Welcome to the Church and Family Life Podcast. Today we're here to talk how to build great, wonderful, vigorous, happy cultures of music in the Church, and we have Chris Law from Geneva Lakes Church to talk with us about it. Hope you enjoy the discussion. The discussion. Trent, we just had a really neat week last week.

Yeah, children singing camp. We did. Yeah, we did something we'd never done before. And we had four days of bringing kids together from 8 30 in the morning until noon. And you and I gave little messages at the beginning in the morning.

That was a joy to stand up there. But why did we do a kid singing camp? Why did we do a kid singing camp? I think part of it was to, one, we wanted to teach our children how to sing, and also it's biblical. We are supposed to sing, singing to one another and also singing to the Lord.

We're actually commanded to do that. That's what the Bible teaches us, that we actually teach one another when we sing, And it also works to warm our affections to the Lord. Yeah, and we wanted to, as elders, we wanted to do what we could do to improve the culture of singing, to create a great, vigorous, happy culture of singing in the church. But we thought it would be really helpful to have children have formal instruction on how to sing. It's just like anything else In order to be good at it, you need one, you need to practice it, but also you need to be instructed in it.

And that's what we believe would help. And truly, in my own home, it has helped. And this last last Lord's Day was a beautiful day of hearing all of these little voices singing the words to the songs. It was such a joy. That was great.

Hey, so we have Chris Law with us. Chris is one of the pastors at Geneva Lakes church in Geneva, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and a good friend. Hey, you, why are you on this podcast? Because you yourself have a tremendous desire to see the same thing, to have a biblically ordered culture of singing. Tell us about how that's unfolded in your life over the years.

I think even from a child, I was immersed in music in different ways, and music was a big part of my life. It was something I pursued in college and underneath the direction of Dr. Paul Ploo at the Masters College, I think really began to understand a theology of music from a church perspective and really have, I think, continued to flesh that out over the years to see a church growing in its knowledge of music, to not be fearful of music, but to see that it is a gift from God and that we can use it rightly in a way to honor him and to encourage his saints. Chris, what are some of the mountain peaks in the theology of music that come to mind? I think probably one of the biggest things that maybe I've grown in over the years is that too often music is separated apart from the elders or the shepherds and pastors of the local churches.

I think a lot of it is because of the fear that pastors have with a lack of knowledge of music. And so it's handed off to people who are gifted in music, but sometimes don't have the theological foundations. And so seeing all things that happen in the local church underneath the authority of the elders, and to have qualified people leading the music and giving direction to that. It may not be an elder specifically, but somebody who is qualified with a pastoral heart who can shape that. But at the end of the day, the pastors stand in a place accountable to the Lord for all things that happen, and they can't just wring their hands and say, well, we don't know anything about this.

But to learn and to grow, I think that's probably the biggest thing. Well, yeah, you know, having that under the oversight of the elders makes sense because singing is shepherding. Singing is a shepherding tool for the congregation. It is. You know, Colossians 3.16 is a very familiar passage, but it says, Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another.

How? In Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your heart to the Lord. Singing is such a wonderful part of the worship service because it's not just about music, it's not just about sound, it's not just about lifting our spirits, but we're actually doing something there. We're actually teaching one another, which is wonderful through our songs, and we're also singing praises to our God. And those two things are really what the corporate gathering of the church is about, mutual edification and singing praises and glory to God.

And so that's part of it that actually works together to warm our affections. One of the things that has happened to me throughout the years is coming to church and wanting to worship God, but also being a little cold in my affections, just from the stress of the week or whatever it may be. And yet, God uses the coming together of his people to almost like a fire that has died out, you you got to stir up the coals a little bit. And that's one of the things that the writer of Hebrews says, he said, let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works. And one of the things that I find is such a benefit is when we come together in corporate gathering that other brothers and sisters as they sing these doctrinal rich doctrinal songs it actually works to stir me up and it helps to warm my affections and prepares me to worship God.

