Thoughts After Recording 7500 Recorded Hymns

It has been quite awhile since I set down my thoughts at various milestones in my hymn archive project. The last time I did this was in January of 2019! As the saying goes, a LOT of water has gone under that bridge! I thought it just might be time to return to this theme. As I re-read what I wrote in my previous articles marking various milestones it has been interesting to see how my thoughts have…evolved.

Much has changed since I wrote that last article. I kicked death’s door open with two heart attacks in 24 hours and we relocated to central Tennessee. Oh, and we all went through Covid…which I suspect history books will mark as a significant corner in our history…though I am not sure what exactly they will say yet.

In this relocation process, we searched for a couple of years for a new church home. At first, we hoped to find something close to our home since we longed to be part of the local community. One challenge you face when moving to a small community is you are an outsider for…years. We eventually found an accepting church in the next town over, a warm and loving PCA church with very Biblical teaching.

But…(you knew there had to be one!) I think between my own vagabond history (I have played/worked at about a dozen different churches) and my intense decades long archival work on Christian Hymnody has left me far too aware of a broader understanding of Christ’s Church than may be in my own good. In my earlier work, I wrote about my experience of the “body of Christ” as seen in the breadth and variety of His church. Though, at this point in my journey, I have come to see too often the hand saying to the foot, “look at your stunted toes! They are useless.” Each segment of Christ’s church is so eager to disconnect from it fellow member and even amputate a large portion of itself! How Christ must mourn!

I have seen all of this many times throughout my life. As a teen, my home church left the old UP (now PCUSA) because of its profound theological decay. And that decay has continued to today, unabated. The United…though hardly anymore… Methodist church has also cleaved apart because of theological decay. How Satan must rejoice at this. I recently did a short substitution at an Episcopal church. The service was full of Biblical readings, yet the conversations before and after the service contained the same coarse language you could hear on any street corner. Did the readings have NO meaning to them? Recently, the Southern Baptist may have sown the seeds of their own disunion. And a couple of weeks ago the PCA held their General Assembly. One of the hot topics is Christian Nationalism…and it looks like they will need another year to figure out how to handle it. I read through last year’s report and I was so disappointed by their approach to this serious issue. They spent a large portion of the report examining different versions of the Westminster Confession and the change in its understanding of the Church/state relationship. It was as if all they had was this one hammer and everything looked like a WC nail! I have never heard a CN advocate ever quote any version of the WC as a justification for their ideology.

But where does all of this come from? Dissertations by the multitude have been written on this! But, I can say this, from my vagabond journey, the moment pride and the lust for power enter the picture, Satan gains his foothold. This risk has certainly claimed many of the oldest denominations and has begun to break into those who still remain rooted in all of Scripture.

The fractiousness of Christ’s church is just a reflection of our general society. We are in desperate need of those who can speak across lines instead of yelling at them.