Gospel Songs--Why We Need Them

In the last blog we talked about hymns and why we so need them to remind ourselves and each other just who is this God that we serve and what are His unchanging attributes that we can depend on in a undependable world.  Hymns are also songs addressed to God in worship and gratitude for our history with Him.

The other kind of song that we need to sing is the gospel song.  Many great gospel songs have also survived the test of many generations of experience and often we even hear these called “hymns” because they have proven to be so true to our shared experience.  While hymns are “vertical” or God directed, gospel songs are “horizontal” or relational. By that I mean that they are “the word of our testimony”-– each of us telling someone else what God has done in our lives.  These songs are our personal story.

I guess I am cynical enough that when I sit in church and hear both hymns and praise and worship songs telling how awesome God is, I am asking in my mind, “How do you know that?  I have my real and complicated life coming up tomorrow morning, and I have to know how you know that God is awesome, powerful, omnipotent, omnipresent and all the things you are singing about Him.”  

There is nothing so powerful to my fainting heart as a real person saying to me, “This is what happened to me, and this is how I know.”  Like the blind man who was questioned by the sanctimonious doubters, he simply said, “I don’t know whether he’s good or bad.  I only know, once I was blind, but now I see.”

We also need these relational songs because love demands action to be valid.  We don’t read the words of Jesus very long before we hear Him telling us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give shelter to the homeless and “thus fulfill the law of love.”

It is my deep belief that in our worship, both personal and corporate, we need a good balance of hymns and personal testimony songs.  We do overcome by the “blood of the Lamb” and by “the word of our testimony.”  Nothing is as powerful when some cynic shoves us into a corner of “theological nit-picking” than taking two steps away from the belligerent finger-pointing to simply say, “I only know, this happened to me.”

We need both hymns and gospel songs because every vertical commitment will eventually demand a horizontal living out in relationship with those around us.  It is imperative that we know what God says in His living Word and when we gather to worship express our gratitude for all He is, rising above our smallness to embrace His Glory.  We also need to live out what He says in this word, drawing from the great storehouse of His freely offered resources to embrace a hurting world by being what He has called us to be.  The vertical.  The horizontal.  The hymns of praise and great scriptural truths that have withstood the test of experience must be combined with the word of our personal testimony sharing our stories of God at work through us and in us to conform us to the likeness of His Son.  We need to teach both to our children.  Don’t worry that they might not totally understand all the words.  Did you?  Did I? But hymns and spiritual songs that are worth their salt are pieces of portable theology, and they will throw our children a lifeline when experience is pulling them under for the third time.  As with scripture, the meaning of profoundly true songs will become clear when life gets their attention.

The “praise and worship” vs. “gospel songs” argument should never come up!  We need to sing the songs that have outlived us.  We need to sing the songs as new and fresh as this morning’s experience with our neighbor or our children.  We need the songs that remind us that we have a history with God.  We need the songs that sing our testimony as personal as the text of encouragement we just received from a fellow believer.

All must be biblical, beautiful, true, powerful and, yes, personal.  Let’s encourage each other daily, singing hymns and spiritual songs.  Let us never lose our joy and in the chaos of the world, live at rest in Him who is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.

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Margaret Effie Boster

I thought my grandmother (my mother’s mother) was the wisest person on earth.  She seemed to know everything:  the names of the trees, the herbs to use for poultices or making teas that could cure fever and sore throat and nausea and cramps, and the names of the heavenly constellations.  She knew the best way to catch a catfish or set the broken leg of a goose.  She could make a designer dress with lining, lace, and covered buttons, but she could also saw sheets of dry walling into manageable pieces, nail them to the studs, strip the seams, plaster the unfinished wall, and then paint it when the plaster was dry.

She taught me to never tell a lie, believe a braggart, trust a man who would kick his dog, or to argue with a fool. Because of her and her daughter (my mother), I learned a that a job is never finished until it is done, that garden tools should not be put away until they are hosed off and oiled, and that you weren’t done fishing until the worms were stripped from the hook and the line was rolled tightly and secured.  She taught me to notice weeds and tears and silence.  She showed me how to pay attention to the color of the clouds, the way leaves turn silver-side-up before a storm, and the sound of the wind when it gets still before a tornado.

She was suspicious of people who always had to affix blame or who needed to take credit.  She paid her tithe, mowed her own lawn, and took the tulip and iris bulbs with her when she moved.  She had her own definition of “clean”, and it was way beyond not being able to see dirt.

