The Hymn Project with Jeremy Walker

Welcome to the WHOLE Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is Jeremy Walker, our special guest.

We had Jeremy on previously to talk about the HOPE Project, reaching the homeless children in Zambia.

And you can find again notes for that, links to that project and how you can support that in the show notes below.

But this week we're talking about the Hymnody Project and this is something that Jeremy has been working on for a long time.

And we've been discussing for a long time the possibility of Mediagratie working in conjunction with Jeremy and doing what we can to make these things available to the church at large.

So good to have you again, Jeremy. And why don't you tell us about the

Hymnody Project and why you think it's important. We have a wonderful evangelical history of hymnody.

We have a rich tradition of psalmody. We have wonderful resources at our disposal and a lot of them, sadly at the moment, are languishing in a state of disrepair and disregard.

One of the challenges that we face, and this is something that we've spoken about briefly, is that a lot of the people that we're actually ministering to are coming in very fresh to congregations like ours, where we value congregational singing, where we're, to use the language that we find in Ephesians and Colossians especially, we're trying to sing upwards to God and bring praise and glory to Him.

And then we're trying to admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, communicating truth in a way that encourages and exhorts, that equips the saints of God.

Now, one of the challenges that we face as congregations that have a deeply rooted historical sense is such things as the fact that we're talking about people who've maybe never been in a church before, or certainly haven't been in a church for very long.

Their theological understanding is, in the best sense, immature.

They're lambs rather than full grown sheep. They're people who perhaps have never done much in the way of reading at all, certainly not much theological reading, and probably aren't particularly comfortable with 16th, 17th, 18th century texts.

If they're going to read, it's not going to be that. And in some cases, academically, they're more limited than perhaps people have been in the past.

Sometimes it's a linguistic problem. English is a second language. A lot of the people that I serve, their

English is their second or sometimes their third language. And that's massively impressive, but it can present something of a challenge.

So with those kinds of things in mind, what we want to try and do is to not just preserve from the past, but to offer now and for generations to come the very best of the highest tradition of evangelical psalmody and hymnody.

We were talking off camera about the fact that people might be surprised when they,

I guess we could say it this way. When a person comes to the Lord and then they pick up an old hymn book.

I remember Tozer saying, get a hymn book and a good hymn book to go along with your

Bible, the two most important books, and don't get one under 100 years old, he would say.

So why? Was Tozer this traditionalist? Is it just that we get old and we like what we grew up with?

But that's not it. When we come to know the Lord and eyes are opened, it's not just our

Bible that seems to come alive. It's like someone took the Bible we used to have that meant nothing to us, just words on a page that were religious.

And now we wake up and this book is, it's life giving.

It's like every page is illuminated. And suddenly it's a delight for us to walk with the living

God through the pages of this ancient text. And then we pick up a hymnal and we realize this hymnal, it's saying things that are drawn from the scriptures and the experience of believers from the past.

And I recognize that same experience. It's not old people things. It's not just them.

It's us today. And so these things become precious to us. And sometimes we can become traditionalists.

You know, I mean, I find my own heart leans that way and I have to guard against it because we won't be able to stand before the

Lord one day and say, I gave them, you know, this ancient version of your truth, the 18th century version of your truth.

We have to be able to say, I brought the truth to the people the way that you wanted me to bring it.

So we don't adjust the truth. And I know that you have a number of principles that have guided you in your own thinking.

But perhaps our people don't realize how much the famous and the best hymns that they are singing today have already been edited so that they make sense for today or for the 1950s.

So do you have something, you know, we were talking about some different examples of that, illustrations of that.

So I think we need to be careful. I understand Toze's advice, and I think we can talk about why it was valuable.

But one of the challenges that we do face is a rather crass offsetting of antiquity versus novelty.

That the old must be good and the new must be bad, or the new must be good and the old must be bad.

And the Bible doesn't leave us seesawing between antiquity and novelty. It actually gives us, if you will, a formula for the best quality.

I think what Toze has in mind is saying that if you go back that hundred years or so, what you've got is, if you will, the curated collection of the best of what's been written up to that point.

And it's typically been curated or adapted by what I will call pastor poets.

Now, I'm not saying there are none such today. I've tried.

I have a somewhat of a literary background. I've been writing poetry and hymnody for most of my life, as far as I can remember.

