Why do we use music in our worship, and what is its purpose? We take for granted that there will be music in Christian worship, but how many of us have stopped to consider those two questions? Music, especially singing, has long been a part of biblical worship. Consider, just as one example, the 150 Psalms inspired by the Holy Spirit and included in the canon of Scripture for the worship of God’s people, from the time of Moses (Psalm 90) until today and until Jesus returns. The book of Revelation gives us a picture of the worship in heaven from the apostle John’s day into eternity, where saints and angels are ceaselessly singing “Holy, holy, holy,” and “Worthy is the Lamb.”
This is one of the marvelous distinctives of biblical worship. What other religion in the world has made the singing of the people to be such an integral part of worship? Yes, there is music in many religious practices, from animistic jungle tribes to that of the mantra chanting of eastern religions. But those bear little resemblance to the vast treasury of sacred music that has grown in Christianity, especially since the time of the Reformation. Even before that, this included the beautiful Gregorian plainsong melodies of the medieval church, and has now grown to include well over two million Christian hymns, not to mention the vast repertoire of sacred choral and instrumental music!
So we know music is a part of Christian worship, and it is clearly very effective in engaging the hearts of worshippers with the Lord, and is enjoyed and appreciated by all. But that’s not the reason or the purpose. The only legitimate reason for including music in our worship is that God has revealed in His Word that He desires it. And it is there for our benefit, but even more importantly for God’s pleasure and to glorify Him. He is the one who invented music itself as well as giving human beings the ability to create music and musical instruments, and also the ability to hear and appreciate the beauty of musical sounds, which animals (not made in God’s image) cannot do.
Some of these concepts are found in the hymn “When in Our Music God Is Glorified.” The words were written in 1971 by Fred Pratt Green (1903-2000), one of the best-known of the contemporary school of hymnwriters in the British Isles. His name and writings appear in practically every new hymnal and hymn supplement wherever English is spoken and sung. Born in Liverpool, England, he was ordained in the British Methodist ministry in 1928. He was a pastor and district superintendent in Brighton and York, before serving in Norwich. After he retired, he continued to write new hymns prolifically, as he described it, “that fill the gap between the hymns of the first part of this century and the ‘far-out’ compositions that have crowded into some churches in the last decade or more.”
His hymns generally reflected his rejection of what is sometimes derided as “fundamentalism” and show his concern with social issues. They include many that were written to supply obvious liturgical needs of the modern liberal church, speaking to topics or appropriate for events for which there were few traditional hymns available. His hymns appear in hymn books of various denominations, but most notably in Methodist churches in England and in the United States. As well as writing his own hymns, Green produced translations, notably translating one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s late poems as the hymn, “By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered.”
This particular hymn text came about as noted British hymnologist John Wilson (1905-1992) suggested that Green write a text to sing to the great tune ENGELBERG, composed in 1904 by the famous British composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), something that could be used in choir festivals. Hymnologist J. R. Watson records that “Wilson urged Pratt Green to write a text for a Festival of Praise . . . which could be sung to Stanford’s neglected tune.” Pratt Green based his text on Psalm 150, but alluded to Mark 14:26 in stanza four of the hymn, a stanza recalling the hymn sung by the disciples at the Last Supper.
Sir Charles Villers Stanford (1852-1924) is an important name in church music. He was an Anglo-Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Romantic era. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at Cambridge before studying music in Leipzig and Berlin. While still an undergraduate, he was appointed organist of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1882, aged 29, he was one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music. From 1887 he was also Professor of Music at Cambridge. Among his pupils were rising composers whose fame went on to surpass his own, such as Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Stanford composed a substantial number of major concert works, including seven symphonies, but his best-remembered pieces are his choral works for church performance, chiefly composed in the Anglican tradition. His tune ENGELBERG was originally intended for the text, “For All the Saints,” by William Walsham How (1823-1897). It was Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), one of Stanford’s former students, who composed his own tune for How’s text, SINE NOMINE. In the eyes and hearts of many, Stanford’s tune was supplanted by these developments and SINE NOMINE became the favored tune setting of “For All the Saints.”
With Green’s text about glorifying God through music, we remember numerous examples in the history of hymnody where music is a metaphor for some theological theme or experience. In Babcock’s “This Is My Father’s World,” for example, “all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.” Charles Wesley speaks of “the music of the heart” in his paraphrase of Psalm 150, “Praise the Lord Who Reigns Above.” Some have been reluctant to embrace Green’s text as more of a worship of music than of a worship of God. But that surely was not the intent of the author, and should not be used as a reason to rejection Green’s fine worshipful lyrics.
