Hymnology 101: How to sing a hymn and actually enjoy it

I'll tell you a secret: I love to worship God.¹

I believe that God created us to be whole. He did not make us to be simply a mind floating around in an endless sea of abstraction, thinking, calculating, understanding. Neither did He make us to to be a set of feelings, amorphously gushing forth, now in anger, now in sadness, now in pleasure. Nor yet did He make us to be a body, going from task to task, lifting, moving, doing without thought or feeling. He made us to be whole, integrated, experiencing all of these things together in unified purpose, to know what has happened and be sad about it, to accomplish a task and rejoice in its completion, to see a friend in need and act on his behalf. But most of all, He has made us for Himself.

In the Confessions, St. Augustine says:

Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.

We were made to worship and glorify God! Apart from Him, we can only ever be restless. This does not mean that we can never be happy or fulfilled in any way apart from God, but it does mean that we cannot find the rest and peace our souls long for without Him--how could we, since He is that rest and peace?

He made us to be whole, and He made us for Himself. This is reflected in His commands for how we should worship Him. In Deuteronomy 6:5, He says:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

His intention is that our worship should involve our whole selves, body, mind, and spirit. There are many ways in which I know and serve God. I pray, I teach, I write, I read the Scriptures, I try to do a good job at work, I try to treat others with kindness. In all of these things, I learn about Who He is, what His character is like, and how to relate to Him. However, I usually apprehend Him most directly when I worship Him. I learn about His character, His desires, His plans for me in many ways. I see Him in the beauty of His holiness in worship. These ineffably sublime experiences are, alas, fairly rare, but the deep things of God call out to the deep places in my heart. I long for these moments, and they happen most often in worship.They inspire me to pursue Him in all of the other ways I've mentioned, and pursuing Him leads again to meeting Him, sometimes here and now but ultimately, always and forever.

We live in a postmodern culture. Among other things, this means that we, as a society, have given up on reason as a source of truth and meaning for our lives. Paradoxically, we embrace science and technology, but as sources of convenience, not as sources of meaning. As Sting says,

I never saw no miracle of science
That didn't go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse...

This attitude has pervaded the church. As a friend of mine recently wrote, "modern evangelicalism is suffering from virulent anti-intellectualism," and, frankly, why wouldn't it? If thought and reason aren't sources of truth and meaning, why would we even attempt to glorify God by using them? Let us focus instead on the emotionally evocative. Evidence of this attitude is sadly abundant in modern worship music.

Don't get me wrong, I go to a contemporary church where we mostly sing contemporary worship songs, and I love it. We are made to be whole. Singing a song with simple lyrics and a simple tune which primarily appeals to my emotions is perfectly consistent with that². You're hitting two out of the big three. Sing it with all your might! However, we should not, therefore, refrain from worshiping him with our minds. Deep calls to deep. The deep things of God are beyond our ability to comprehend, but that is not because they are without intellectual  or theological content, it's because our intellects aren't powerful enough to understand their theology. Modern worship songs which delve into the mystery of the Trinity or the efficacy of Christ's shed blood for our salvation exist, but they are rare. In worship, our emotions should feed on the Mysteries of God, but our minds should too. This, I think, is where traditional hymns should play an important role in the life of the contemporary church.

The late New Testament scholar Jaroslav Pelikan famously said:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

Traditionalism is one of the major factors that makes hymns unpopular in contemporary worship. Many people who grew up in traditional churches never experienced life in Christ when they went there. Often, when they  became Christians, it was in some more contemporary setting, and they naturally concluded that traditional worship was simply traditionalistic. Not so, but far otherwise!

In addition, hymns face several challenges in a contemporary worship setting. It is much harder to play a hymn on a guitar than it is to play a contemporary praise song, so one often hears hymns done rather poorly³. This leads some to the incorrect conclusion that hymns aren't very good music. The language of hymns is often difficult as well. They use grammar and word forms that are archaic (thee's, thou's, etc.), and they use words that are not part of most people's vocabulary today (What the heck is an Ebeneezer? Is this a Christmas song?)

So, with all of that in mind, here are some rules of thumb that might help you get something out of singing a hymn:

1. It's a hymn, not a dirge. You're not at a funeral. It doesn't have to be solemn. It doesn't have to be slow.
2. Sing a hymn just like you would sing any other song. Put your heart into it. Mean the words you say. Sing the song as a prayer to God.
3. Understand the vocabulary. If you don't understand a word or a Biblical reference, look it up! (Why do you think God provided you with that smart phone!?)
4. Understand the grammar. Learn how "thou," "art," and "changest" are used in sentences so that when you see them they are no more strange than "you," "are," and "change."

1 "Worship" is sometimes a dicey word. It can be used to mean the actions and character of our whole lives as we dedicate ourselves to serving God, or it can, in a more limited way, refer to singing songs of praise to Him. I am primarily using the second meaning here, but everything I say here could also be applied to the first. ^↩
2 Simplicity should not be confused with stupidity or vapidity. There are certainly contemporary songs which are both. In fairness, however, it should be noted that stupid and vapid worship songs have always been with us. In their day, the stupid songs of the past were just as stupid as the stupid songs of today. However, because of their worthlessness, most of them (thankfully) have not survived to impinge themselves upon our notice today.^↩
3 This is not the case at my church. Harry, no criticism is implied or intended.^↩