Amen. You know, this doctrine of singing, you know, is so critical to recover. You know, you brought up that passage in Colossians and it says there that you are singing to one another one of the great confusions of I'm just gonna call it senior worship culture in the twentieth century bleeding on over as people think of singing as you to an audience of one, you and God. It's just you and God there in your little inner sanctum. But the Bible isn't so simple.

The Bible says, no, you are teaching one another in your singing, you know, and some songs are actually written like that in your teaching, and you want a congregation who self-consciously is teaching when it's teaching. Some of the songs are written about God or about doctrine, they're just declarations, And then some are personal in the first person, but they're not all in the first person. And you know, the idea that you're singing to an audience of one is really not biblical at all. Right. And you know, David, sometimes he's saying to his own soul, to his own soul, yeah.

Why are you cast down on my soul? And so it's multifaceted. There's great diversity in our singing, and the audience does change, but yet it brings all of that together. You know, I was reading something this week in Isaiah 64, and it's not really about singing, but it really has struck me as I was thinking about this and meditating upon this passage in Isaiah 64 verse 7, it says, and there was no one who calls on your name, who stirs himself up to take hold of you." That just really struck me and how when the climate of the worship of God or even the people of God can get cold in one sense. We might go through the formalities of gathering together.

We may sing the songs, but there's something that happens there because he says there's no one who can stir himself up to take hold of God. And that's really what happens, and that's what I was kind of alluding to earlier, is that when we gather together with God's people, we work to stir each other up, which is what Hebrews tells us to do, stir one another up. And it works in us that warming of the affections to worship God and to teach one another and to sing to one another, and even to speak to our own souls. I could give maybe just a testimony. It was years ago, a brother came and visited our church, And he sang so loud that many people were turning their heads thinking, what's this guy doing?

But yet I remember how many people were stirred up to also sing. He was singing out and in doing so encouraged others to sing. And there's a song that sometimes in our church here will sing and it speaks of coming to gather and to worship the Lord from different things that have happened this week, to come with full or empty hands, to come young and old. That there's times where we're not always, like Trent said, our emotions are not always in the place where we want to exalt God. But there's times when we realize that it's always a time and place to worship the Lord in the worship of God as his people.

You know, Chris, you talked about kind of a formative season in your life when you were at Masters and we're learning. What are some of the best things you've taken forward from those days? I think that our music, our worship through music, as in it's already been stated, but it needs to take on different forms. Think of the Psalms, how there's Psalms of lament. When was the last time we sung a song of lament as a congregation, or a song of confession, of public confession.

They're hard to find, but we shouldn't have a one-faceted ministry in music. It should take on various forms because we see that exemplified throughout the Psalms, and it takes work, it takes building, and sometimes it goes against just building a worship through music in what we want, but more of what we need. You know, this thing about the Psalms, of course we're all observing an increase in Psalm singing in the church today. It's becoming popular all over the place. Whereas in the 20th century, it was not popular at all.

And I think, you know, what you alluded to, the Psalms take you into experiences that many modern hymns don't. You know, David is under attack, David is being betrayed. There are so many situations, emotions that the Psalms take us into that we don't often experience. And so what are your thoughts about sort of this rising, I'm just going to call it a rising psalm singing movement. How do you view that?

I think especially for those of us who didn't grow up psalm singing, it's a bit out of our wheelhouse, but as you begin to see, there's different ways to sing the Psalms, more metrical ones or applications of them, or a number of people are even writing new ones. I think all of it is coming back to say, the Lord has given us in His Word wonderful texts, and how can we use those and apply those? But it's going to take work. It's going to take any type of reformation that takes the energy to bring about that change. And it's worth it because it is something that's going to balance our diet.

You know, I was, I think slow to really embrace the singing of the Salters. You know, you have these various Salters that are around and what bothered me about them is that they're, you know, they're kind of rough paraphrases. It's sort of idea for idea and maybe sometimes not as faithful as rendering of the idea of the text. So I, you know, I had, you know, I was slow to really embrace the idea. But then I started thinking, is it better, is it better to be brought into the full range of emotions and experiences of the Psalms?