That was, however, the reason, that the 1990 “Trinity Hymnal” revision committee chose to use a different text to go along with the Stanford ENGELBERG tune. Their choice was a fine hymn text for missions by William J. Danker (1914-2001), “The Sending, Lord, Springs,” based on the call to Isaiah in 6:8, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for Us?”
The sending, Lord, springs from Thy yearning heart.
God, Thou the sender, Thou the sent one art,
And of Thy mission makest us a part. Alleluia!Thy body paid for men of every race;
To them we witness, Christ, Thy boundless grace,
With them, on body, kneel before Thy face. Alleluia!Where men their brothers heartlessly oppress,
Where people suffer, hopeless in distress,
There we Thy name in deed and word confess. Alleluia!One mission takes me over land and sea
And to the Christian brother next to me.
Help me to listen, Lord, and speak for Thee. Alleluia!From urban deeps to orbits high in space,
Through cross to glory moves one pilgrim race,
Praising the Father, Son, and Spirit’s grace. Alleluia!
From 1948-1955, Danker served as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s first missionary to Japan. Upon returning to American, he became a professor at Concordia Seminary, and directed the World Mission Institute. A graduate of Concordia College and Seminary, the University of Chicago, and Heidelberg University in Germany, he worked tirelessly as a pastor, pioneer missionary, and edited more than 20 books.
In Green’s hymn, “When in Our Music God Is Glorified,” he used music not just as a metaphor that points us to another idea, but explores music-making as a phenomenon in the Christian’s experience in its own right. The second stanza concludes with the marvelous thought that “making music . . . move[s] us to a more profound Alleluia!” In this way, Pratt Green seems to agree with Martin Luther who said, “Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.” Luther and Pratt Green seem to ascribe a quasi-sacramental quality to music, music as a means of revelation and grace.
This hymn was first presented at a regional gathering of the Church Music Society, London Southwest District, at the Methodist Church in Redhill on May 1st, 1971. Green brought two drafts of the hymn, which are now preserved in his archival scrapbooks at Emory University. One of the most notable changes between drafts was in the way it originally began “Now let our instruments be tuned for praise,” with a nearly identical stanza at the end (as bookends). The sixth stanza, which was never published, is worth noting:
If every art confessed no other Lord
Than he who is the Uncreated Word,
Mankind would cry, by truth and beauty stirred: Alleluia!
In the second draft, the opening bookend was replaced by a new stanza, “When in man’s music God is glorified.” The editors of one American hymn book felt the need to eliminate “man,” “men,” “mankind,” etc. in the interests of the feminine sex. Green responded, “So I was asked to accept ‘When in our music God is glorified’ in place of my original ‘When in man’s music God is glorified.’ My own view is that something has been lost as well as gained! Nevertheless, one accepts a change of this kind with good grace, wondering what is to be done with the ‘he-ness’ of God!”
Regarding the Scriptural underpinnings of the hymn, the author (or his editor) supplied five references in his book “Partners in Creation” (2003): 1 Chronicles 16:42, Psalm 150, Mark 14:26, Ephesians 5:19–20, and Colossians 3:16. The first of those (“Heman and Jeduthun . . . expressly named to give thanks to the Lord, . . . had trumpets and cymbals for the music and instruments for sacred song,”), is not referenced directly in the hymn, but points to the concept of having people within the church whose special task is to make music. The Psalm applies primarily to the final stanza, encouraging all voices and instruments to declare “alleluia.”
Mark 14:26 mentions Jesus and the disciples singing a hymn after the Last Supper before heading out to the Mount of Olives. Most Bible scholars believe this might have been one of the Hallel Psalms (113-118), which is possibly why the author used “psalm” rather than “hymn.” Psalm 116:13 (“I will lift up the cup of salvation”) would have been particularly appropriate following the Last Supper. The two Pauline texts are similar expressions of the admonition to use psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to give thanks and to convey biblical teaching. This is incorporated into the third stanza, which says “the Church, in liturgy and song” has “borne witness to the truth.”
“When, in Our Music, God is Glorified” is a unison hymn with a melodic range of an octave. The melody moves mostly in steps with a few instances of simple interval leaps. These factors, as well as its short length, help make the hymn very singable for congregations. It is in 10.10.10 hymnic meter with “alleluias” added to each stanza as somewhat of a brief refrain (really more of an antiphon). Poetically, the hymn is in iambic meter and features rhyming triplets in each stanza , as each line ends with the same rhyming sound (with the exception of the third line of the third stanza, “tongue”).
Each stanza of the hymn highlights a different aspect of the music we offer in personal and corporate worship:
Stanza 1 – adoration of God, not self-promotion
Stanza 2 – the effect that new sounds and styles can have on us as we worship
Stanza 3 – the historical use of music by the church
Stanza 4 – Jesus’ singing of psalms the night He was betrayed
Stanza 5 – praising and rejoicing through music
At the end of each of the first four stanzas, an “alleluia” is sung. This is a transliteration of the Hebrew word for “Praise Yahweh”). The unresolved sound of each “alleluia” leads naturally to the start of the following stanza. The closing “alleluia” resolves downward in a stepwise melody and brings the hymn to a pleasant melodic conclusion.
