God ordained music not merely to convey particular moods, but to form our affections after His Word. As Christians, we’re to teach and admonish “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (Col. 3:16). This is a non-optional mandate. But how does a dad, with no musical background, cultivate music in his home? How can the local church foster robust singing in the congregation? 

 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Scott Aniol, discuss how to create a culture of music in the home and church. For dads who lack experience, they encourage investing in a good set of hymnals and using the SingYourPart app and relevant online videos to bolster the process. For churches, they explain that the human voice, not musical accompaniment, should be the prominent feature in corporate worship. Be it at home or church, the voice of God’s people should joyfully sing forth His praises. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Scott Anial with us and we're going to talk about building a culture of singing in your church. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Jason, today we have a real privilege to talk to Scott Anial about singing. He has been writing about singing, leading singing, teaching people how to sing, teaching song leaders how to lead for a long, long time.

And I'm just so delighted to have Scott to talk about what? To talk about creating a culture of singing in your church. A subject matter expert. Yes, exactly right. You've been accused.

You've been accused. And this is such a delightful thing that God has created, music. It's such a helpful mover of the soul, a trainer of the mind and really a galvanizer of the unity of the saints together as they all raise their voices together. I first bumped into you, really your writings about singing and worship on your, your, your, your, the website that you operated, religious affections, And we just really benefited from that. We've gotten ourselves in a little bit of trouble even talking about music.

It's kind of hard to talk about music without getting in trouble with somebody. But joyous moments. So Scott, Just give us a quick thumbnail of how you got to the place where you really believe that the creation of a biblical culture of singing was really important. Yeah. Yeah, Well, you know, I think it actually stems from growing up in a family and a church that had that culture and that cultivated that culture.

So I am a product of it. And therefore, as, you know, as I began in church ministry and began to look around and be exposed to other churches and to sort of the landscape of modern evangelicalism, I saw, you know, there's actually not a lot of churches and families who had what I had growing up, and I praised the Lord for that. And so it just began to be a burden. So, I mean, I grew up in a musical family. My parents had us singing, you know, as long as early as I can remember, and then a church that really prioritized it.

And I see the rich benefits of that in my own life. You know, as you mentioned, music has so many profound benefits for our mind, for our souls, for our hearts. So I see that benefit in my own life and have seen that benefit in the churches in which I've served and in my own family with my own children, you know, 17 down to five now. And so it's just a lifelong now mission of mine to encourage this kind of thing in families and in churches. No, that's really great.

Now singing also is a central matter of what we would call the regular principle of worship. I'd like to talk about that because this is something that God has actually prescribed. We don't sing just because we want to sing. Well, maybe some do, but in the church we sing because God tells us to. The regular, yeah, the regular, what's the regular principle of, well, let's just say singing.

Yeah. Yeah. So if we, if we've committed ourselves to the Bible being our authority and everything we do within the context of the church, particularly our gathered worship on the Lord's day, then like you said, we, we, we must do what the Bible commands us to do, and we must not do what, you know, the contrary. If the Bible doesn't prescribe something, then we ought not do it. And I think when we talk about the regulative Principle, we tend to focus on that part, right?

Not doing what the Bible doesn't prescribe, and I think that's important. But we also need to emphasize doing what the Bible does prescribe, and very clearly in Colossians 3.16 and Ephesians 5.19, in the context of commands given to these churches that are to be perpetuated in all local churches, we have very clear commands, sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. This is a command given to us to do. So like you mentioned, it's not something optional. It's not just something for people who grew up singing or people who happen to like singing.

I've heard people sometimes say, well, singing is your thing. Singing is not really my thing. And what I like to just gently encourage them to think is that, you know, what if someone said, you know, reading is your thing, reading is not my thing, you know? I didn't grow up reading, I didn't grow up learning how to read, so, you know, I really don't think it's important. What we would say is, pastorally, well, no, the Bible commands us to read the Scriptures, and so even if you didn't grow up reading, you've got to do what it takes to learn the skills necessary to reading the Scriptures.

And I would suggest the same thing with regard to singing. Clear commands. And so even if an individual says, well, I didn't really grow up with that, okay, I understand that. So let's see what we can do to learn the skills, to develop the skills, to learn how to do what the Bible commands us to do. Yeah, the Bible says, reading is your thing.

