly minister once told me, and my experience confirms it, that when a congregation is about to go bad, the first thing to be corrupted will be the music.”

This is as much about how things are sung as what is being sung. There should be a connection between what we sing and the way we sing, being attentive to the words and the music simultaneously. This corresponds to the way that what we sing is “lived out” in the life of the Church, not always in a “literal” sense (e.g. dashing enemy infants’ heads against rocks!), but in such a way that the words we sing truly inform how we think of our enemies and our people and our God, and shape the way we live in accordance with what God’s Word really says.

Over the Mighty Waves

To give one brief example, I have found David Erb’s rendition of Psalm 93 especially good precisely because it also represents the minor notes which so often accompany the storms of life, along with the tubthumping hope that pulls us out again. See especially the contrast between the threat of verse 3 and the overpowering deliverance of verse 4:

“The floods have lifted up, O Lord,
The floods have lifted up their voice;
The floods lift up their waves.

The Lord on high is mightier
Than the noise of many waters,
Than the mighty waves of the sea.”

In Erb’s setting of the psalm, the rising and falling of the music perfectly echoes the lifting up of the floods and their ensuing chaos before being engulfed by the roar of the higher, all-conquering line, “The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters and the mighty waves of the sea”.

You can tell someone that God is bigger than your problems. Or you can roar it out in song, in unison. It would appear that the book in the middle of the Bible gives us at least a hundred and fifty hints that the latter option is advisable. This is why the psalms are so profound, because they reach you in the depths of your experience and then launch you back into God’s arms.

A few months ago, I remember being so encouraged to hear my then-6-year old daughter was singing the words to that psalm around the house in that melody. She could have been singing nursery rhymes or pop songs, but she was singing psalm 93. It made my week! Life can be hard. There are times when work, home, church, life in general, can feel like it’s driven and tossed by the waves and dramas of life. But at the very least, you can put the words of Scripture in your children’s mouths, that they may take them with them wherever they go.

You can pray that those words stay with them, and find their way into their hearts, “so that [they] may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” (Eph. 4:14).

As with children, so with churches, for what are we but children in the arms of our heavenly Father?

Long-Term Stability

Churches that regularly sing the Psalms like they mean it are more likely to remain standing over the long haul than churches that don't.

The evidence of the problem is visible in the fruit of the modern western church which has almost everywhere softened in its Biblical convictions to varying degrees, and where there is very little evidence of multigenerational vitality and faithfulness. If you look at any individual evangelical church today, for example, it can seem healthy. But the goal is steadfastness to the end, not for a few decades, and to be able to pass those convictions on to future generations who can go further with them in advancing the kingdom.

I have seen very little evidence that such long-term steadfastness is happening across the board, and I see the primary problem as being rooted in a loss of conviction over the functional authority of Scripture. This is something which is categorically harder to do if you are regularly confronted with the whole counsel of God in a meaningful way.

I read a tweet recently which highlighted the wider kingdom significance of psalm-singing with a tone of appropriately psalm-like lament for its absence:

“Yesterday at church we sang Psalm 2 together, and I cried - hadn't realized quite how homesick I am for Scotland and singing Psalms every Sunday. It is so nourishing for the soul and I long for the English church to get on board with it.”

It’s curious how psalm-singing has almost become, for many, a kind of “niche” thing. How did that happen? Why was it a “Scottish” thing? Well, because John Knox took the reformation of worship very seriously, for sure.

But here, no doubt some will say: Have you seen the state of the Church of Scotland today? Did Psalm-singing save them? Indeed, look at the Church of England too, which commits to evensong every week, and often does so with beautiful musical arrangement, and yet these churches are still in decline—rapid decline, in fact. Yes, these historic denominations have maintained the “tradition” of psalm-singing, but the difference is that most of them no longer really mean it; even if they enjoy it, they do not mean it.

I’ve sat in evensong before, thinking how strange it is that the words of the psalms seem to bear so little correlation with the actions of the churches that sing them. It’s as though, because they are sung in the KJV, it gives them a license to see them as “archaic”, merely for their aesthetic beauty rather than the spiritual power to which that aesthetic beauty points.

The point is not merely to sing psalms simply because it's part of the normal cycle of a church’s liturgy. Nor is it to merely sing the palatable bits of some psalms here and there by inserting a phrase or a motif into an otherwise modern song. It's not just about whether a church “does psalm-singing,” it's about whether a church means its psalm-singing and lives accordingly. I believe that meaningful psalm-singing is often a lynchpin for faithfulness in many other areas of ecclesial life.

Preparing for the Storms

Being meaningfully confronted by the psalms in a way that is participatory (as they were intended) makes it harder to avoid the other parts of God's Word which, over years of neglect, come to be seen as “problematic”. Many psalms, for example, become literally “unsingable” in most modern churches because there is no theological framework for them; they seem to present an entirely different view of God than the one on which such churches have been living.

Such churches are not wholly wrong in their view of God—that he is loving and gracious and gentle and merciful, etc.—it's just a selectively myopic view of God, usually presented on their own terms and for their own benefit. Such a view of God is also generally preferred by liberal secular culture, which likes a God that doesn’t offend them, a God who simply loves everyone and anyone indiscriminately with no borders or boundaries, as though he really isn’t loving anyone or anything at all. One thing the Psalms teach you is that the actual God of the Bible fails the offensiveness test time and time again.

So, whilst this partial view of God and His Word may sustain a congregation for a time—because there is indeed some truth in it, and because their faith in God is genuine—it tends not to last over the long haul unless it is further buttressed by the fuller Biblical picture. Why? Because at some point the storms of life and upheaval will come—“the floods lift up their waves” (Ps. 93:3)—through scoffers and mockers who will offer alternative “counsel” (Ps. 1:1) which will beat against and ultimately undermine the foundations of that house (Matt. 7:24-27).

Depending on the kinds of attack we face in this or that generation, the price for our neglect of the fullness of God’s Word could cost us the whole house. In the last century alone there are many such cases of worldly invasion destroying good churches from the inside because, one way or another, they allowed themselves to become embarrassed by the Word of God.

When particular psalms (or parts of psalms) become essentially unsingable for Christians because they appear to be “inhospitable” in light of the “welcoming” posture of the church, such psalms become locked doors to many other parts of Scripture too, which leads to further erosion in discipleship of the younger generations. But when you open up the psalms—not only hearing and reading and singing them, but living in light of them—they unlock many other doors to becoming Biblically unashamed, Christianly unashamed.

This is how the Church becomes storm-proof, not because it trusts proudly in its liturgies but because its liturgies reflect its faith in the rock of the Word of God, the God who loves us and offends us, and a God who promises us true shelter from the storms if we would only trust (and sing) that His voice is “mightier than the noise of many waters and the mighty waves of the sea” (Ps. 93:4).

And sing it we must.