Grunt, grunt, grunt!!
 

     About half a century ago, several hundred schoolboys used to gather together on a large number of mornings to create as little noise as possible. Does this ring true? Well, it is. The occasions were the (upper) school assemblies at the grammar school I attended, and the object of the exercise was to create an impression of personal involvement in the singing of tedious school hymns by means of collective miming. However, for the illusion to be maintained, it demanded that at least some of the participants were making some sort of sound; also, to confuse the sharp ears of nearby form masters, all of us in a row had to appear to make some contribution, or mask the offenders who did not. 

     The result of this was a low- pitched grunt, which did not vary from note to note or word to word, but maintained the rhythm of the hymn in question through to the end. The singers would receive the usual criticism from the Headmaster, with reference to bovine herds, and so on, then the assembly would continue.

     You will be aware of what happens to boys’ voices at about age 14; when it happens to several hundred together, it stands to reason you are not going to create the best of choirs, even allowing for the unwilling character of the participants. Now some of us, myself included, continued with broken voices into the tenor and bass range, and can to this day enjoy singing hymns and songs sacred and secular, classical and popular. A number of us have moved on, in the words of Black Adder, to form “large groups of sinewy men, roaming the hillsides (or concert halls), terrifying people with their close- harmony singing.”

     All of this makes me so glad that the church has such a high proportion of women, who will give it a go far more readily than their male counterparts, and enhance worship with sweet- sounding melody; when trying to find the right key to play a song in, it is the range of the ladies that convinces, as we know that very few men seek to stand out, only being encouraged to do so by the Spirit. Yet this community singing is still an unquestioned element in worship, and new adherents to the church have to come to terms with the sheer amount of singing there is. We must praise God for the incredible amount of worship- music we have available, both traditional and modern, for it has the power to liberate us and place us foursquare in God’s bosom. However, we have to remember we carry with us people who are not proud of their voices, some of whom cannot land on the correct note much of the time, but whose enthusiasm and spiritual involvement is first- class; it’s as a family together, with all types unified by their commitment to praising their Lord, that the church comes meaningfully before its God in worship, and together that it receives from Him.

     This brings me on to the question of how we do ‘church’ in times to come. No doubt the accepted forms of worship will continue and flourish, largely depending on the location and character of each church family; the music used will vary, as it does now, and will probably continue to divide where it is allowed to do so; but increasingly there are going to be congregations where the medium of community song- singing is an alien concept. Where teenagers in my youth would create music with voice and instruments, being themselves their arrangers, engineers and musical directors, in recent years it’s become more natural to sing or mime to a CD or other packaged form. It would be hard to ask our own young folk to stand around the piano and sing before a congregation even the songs they themselves preferred, but with a CD playing, they might let themselves go more from their places in church.

      Another thing I have noticed is the tendency for more commercial music, pre- recorded, to be used at weddings and funerals, and an increasingly smaller pool of hymns and songs to be requested. A missionary church will take this and other matters into consideration when it looks into how it will nurture its new believers and assemble them for God to do business as He promises. We will get nowhere if none of us change and develop (including those who become Christians and start gathering for church family worship), but this is no time for babies to go out with the bath water: God didn’t inspire such wonderful words and tunes for them some time to cease to matter at all, and all members of the church can be fulfilled by God using the best that He provides in different forms, in order to draw us and keep us close. In that sacred space, even our grunts can count!