You're a Christian. The Bible says, singing is your thing. You're a Christian. Christians do this. I think one of the big wet blankets on creating a singing culture is fathers who grew up in homes that were not musical homes, and it doesn't come naturally to them at all, and they can barely make themselves do it.

And it sounds like I'm running them down. I actually have compassion for that position because in some ways they are a fish out of water. But to those dads we would want to say there is so much opportunity for good for your personal walk with the Lord, for your family life, to be a blessing in your church life, that it's worth the investment to push through being a fish out of water to Just agree with the Bible. The Bible says Christians are singing people. You're a Christian.

Therefore, you're a singing person You know God God only commands us to do the things that are good, but just think about this for a minute God is the one who wants his people to be singing people God wants his people to sing. I think that's glorious. And he, you know, the apostles actually teach churches how to sing. I want my people to sing to one another, right? In Colossians 3.16.

I want my people to sing to me. I want my people to be, have hearts full of praise, even when maybe they're downcast. You know, I want people to sing about being downcast. I want my people to admonish one another through the Psalms. You know, God, it's so inspiring to think of what God wants to create in a culture of a church of all of, and this is something God has done.

Have you ever gone to worship on Sunday morning and your heart was just full and you're thinking, I'm so glad I have this outlet. It's an outlet for the fullness of your heart. Well, how about the opposite? Have you ever gone to church and your heart wasn't very full at all? But actually, the singing activated your heart.

So I think it's bi-directional. Sometimes it's just wonderful to have an outlet because your heart's already full. Sometimes you're feeling really dry and singing alongside the Lord's people just warms everything up and makes you ready for all the rest of the worship. Yeah, yeah. I agree, absolutely.

And I think we also need to recognize the reason that God has commanded it for us to sing. It is a way for us to express full hearts. It is a way for us to express full hearts. It is a way for us to encourage our hearts when we're downcast, absolutely. But then, as Paul says in Colossians 3 verse 16, we are actually teaching and admonishing through singing, And that involves absolutely the theology of the lyrics, teaching truth through our minds, but it's actually even more than that.

We're actually teaching our hearts. We're forming right hearts toward God so that even when, you know, perhaps we are not feeling rightly toward God, perhaps we actually are feeling wrongly because of circumstances in our lives, or sometimes, you know, we might hear a particular biblical truth. This is certainly true for maybe young Christians. They hear a biblical truth for the first time and they actually respond perhaps wrongly. They're not quite sure how to grasp it.

Good singing can actually teach us the affections of our hearts that are right and appropriate for the truth of God's Word. And singing does that in a way that preaching and reading don't do. We need all of these things. We need sound preaching, we need sound reading of Scripture, and we need sound singing, all of which works together to mold and shape us in the way that God would have us to be shaped by His Word. So can I read that verse?

You quoted a phrase out of it, but it's Colossians 3.16 and Paul writes this, let the word of Christ to dwell in you richly and all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. So this is actually a teaching and learning category. Who doesn't want the word of Christ to dwell in them richly? Well, this is actually a teaching weapon for that, I think, is what's being said. You know, and Let's talk about how to create a culture in the church.

I want to start off because you just read that. What I've often said to our church is, notice what's being said here. It really follows the way that songs are actually written. Some songs are written as personal expressions of love or praise. You know, they're characterized by the word I or me, right?

Lots of songs are like that. And then there are songs of we like a mighty fortress is our God. That's a song where everyone is saying the same thing together and it's actually designed to unify the church around a particular doctrine. So you have to pay attention to the voice of the song. So, you know, it's when you're singing, you want to recognize, is this a personal expression of praise?

Is it a or is it a corporate, you know, framing of it? Or is it like a declaration of a doctrine? So I think it's helpful to understand that the people understand that songs are written in a different voice and to sing them according to the voice. So when a person's singing, a mighty fortress is our God, they're singing to what we're singing to one another and binding ourselves together, you know, according to this great truth that God is a fortress. Yeah, yeah.

I think that's so important too. You know, even sometimes we forget about even the immediate context of Colossians 3.16. Well, the immediate context addresses that sort of harmony that is being formed within us in the body. You know, Paul writes a few verses earlier, put on love which binds all things together in perfect harmony and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. And I think that's talking about the peace of the body, the harmony of the body that's being formed.

And what is one of the best ways to foster that and cultivate that? Through letting the word of Christ richly dwell within you as a body, singing, teaching one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. All of that's working together and harmonizing the body. And that's what singing does. It harmonizes the body and creates peace and unity and beauty within the body of Christ when we sing together in that manner.