So I hope I have at least some sensitivity to those things. But very often today, what you've got are basically performance pieces that are written by professional musicians.

Now, there's a challenge. If you go back, you get some doggerel that is written by some very godly men.

And that what's that tends to get weeded out. Or you might get you still get sentimental tripe that's written down through the ages.

I mean, you know, some of the some Victorian hymnody, you just think this is this is quite childish, quite shallow.

But the advantage is that what you've got that's come down through the centuries has already gone through that filter of what is really useful.

And there's very little old hymnody that we now sing that hasn't already been edited, sometimes quite significantly, sometimes for its clarity, sometimes for theological accuracy and credibility.

But John Newton's hymns, many of them were written every week for his congregation to sing in response to the

Lord's Day ministry. I mean, that's on the spot. He's thinking, I want these people to sing this truth to God and to one another or of God and to one another.

You have men like to step across from Newton. You've got Cooper who's writing out of his own deep personal experience.

You've got men like John Berridge who are serving in villages where people are relatively straightforward and straight thinking.

They're not going to deal well in highfalutin airy fairy notions. They need something that's substantial, simple, spiritual and sweet.

And so he's adapting the best of what's already out there. And he's making sure that they put in the hearts and mouths of God's people to whom he is speaking, that this is something that serves

God and serves the church of Jesus Christ. And I think there's space for that still in accordance with the principles that you've mentioned.

You mentioned John Berridge. So serving among a people that often were not educated, not as educated as those in London where John and Charles Wesley were laboring.

I remember John Wesley writing a letter to Berridge that I read, and he scolded

Berridge for turning his brother's poetry, you know, as you said, into dog roll.

So we'll have to update dog roll as well. So, you know, substandard poetry.

And what Berridge said was, well, I can't give my people your brother's hymns to sing because we're simple people here.

So one thought per line. And if your brother's hymn carries a thought over a couple of lines, my people lose it.

So he rewrote Charles Wesley's hymns, those that were more complex so that his people could benefit.

Strange that John would be so critical because the joke of the day that John Wesley edited so many people's works.

He had a 40 volume Christian library, you know, the best of the Christian classics. The majority of those were

Puritans. And so there would be areas theologically where John disagreed with them. And he would edit out their reformed thinking.

And so the joke of the day was that it was a good thing that John Wesley was not alive in the first century, or he would have tried to have edited the

Gospel of John, that John edited everything. So but it's understandable. You know, we fall in love with hymns.

You know, you fall in love with phrases that follow you. But we're thinking above our personal preferences.

We're thinking of the kingdom of God and the truths of God and how to get these truths to people who might find archaic language, an insurmountable obstacle and an unnecessary obstacle.

Yeah, I'm a natural conservative in these things. My instinct is the original.

And actually, one of the things that's been fascinating about this project where I can, I've tried to go back to the first edition, the first publication of some of these hymns.

And it's not so much that you have to change things. You've got to put things back in because there are there are aspects of hymnody in the past, much more straightforward, much more honest about certain things.

And that's that's been really refreshing. So my instinct is is not to change.

And you know, there are people, oh, that's the verse I was singing when I was converted. And you've gone and wrecked it.

So now, do you mean changed it? Changed it and wrecked it aren't necessarily the same thing.

And as you said, I think there have been times when I've had to say, OK, this may not be quite as crisp as the original in terms of some aspects.

But I do think it's it's more accessible. So some of the principles when

I sit down, typically. So we we started doing this as a congregation years ago when we wanted to sing more psalms.

The hymn book we were using was quite light on psalms. We read psalms every week in our congregation.

We wanted to be able to sing them back to God and to each other. So every week

I would go through five or 10 old psalters and find one that was sometimes a more word for word literal translation, sometimes a more spirit of the psalms translation to use

Spurgeon's phrase in his Our Own Hymn book. And I would take what I hoped was was one of the best or sometimes two or three of the best that were available.

And I would then try and update that language. So week by week, we began to accumulate a collection of truly scriptural and evangelical psalmody in a modern idiom that could be sung by a congregation to simple, straightforward tunes within the range of every voice, male and female, young and old.

As that collection came toward its conclusion, I was thinking, well, could we do something similar with our hymnody?

Because there are people who are struggling with this. You could see them falling over certain phrases for the reasons that we've discussed.

So I we had a wonderful resource in a hymn book from the middle of the 20th century, more or less.