Her faith seemed to be tied to her faithfulness; she seldom asked God for special favors until she’d done what she knew to do.  She believed a person best showed love by doing the right thing, putting oneself out for someone else, and not being indulgent to make up for the guilt of not doing what you should have done in the first place.

I loved her stories because they were real, not made up.  My favorites were the stories about how she sewed the muslin cover to slip over the bones of a wagon that she and Johnny then hooked up to a team of horses to go from Missouri to Wyoming to lay claim to a homestead.  Along the way, she told me, they would stop at night and join other covered wagons to build a fire, cook their supper, and share reports about the safety and dangers of the trail over which they had just come.

When Margaret Effie and Johnny got to Wyoming, they built a sod house to protect the family from the elements and began the backbreaking job of coaxing a farm out of the thick thatch of the prairie.  Maybe this life-experience and the many more about which she told me, shaped the grandmother I knew.  She was not a warm, fuzzy person.  I don’t remember her hugging me a lot or very often telling me she loved me. I was in awe of her.  But the skills and personal disciplines she modeled every day of her life helped to shape the way I come at life to this day.  For her, God was never the “great sugar-daddy in the sky’’ or the genie in the jug. He was the One with whom she was yoked in the great work of life, tilling fields, sowing seeds, expecting—then being good stewards of—the harvest.  He was the one who helped her find her needle, the neighbor who helped her locate the “pearl of great price,” or the friend who searched with her all day, if need be, to find the lost coin.

Because of her I know that God is my co-worker, my wise advisor, my strength when the task is beyond me, and the healer of broken bones, broken tools, and broken hearts.  Because of her, Margaret Effie Boster, I know that whatever I can bring to the task is enough, because God my co-worker, is more than enough.

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"A Place of Her Own"

Every woman needs a place of her own; a corner, a room, a space in the garden she can call her own where she can get alone with God, where she can go to read or think, where she can shed private tears or write in her journal. Given the pressures of life, the demands of work and family, most women need “an escape hatch,” a place where we can run and hide for a moment to catch our breath, recoup and regain perspective.

For my mother I suspect it was her sewing room, where to the whir of the sewing machine (and earlier the rhythm of the treadle) she could think undisturbed while she created designer fashions from the patterns on her sewing table.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

For my sister it has always been her garden with its abundant blooms and bird-feeders and trellises growing with the great globes of red tomatoes she had nourished.  There in the garden she and God have had many an intimate conversation and, I suspect, these encounters were why her spirit always seemed to be a homeplace for weary hearts.

Our daughter Suzanne has her writing place where the sweet fragrance of blank paper and the pungent smell of ink blend with the delicious musty aroma of treasured books.  There she cocoons herself away with her cat and gives into her natural hermit nature to express a world that only comes alive for the rest of us on the page.

Amy is a nester by nature, so she makes every space her own and invites the world into her quiet place.   She and Andrew both have the gift of hospitality and live their outwardly frantic pace as a natural rhythm that we have always referred to as “AMYtime.”

My special places are an old mission chair by the fireplace in our Indiana farm kitchen, our cabin in the woods, and my potting shed.  The potting shed and its secluded green space is by now an old friend and a place where I can go to dig in the dirt, write in my garden journal, and pray. My other soul-place is the seaside; I’m sure there must be salt water in my veins, for the beach always calls to me.

The other day Suzanne sent me this poem about décor.  She called it “Finishing Touches.”  I loved it so much, I asked her if I could share it with you.  After all, the most beautiful décor of all is light shining on the special place where your heart feels at home.

The GUIDE TO STYLE IN LIVING tells how
to arrange with organized random
the globed scented candles, books, vases,
how to find palette (no more than three

patterns), how to fill wall space.
“There is a balance to this room,”
it says, the fresh coat of indigo paint
drying behind a fire engine red armoire.

I sling it down on the body of my one
random border collie who looks at me
like I’ve lost it.  I glance around this room
centered around the rich texture of woods
winter bare.  Still I admire how the charcoal,
taupe roughness juxtaposes my worn
jean jacket strewn haphazardly across
the pine trunk at the foot of my four poster bed.

This rocker I received from my husband
when our oldest was born now recovered
for the third time, rests rightfully in the corner.
the book on Aristotle Jesse was reading

lies decorously, a disconnected leaf,
in the floor next to the yellow and black
stripes of Cliff’s Notes on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
screaming their presence at the muted door.

And I realize how we have found palette
filled empty wall space, and how we
balance, sometimes precariously, in the details
of our randomly, organized lives.

Suzanne Renee Gaither Jennings

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