So, a thought on accompaniment and how it relates to the singing. My opinion is bad accompaniment is a threat to us creating a singing culture. It's very distracting when the accompaniment is bad. My opinion also is that awesome accompaniment is a threat to a singing culture in the sense that you can have music that is so good, so polished that singing actually becomes secondary. I think you want your accompaniment to become lovely in the sense that it's not over the top and subjugating the singing, but the singing is actually what ends up being prominent as you're listening to what's happening in the room.

What we've said over the years, Jason, is we want the voices to be prominent and the musical instruments to be supportive and helpful. But we don't want the musical instruments to overwhelm. And I think that's one of the things that you're saying. Scott, what are your thoughts about instrumentation and all that? Yeah, I agree completely.

We can get to the point where maybe our music is, the instrumentation, the musicians are actually so excellent that the attention is drawn to the virtuosity and the excellence, and it's really drawing attention away from what ought to be primary. How we put it in our church is the primary instrument of our congregational singing ought to be the human voice. The instruments that we use are absolutely helpful. They're supportive, but even how they're played can either support the singing or it can distract from and harm the harmonious singing, robust singing of the voices of God's people. I've been in a couple of church services in the last year where if the congregational singing ceased entirely, it wouldn't really change the sound of what's happening in the room.

And in both cases, the music team was great. It was good music from the stage, but our worship services need to be way more than good music from the stage. Yeah. And I think, I think what people need to hear is there's a riskiness to what we're proposing, because if you make the voices prominent and, and, you know, maybe there's not as many people that Sunday or not as many of your strong singers. There's a risk to that.

It might not be quite as robust, but it's a risk worth taking because you're forcing people to recognize every voice matters. Let's aggressively, robustly sing all of us. Every voice matters. And you know, one of the ways that that can be encouraged, and we do this almost every Lord's Day in at least one hymn, where our pastor of worship and discipleship, Matt Sykes, he'll have planned this ahead of time, that the instruments will drop out and we will sing a cappella on at least one stanza of a hymn. And it's usually he's choosing something he knows we know really well, he knows we're going to be able to sing it robustly.

But by doing that, once again, you're just allowing the voices to shine through. And again, it can be risky, but it's a risk worth taking because again, we're prioritizing the voices above other instruments, which are good and helpful, but can very easily become the primary focus if we're not careful. I love it when worship leaders do that. It's so beautiful. And I've thought many times, my favorite sound in the world is the sound of the voices of the church.

It's the sweetest sound. You know, you just hear the mingling of the female and the male voices and children too. You know, of course I hear children singing at our church all the time And that's always such a joy as well. Yeah, that's a beautiful thing. I remember my first church that I served in Illinois, I really made a priority to teach the children the hymns that we were singing, and try to do that so that when we came to the Lord's Day gatherings, they knew them.

So I had opportunities outside of the Sunday morning gathering to do that. And once I began to teach them, I mean, kids love whatever you give them. The boys loved a mighty fortress. They love it. And I remember then as that began to sort of influence them, I'd be leading the singing one Sunday and we would sing something the children just learned, you know, and I would see adults turning around and looking because here are these young children singing at the top of their lungs.

You know, that, I really, that was one of a sort of a ministry changing moment for me because I realized teaching our children and really investing in them to learn the great hymns of the faith, because again, they'll do whatever we give them and they love it. Doing that actually had profound effect on the whole church. The whole church was influenced and encouraged to sing better because the children had been taught to sing these wonderful hymns? You know, yesterday I was with about 40 little kids in our church and I was doing exactly that. I was playing the guitar.

I played the guitar all my children's growing up life, just singing to them at night, you know, my favorite songs. But I like, I'm glad you brought this up about the children, because, you know, an important part of creating a singing culture in the church is doing that with children. And I, any more to say about that? What are, are there other ways to sort of build that from the ground up in the church? Yeah, absolutely.

I think two things. Number one, dads, you need to be singing with your family at home. And this is where we talked about earlier, maybe you didn't grow up with that, maybe you don't think you have a great singing voice, you've got to find out ways to do it anyway. I mean, you've got to cultivate that culture within your homes. And that is so important that the dads lead in that.