Is it better to do that or to neglect them because maybe you don't like the tunes? Some of the tunes are very awkward because I think they're awkward for 20th and 21st century years. The environment that we grew up in, some of those tunes are discordant. So how do you think about, how do you, have you worked through some of those problems or maybe did you have those problems thinking through singing the Salters? Yeah, I think one of the things that I've always thought about when it comes to music in the congregational setting is the songs need to be singable.

And so there are some, I remember one of our assignments in college was we were given like 150 doctrines and we had to just read through hymnals and find hymns that come along with those doctrines. But in doing so, I would come across to him and I'd think, wow, this is a great text. And then you hear the tune and you think, this is totally unsingable or it would take months to learn this. And so I think with the technology, we have the abundance of options that are out there. We can find music, whether it's newer or older.

I don't think one is necessarily better than the other, but it's looking to say what's singable for a congregation, what's an area that we're lacking in, in building that more balanced diet, and in doing so, we may have to practice. And one of the things that we try to do here is we send the music out ahead of time in a weekly email, and so that families can be listening to it. We've created lyric videos that families could even use during family worship. But especially as a parent who has had younger kids who couldn't read, to sing five verses of a hymn is very difficult. But if you're able to practice it ahead of time during the week, it primes that for the congregational singing.

I may be opening a can of worms here, but I'd love to get your thoughts on singing from hymnals or singing from a book with notes in it as opposed to singing just of words on a screen. Yeah, I definitely know there's plenty of opinions and anytime we talk about things about music, it seems very emotionally charged. Even this past Sunday night, we were learning or reminding ourselves of an old song, and I had it printed out because it was not in our hymnal. And there was a first ending and a second ending, and I asked how many people in the congregation could read music, and about six people, I feel like, raised their hand on our Sunday night, and a very small percentage could. And so, I just talked through really quickly.

Here's how we sing. We're going to go here. We bounce back to the beginning. I think that's one of the challenges, not to think, hey, we're worshiping God better because we're holding a hymnal. But if people don't know how to use it, it tends towards Phariseeism.

I don't believe that four-part harmony is the perfect thing because I think sometimes unison is a picture of our unity as well. And so I think there's beauty in the harmonies, there's a beauty in a unison singing, But a lot of it is just a reminder and even kind of thinking about recording today, an instruction that does need to happen, like you said Trent, we have to dedicate specific time to do that. And I think as elders here, that's what we need to do too. One of the things I found beneficial with a hymn book, actually, it just kind of dawned on me. I still have small children, and for one, when it was only on a screen, they couldn't see it real well because they have people standing in front of them sometimes.

Nor could I help them. I'm speaking about those who have a difficulty maybe with reading or just learning to read and having a hard time keeping up. But that hymn book, when we've incorporated that and we do that, we bring that in occasionally, it was very beneficial for me to just lead with my fingers across those pages and show them the notes. And I don't read music, but I can follow a little bit of what's happening there. And I found that my children were more excited about singing it and actually would sing it when I could walk with them through that.

And I just found that beneficial at a very practical level of being beneficial for our children. If all they ever see at church is just words with no music on a screen, we may be doing a disservice to them. And again, I'm not saying either one is wrong or right, but I think maybe using and incorporating both of those things can be helpful. Absolutely. I think one thing to note when holding a hymnal is to hold it up so that our heads are not bowed down and the sound is just going downward, but to properly hold it to lift our voices so our voices are not just being muffled but resounding out.

Chris, in teaching a congregation to think biblically about singing, what are some of the things that come to mind? One of the things that just popped into my head was this summer we were preaching through some of the Psalms in our evening service, and we were choosing various Psalms, but one of them was a psalm of repetition. And repetition is not inherently bad. If that's our only diet, it is. But I think it was Psalm 136 where it talks about the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.

