I have a bee in my bonnet. It is about Daniel Iverson's wonderful worship tune "Spirit of the Living God" which is number 295 in the Methodist hymnbook "Hymns and Psalms".
Given the awfulness of some of the editorial work on "Hymns and Psalms" we should be thankful that this sole example of 20th century worship music made it into the collection. However there is something that I now find a irksome if sung as per hymnbook. It makes "me" the centre of the hymn with no less than seven mentions.
From now on I'm going to ask congregations to sing it through as three separate verses.
First verse will be as per hymn book.
Second verse will be a prayer for one another "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on you....Break you, melt you, mould you, fill you.."
The third verse will be for the congregation as a body of believers "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us....Break us, melt us, mould us, fill us".
Who knows? This may be the prayer for a new pentecost.
Given the awfulness of some of the editorial work on "Hymns and Psalms" we should be thankful that this sole example of 20th century worship music made it into the collection. However there is something that I now find a irksome if sung as per hymnbook. It makes "me" the centre of the hymn with no less than seven mentions.
From now on I'm going to ask congregations to sing it through as three separate verses.
First verse will be as per hymn book.
Second verse will be a prayer for one another "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on you....Break you, melt you, mould you, fill you.."
The third verse will be for the congregation as a body of believers "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us....Break us, melt us, mould us, fill us".
Who knows? This may be the prayer for a new pentecost.
Posts
3 comments:
Quite right. It's like too much modern hymnody; all about me, and no sign of anyone else.
Methodists disapprove of 'me, me me' worship, and that's reasonable. But H&P is hardly dominated by that kind of music, so I don't see why it's wrong for 'Spirit of the Living God' to be focused on the individual.
Worship can seem rather impersonal if individuality is always kept at arms length. Also, focusing on our own need for transformation (as in this song) can prevent us from criticising other people while we still need to be transformed ourselves. Perhaps it helps to keep us humble....
Awful. It's like that Paul bloke in Romans 7 - all he goes on about is himself.
Post a Comment