I think in our broader culture today, singing is sort of seen as something that's feminine, and that's further than the truth. You know, I mean, you know, talk about David, the warrior king, who was the sweet psalmist of Israel, right? Singing is a manly, masculine thing to do, but we have to cultivate that in our homes, especially for the sake of our boys. You know, I think in my own, you know, I've got a 17-year-old boy, a son now, who loves to sing, who sings in church robustly. That's not normal for a 17-year-old boy in our culture, but he doesn't know any different.

He doesn't know it's not cool to sing loudly, you know, because he grew up in our home singing and with a dad who sings robustly. So that's so important. And then in the context of the church, I think that there are things you can do, you know, again, in outside gatherings beyond the Lord's Day service, intentionally bring children together and intentionally teach them hymns, teach them how to sing. In our own church on Wednesday evening before our prayer meeting, we have a time of children's choir where we all the children come together, they learn how to sing properly, They learn how to, you know, the basics of music, how to, you know, basics of rhythm, basics of pitch. And then we're always teaching them a hymn of the month that they're learning that really that the hymn of the month for our entire congregation, but giving direct attention to our children so that once again, we're cultivating that in them.

We don't want any of the children of our church to grow up not having been exposed to and actively taught how to sing and what good singing is like, and we've got to give that focused attention in our congregations. Scott, that's such an important point. Today's pastors have to recognize the shift that's happened in the last 40 years, so really during my lifetime. When I was growing up, we sang out of hymnals and it gave you access to the melody lines and to the rhythms. Now we sing off a projector on the wall, on the wall that has neither the melody line nor the rhythm.

But the truth is it doesn't matter because the only people who could read the melody lines and the rhythms were the people whose moms made them take piano, and there's not that many anymore. So just we need to recognize if people are going to learn to sing parts, we're going to have to teach parts. Can I recommend a resource for that, for families, for fathers? There's a website called Sing Your Part, and there's an app, too. It was developed by some churches, and it's wonderful because there's tons and tons of hymns in that app and on that website.

Sing your part and you can call up the hymn. You can look right at the music if you want, but also you hit play, it'll play the whole hymn, it's got all four parts, and you can even with a little slider, you can make the melody louder, or if you've got the melody down and you want to learn a different part, you just make the melody a little softer, make the alto louder, or make the tenor of the bass, and you can just learn parts just by hearing. So we in our church, every week, Matt will send out the hymns that are coming up on this Lord's Day with, we've encouraged everybody in our congregation to download that app to access it. And so people in their homes are just pulling it up and they can sing it with their families. If they don't know it quite yet or they're not musical, there's a tool, there's a resource that they can use to learn it.

That's fantastic. Choir practice for people who have never been to choir practice. I love it. That's right. That's great.

Okay. We're about out of time, but hey, anything else, Scott, you would recommend for creating a culture of singing in the church? We talked about kids. That was great. Yeah, absolutely.

I would say, you know, get some hymnals, you know, in your family. Have some hymnals at home. It's true that if you don't know how to read music, then you're not going to immediately be able to know what you're looking at. But I know people who have sort of learned the basics of music just from the hymnal, because you can begin, maybe with a little, you know, there's so many YouTube videos today on the basics of music and things like that. So just with having some hymnals at home and having hymnals in your church, that itself can be a great tool for music literacy and for encouraging robust singing.

Great, great stuff. One parting shot for me. My experience is that it's self-feeding. In other words, the better the singing is, even when you have new families come in that have no singing background, they come up to speed really fast because it's great to sing among great singers. And so there's not a thing that we do that we don't sing.

And part of that is wanting to build sort of this thing that has its own momentum. Yeah, that's great. Have hymns, sings and homes and there's so many things that can be done. That's great. Wow.

Okay, maybe we can keep talking about this. Well, we are going to keep talking about this subject in the next podcast on singing the Psalms. And you just put together a Psalter. And so people ought to go get that. It's at G3, right?

Go to the G3 website. That's g3men.org. It's called Psalms and Hymns to the living God. So it has all 150 Psalms plus hymns as well, all in one collection. And plus you wrote a book recently about it.

We've talked about it on this podcast. It's a great book. Go get the book. It's really helpful book on the Psalms. It'll help you actually understand the Psalms better.

Yeah. Musing on God's music. Yeah. Musing on God. Okay.

Hey, Scott, thank you so much. Always enjoy it. We'll see you. Okay. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

And I hope you can join us next time after you go out and get Scott Anial's books on the Psalms. We encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com