I think Spurgeon's Our Own Hymn book is one of the finest of of those kinds of compositions and there are others like them.

So I began to work through those hymns and the principles that I wanted were, first of all, theological accuracy.

This has to reflect what the word of God teaches. And as you've mentioned, people have been dealing with that, especially in terms of some of the more significant divides in within the evangelical camp, if you will, especially the

Calvinistic and Arminian divide. But we wanted theological accuracy. We didn't want the congregation to be second guessing what they were thinking, what they were singing.

We learned so much of our theology from our hymnody. So we wanted to make sure that it was accurate.

Then the second principle was poetic beauty. We didn't want to turn these into doggerel.

And sometimes we retaining not just theologically precise language, but poetically intense language.

So I was actually preaching yesterday away from home and one of the hymns that we sang has the line in it,

Oh, sweetness, most ineffable. Now, if you know what that means, that's wonderful.

Now, I'm not going to take out the word ineffable, but I do think that pastors and teachers need to explain what are we singing there?

We're talking about the divine sweetness of Jesus Christ that is beyond description.

It's the unsearchable riches of Christ. These are unspeakable, but we're trying to speak them.

So there's this poetic beauty. There's rhythm, there's rhyme, there's meter or scansion.

We want to make sure that we're not falling over ourselves when we're singing these things.

It's got to be good poetry. And that sometimes means it's going to have more complex language that can nevertheless be easily explained.

But that brings us to the question of linguistic clarity and accessibility.

We want as much as possible to take out some of the archaic language that is a relic of a past mode of English.

Also, we want to take account of the fact that some words have a different freight, a different meaning today than they did have when they were first used.

I don't know. Do you have bounty bars in America? I don't think so.

Okay. Other chocolate bars are available. That should be pointed out. But in the UK, it's a chocolate bar.

It's got some kind of toffee or coconut in it or something like that. We literally had one lady who was singing about God's bounty.

She couldn't understand why the Lord was providing chocolate bars for the people. Yeah, we would translate that Snickers, or Teddy would say

Three Musketeers, because something's wrong with Teddy. Right. Now, bounty is a perfectly good word.

So we can explain that. Or there might be times when we have to use the word blessing.

Because blessing, bounty, same number of syllables, that would typically translate, that would typically fit.

When you're dealing with things like the these and the vows and the vines, sometimes you do have to slightly shift the meaning.

Sometimes I'm sitting back. Sometimes it's just I can change a couple of words in each line and it all works.

Sometimes you're saying, I need to rewrite this verse. So it still says what the author intended, but that it communicates it in a way that we can all enter into.

Then another principle, experiential validity. We want to be singing about what it means to know

God in Christ. We want to sing from the heart. We want to sing with the understanding.

We want to be able to enter into this truth. We want it to to honour God and to lift up our own souls, because singing is meant to help aid and provide and provoke that righteous, affectionate response to the truth of God.

We're singing truth. That's what impacts our souls. It's not just the rhythms.

It's not the volume of the music. It's it's not the environment. The truth needs to impact our hearts.

So theological accuracy should give rise to that experiential validity. And then authorial integrity.

Yes, we are sometimes changing things because we think that people got things wrong or there's some clarity that we can introduce.

But we do want as much as possible to respect the intent of the original author in saying this is he would still recognize that we're singing truth to God.

So I've been working through things. I've probably got somewhere between,

I know, a thousand and fifteen hundred hymns like that at the moment that we've now been singing as a congregation for several years.

And, yep, there have been some some challenges along the way. But I think we're road testing these things in a way that demonstrates that it actually serves a congregation in gathered worship for the honour of God.

So how the ultimate goal in your mind is.

There's more than one kind of offering here. We've talked about being able to begin to make these updated, carefully updated hymns available through, you know, the medium of a

Web site, Media Gratia. We were looking into the possibility of making those hymns digitally available, not just the lyrics, but then tunes to go with them.

And ultimately, we'd like to see a hymn book made available. We need a new hymn book.

And then in the coming years, we actually use the same hymn book, I believe your church uses. And so that's been out of print for some time.

And our books are getting kind of threadbare. And so we're down to kind of the last box of replacement hymnals.

The people love them. And so there probably will be an uprising and we'll have to do the whole council podcast from under a bridge once they hear this.

But we do have to replace them. It's just physically impossible to keep them. But I think it's a great opportunity to do what you've been talking about.