And that there's 25 times it repeats in one song. And we would sometimes when maybe we're reforming and coming out of an emotionalism, we can joke about the 7-11 songs or songs that sing seven words, 10, 11 times or whatever. But repetition helps us remember. And so there's a place and a time for it. But what is the repetition doing?

What is it teaching us to really be driving to the text? And in our evening, Sunday evening service is a bit more informal. And sometimes we'll finish singing, and I'll ask people, tell me one thing we just sung about. Like, a bit of a kind of were you thinking? Was your mind engaged?

As the psalmist said, that we are to sing with knowledge. And it's not a passive, but it's to be thinking. And like Trent said, to be able to roll our eyes back further to a text that we've sung or coming up, it's good to be able to meditate even as we're singing. Yeah. Now, again, going back to the Psalms, I think one of the beauties of that, and incorporating those into our worship service, and you kind of touched on this earlier, but it's the range of emotions that the Psalms bring us through.

I think about, I believe it's Psalm 73, where David, he's seeing all of these things happen around him, you know, my foot would have slipped, I almost lost heart until he came into the house of the Lord, and he knew their end. And it totally... To bring someone through that range of emotion, and then that's what I love about the Psalms, they're always bringing us to this crescendo of the Lord is our helper, the Lord is our strength, the Lord will subdue the enemy, And it's just such a helpful thing because often that's actually what happens to us as we enter into the worship service. We may be coming in low. We've just come off of days of working in this world and could be discouraged about what we're seeing or maybe even feeling sorry for ourselves.

It seems like David was feeling sorry for herself a few times, but yet through the act of singing and worshiping the Lord and hearing the doctrinal truth, and it lifted him out of that despondency. It lifted him up, and it turned his attention and his focus was turned from the things of the world, and it turned vertically. And he saw the Lord high and seated upon his throne, and it changed his whole perspective. I think, you know, singing changes your life. Yeah.

And it doesn't just change your life while you're singing, because those songs often carry you through times. I'm singing songs that I've sung for over 50 years, and they take me back to a moment in time where that song carried me. And guess what? It still carries me today. And so singing is a pivotal part of church.

It's part of the regulative principle of worship. We are commanded to sing. And singing, it's transformational. Singing, it's spiritual warfare. It is the creation of good affections toward God It tells us what kind of God we worship What kind of gospel we're proclaiming?

What's the basis of our unity the whole church is singing off the same page. It is probably one of the most physically spiritually unifying things that the church ever does. What a gift. What a wonderful gift. And you know, one last thing, I was just thinking about this in Ephesians, it's actually one of the signs of being filled with the Spirit.

When you're filled with the Spirit, you're going to speak to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. So we need to be a Spirit-filled church. And if you're a Spirit-filled church, you're going to be singing. Amen. Chris, why don't you conclude this whole thing?

Yeah, maybe just an encouragement to pastors. It doesn't matter the size of our church. I've had opportunity to serve in many different size contexts and some with, from one perspective you could say had a lot of musical talent and in another context where there wasn't as much. At the end of the day that's not what's important. Music is a gift from God and we want to do it to the best of our abilities and I'm thankful for tools and resources that are available now that we can use if even if we don't have an accompanist we can sing acapella or there's things to be able to be used but when we begin to build maybe that multi-generational focus of saying how do we build people who love music, who understand the right role of music in the worship of God, and see the importance of it and the gift that it is, and not just give up because it's hard, but press on.

Just like in other areas of our churches that we want to see a Reformation taking place, we're not going to give up on that because this is a good thing, and it's something that we'll be doing for all eternity and look forward to that time when we are all joining the 24 elders around the throne proclaiming glory to the lamb because he is worthy. Amen. Okay, well Let's do what we can to work for and pray for the building of great cultures of singing in our churches. What a wonderful gift. Thank you for joining us, Chris.

We really appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next time. Www.churchandfamilylife.com