Stanza 1 immediately lays the foundation for why church music happens: for the glory of God. Church musicians are likely to have mental associations between this and J.S. Bach’s famous inscription in so many of his music manuscript pages (SDG – Soli Deo Gloria), or the Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q 1: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever”) or possibly the Heidelberg Catechism (Q 6: “God created man good . . . that he might rightly know God his Creator, . . . to glorify and praise Him”). The stanza continues by pointing out that when we do that, there is no place for prideful boasting in who we are or what we have done. The whole creation points to His greatness and glory.
When, in our music, God is glorified,
And adoration leaves no room for pride,
It is as though the whole creation cried, Alleluia!
Stanza 2 describes the spiritual phenomenon of making music and experiencing something greater than the sum of its parts. Church musician and scholar Donald Hustad explained, “When church music draws attention to itself, it remains only a source of pleasure or the object of esthetic veneration. When it gives us a more profound view of God and of ourselves, it is worthy of that inscription (Soli Deo Gloria). It becomes an Alleluia experience, a celebration of a new dimension of ultimate reality.” Hopefully, that is what the music in our worship services will do for us, to transport our souls into the “dimension” of God’s presence, singing “Alleluia” to Him.
How often, making music, we have found
A new dimension in the world of sound,
As worship moved us to a more profound Alleluia!
Stanza 3 carries the biblical idea of using music to convey doctrinal truth, and the author saw it happening “in faith and love” across centuries of error (as in Ephesians 4:15, “speaking the truth in love”). Furthermore, Lutheran scholar David Berger pointed to the way in which the creation of music accumulates over time and continues to serve the church, saying, “Liturgy and hymns of Christian worship are gifts of the ongoing communion of saints from every time and place, conveying the truth in a multiplicity of languages – musical and verbal.”
So has the Church, in liturgy and song,
In faith and love, through centuries of wrong,
Borne witness to the truth in every tongue: Alleluia!
Stanza 4 sets Jesus as an example of making music in the face of adversity, as He sang with the disciples in the Upper Room before going to the cross. Berger noted, “Indeed, music has the power to lift us from the pit of despair (1 Samuel 16:23),” but Pratt Green seems to have conveyed something slightly different, not so much music breaking us free from darkness, but music being brought to the Lord, obediently, even in the face of certain trouble (Habakkuk 3:17-18). Therefore, the author says, we do likewise, and offer it to God, “for whom [Jesus] won the fight,” celebrating what His struggle against the Satanic forces of darkness and evil accomplished, which will once and for all be finally and permanently banished when He returns.
And did not Jesus sing a Psalm that night
When utmost evil strove against the Light?
Then let us sing, for whom He won the fight: Alleluia!
Stanza 5 embodies the sense and spirit of Psalm 150. Here, in what once was the opening of the hymn, we find an appropriate and stirring conclusion, where our worship should, as it were, “pull out all the stops” (referring to what an organist does when engaging all the voices [stops] of the instrument). As Psalm 150 calls us to use everything that has breath to praise the Lord, so here our voices are lifted up in faith as they sound yet again “Alleluia!” There is no holding back as musicians raise the roof in praise to the Maker and Redeemer. Fittingly, Green concludes with a petition that recognizes once again the source, the foundation, and the proper focus of the music of worship: “May God give us faith to sing always: Alleluia!”
Let every instrument be tuned for praise!
Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise!
And may God give us faith to sing always: Alleluia!
Words by Fred Pratt Green © 1972 Hope Publishing Company; Carol Stream, IL 60188.
Another tune, FREDERICKTOWN, was composed by Charles R. Anders for this text, for the “Lutheran Book of Worship” (1978), repeated in “Lutheran Worship” (1982). The tune was named after Anders’ birthplace (Frederick, Maryland). When the 1978 hymnal went to press, Anders was pastor of All Saints Lutheran Church, Tamarac, Florida, but he had previously been an editor for Augsburg Publishing in Minneapolis (1973-1975) and was a member of the hymn music committee of the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship. Facing strong competition from ENGELBERG, this tune has found better success being paired with a different text, “In all our grief and fear we turn to you,” by Sylvia Dunstan. Dunstan’s text is a more suitable partner, since, as Paul Westermeyer has pointed out, “The melodic lines give it a somewhat somber cast,” and the composer conceived it musically in the Phrygian mode.
Here is a link to see and hear the hymn in an anthem arrangement by Dan Miller.