How to get the same truths more clearly. Yet, you know, with that biblical integrity and all the things you've mentioned, how to get that into the hands of the people so that the next generation can benefit.

And we can say to the Lord, according to the light that we were given, to the best of our ability, we gave your people your truth without any unnecessary blockage, you know, hurdles.

How many hymns, you know, in your mind, a good hymnal would have a psalter. So a psalter.

And then how many hymns just off the cuff do you think you would probably like to see in a hymn book on top of the psalter, the songs of the

Psalms? When I think of the what I consider to be some of the best examples of collections like that,

I've mentioned some of them. If you assume that a psalter is something like 175, taking account of multiple versions of some psalms,

I would say. Now, most congregations don't actually sing as many hymns as they think they do.

They may have a huge hymn book, but they're typically selecting a relatively small number. I still think there's value in providing a range so that the whole scope of truth and experience, faith and life can be properly expressed at proper times.

Now, there may be then some that you wouldn't use all the time because you wouldn't need them all the time, but it's good to have them available.

So I'm thinking probably all in, I'd like to aim for something like around a thousand.

But that's a large number. I have a friend who says if we had 250, we'd be able to do everything that we needed to do.

Now, I think probably the poet in me goes, oh, but there's so much more than that. So the advantage of, first of all, a digital resource is that we can keep populating it.

So what we'd like to do digitally, perhaps as a subset of the

Media Gratii website, is to have these updated psalms and hymns.

And I think they're all out of copyright so that they can be dealt with like this and then made available.

We want those to be made available with a kind of a proper taxonomy of hymnody.

That is, here is our doxology. These are the different phases of Christian living that we're talking about.

Here's our praise to God as triune, to God as Father, as Son, as Holy Spirit. Here are hymns about the word of God's God speaking to us through the scriptures.

Here are hymns that are appropriate to more joyful times.

Here are hymns that are more appropriate to more distressing times. And you've mentioned too the importance of, if I use the language of mood, music that fits the mood of a hymn.

I'm sure we've all heard it. Either hymns that are set to dreadful tunes or hymns of joy that are sung to funereal dirges.

And you think, that's not how that's meant to be sung. And so we want to fit tunes that are accessible to congregations in terms of the way that they're pitched, their pace, their structure.

These are things that we can all sing. You don't have to be a professional. You have to be a Christian and you can enter in.

And even if you've got a voice like a donkey, you can get along with us. We'll help you and you can sing to your heart's content.

We sing a lot of, I end up choosing the hymns for the service if I'm preaching.

And Chuck, the other pastor who preaches on Wednesdays, he chooses for himself.

And I often get accused by the people in a gentle way, which I have ignored for 24 years, but I probably shouldn't continue to ignore it, that I always choose the

Celtic tunes and they can be a bit minor. Yeah, a lot of them are in a minor key.

And I love them. And they're saying, John, why did we pick four minor key hymns for today?

Yeah, or you can get the plodding Germanic marching songs. Yeah, I find the

Germanic tunes somewhat complicated at times. They can be. Or sort of like carnival songs.

You imagine a Wurlitzer and a trumpet in the background. Okay, well, isn't that necessarily wrong?

It's not ideal. It's umpty dumpty dumpty kind of songs. Yeah, I say that any hymn tune that's played with the trombone,

I'm not sure it's theologically correct. I'm like, oh, no, no, no. What are we sliding here for?

I think we should just leave that at home. And so one of the important things, if we tell people what the meter of this hymn is, how many beats per line, how many lines per verse, if there's a more accessible tune that people know, you can still sing that hymn.

But what we'd like to do is to say we think this tune fits this hymn and you can sing this from the heart to the praise of God.

So if we can provide that resource digitally, we're acknowledging that a lot of congregations today are going to project their hymns or print their hymns week by week.

That's fine. Here's a resource that you'll be able to use. If you don't have competent musicians in house, you can play this tune.

We'd like to be able to offer the facility to change its tempo, to change the maybe even the key.

You know, you might have a well -trained congregation where you can sing all the parts or you might say, you know what?

We're not great at this. We just we just need you know, we need that melody and we need to be able to sing it.

You know that the men can the men can get up to it. The women get down to it or vice versa.

That's that's going to work for us. So you can change within reason some of those things.

That gives you this sort of one one stop shop for the psalmody and the hymnody.

Now, out of that, as you've mentioned, congregations like ours, what we'd like to do probably then is to make a selection and to get the cream of the cream.

Now, we said novelty versus antiquity is not the issue.

There's not going to be much new stuff because most of it is copyrighted. And we want to make this as cheap and accessible as possible.

So the issue isn't we don't like new stuff, but we do know and can rely upon a lot of this old stuff and we can bring it up to date.

So it may be that in due course, the next stage for congregations like ours that perhaps haven't been comfortable with the way that some modern hymnody is gone.

Some of the dumbing down, the shallowness, the frivolity, the theological carelessness that sometimes creeps in.

Right. Here's a popular, in the best sense, accessible, reliable, biblically substantial, richly experiential collection of hymns that are written in an idiom that men and women walking into our congregations, boys and girls sitting down around family worship with dad and mom, people who perhaps they're still going to, if they don't know, if this is the first time they've ever sung, it's still going to be something of a jump.

But they will hear difficult words explained and they'll be looking at this, say,

I've got a sense of what this means. And I can begin to begin to enter into what we're singing here.

And I hope that with such a hymn book in church pews or chair backs or whatever it is you've got in family homes as an aid to family worship, that this really could be a resource that will help churches and Christian families and individuals to sing to God's glory with an ease and a straightforwardness that some of them don't always have.

Well, Jeremy, thank you for being with us again and for the many, many years of work on this.

And we're grateful that the Lord has put this on your heart and given you the energy and the ability to do that.

So we will keep the folks updated with how this is going, especially as we begin to work on finding a spot on our website where we can put these, if that's the very best way.

The young lady that would be building that part of our website is out on maternity leave. And she just gave birth to the most beautiful girl in the history of beautiful girls.

The girl's name is Flora Snyder. So coincidental only.

And your qualification for this particular judgment on the excellence and beauty of this show? My wife says it every day.

Glad to hear it. Congratulations, Grandpa. Yeah, yeah. So we will keep folks updated and and we're thankful for the chance to, you know, to get truth out.

I'll give one last illustration and then we'll bring our podcast to a close.

Years ago, we had a hurricane on the Mississippi Coast area down in New Orleans as well.

And I forget the name. I forget which hurricane this was. It was about 15 years ago and a young couple moved from New Orleans area all the way up to North Mississippi and the young man got a job.

They were in their 20s. They did not have church background, but they were both believers. They had recently been converted.

She grew up in a Roman Catholic because of Louisiana, the influence strongly

Roman Catholics. You grew up in a in a nominally Roman Catholic church. He grew up in nothing.

And then they both, when they got married, decide, well, we need to be good parents. We're going to go to church.

And they went over to a Pentecostal kind of charismatic church. And after a while there, they felt that what was being said and done did not match the scriptures.

So they began to look and to find something they felt was more biblical. Well, they did.

And then the hurricane hit and they moved. And when they came to us, we had them for, you know, over to have supper with my family.

And so we were trying to explain, you know, the church, things that looked weird. You know, a long prayer meeting and the hymnal.

And they were in their 20s. So I thought, you know, no church, no real church background. And then this hymnal with no music in it, it just it looked like a poetry book.

And so I said, now, look, the hymnal can be a little difficult, but it's worth it.

And they interrupted me and they said, are you about to apologize for this hymnal? I said, well,

I guess so. I love it, but it can be difficult. And some people have complained and they they said, no, never apologize for the hymnal.

And they looked at each other and then they said to me, you could get saved reading this hymnal.

They said there is so much truth in this that, you know, the gospel is here.

The truth about God, the truth about the Christian life, the ups and the downs. They said it's all here.

The churches we've been a part of had none of this. And it just reminded me that oftentimes, though, we want to remove unnecessary barriers.

Oftentimes, the great barrier that we can't remove is a person's lack of appetite for God.

They come and they say, well, this is a little difficult. I don't want to put the effort in. And then you have another person that comes along with the same background and they see the words and some of them are strange.

And they say, I don't care. I'll put the work in. This is these are the truths of my king and I want to know how to sing them.

And, you know, it was very encouraging to meet the young couple who wouldn't let us, you know, apologize for the hymnal.

Well, again, Jeremy, thank you. And we'll have more information as as the days progress.

And Teddy will give you some information in the show notes. And we will hopefully see some of these hymns on our website in the coming months.