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Lessons and Carols for the Small Congregation

Author – Ginny Chilton Maxwell is Music Minister at Church of the Ascension in Norfolk, Virginia, where she serves as organist, choirmaster, and elementary music teacher.

 

Lessons and Carols

My church has a tradition of doing a service of Advent Lessons and Carols every year. To me, the term “Lessons and Carols” brings to mind King’s College in all its perfection, so planning my first service felt a bit daunting. I serve a small congregation with a small, but capable, volunteer choir. I knew the level that King’s produces was not attainable for us, so I embraced this as an opportunity to get creative. I ended up having a ton of fun crafting something that allows my choir to shine and encourages more active participation from the congregation. Below are some helpful tips for anyone who is still crafting Advent and Christmas services at your church.

 

Add some more prophets

Lessons and Carols is much like an Easter Vigil service in that it retells the Christian story of salvation: both services start with the Genesis stories of Creation and The Fall and end with stories of Jesus from the Gospels. As long as you start and end correctly, you can insert almost any readings, and any number of them, in between. The readings of the canonical nine Lessons and Carols connect Genesis to the Gospels via two passages from Isaiah. In my congregation, we enjoy hearing from several prophets in addition to Isaiah, which is perfectly fitting. I don’t mean to criticize the curators of those original nine lessons (okay, maybe I do), but the Israelites waited a long time for their savior! We should hear from more than one prophet before we jump to the Gospels.

In addition to it being historically appropriate, adding more prophets makes for a more exciting service. Start out joyously after the story of Creation and have the mood drop dramatically after The Fall. Then, make your congregation wait a bit before the star of Bethlehem dawns on the horizon. Jesus’s arrival will have much more impact.

 

Engage the congregation

When I’m worshiping as a congregant, I confess that I often get so caught up in the music that I miss the message. That is definitely the case when I attend a traditional service of Lessons and Carols; you’ll find me humming “Tomorrow Will Be My Dancing Day” for days afterward. I wanted to be sure the members of our congregation were engaged in the story of salvation from beginning to end, so I picked several congregational songs to fit with the additional prophetic readings. “Deep Within” by David Haas has a hauntingly beautiful melody and a refrain that is easy for congregations to pick up. The words about God writing a new covenant on the people’s hearts are taken directly from Jeremiah 31:31-34. “People, Look East” by Eleanor Farjeon is a common carol sung in Advent; most people don’t realize these words are based on the prophet Baruch (4:36). The prophet Micah also foretells a savior (5:2-4), and you can pair this with any number of Advent or general Parousia hymns (I often use “Soon and Very Soon” by Andrae Crouch). Finally, it is gratifying to hear from John the Baptist, as in John 1 where he foretells the coming of Christ. Pair this reading with “There’s a voice in the wilderness crying” by James Lewis Milligan using the ASCENSION tune.

Having plenty of congregational music also makes it easy to add in the odd musician from your congregation: flute sounds lovely on “Deep Within,” and “People, Look East” benefits from one or more brass players. Having more congregational music and musicians engages people in what is happening, and aids the service in feeling more like worship and less like a concert. If you’re doing Lessons and Carols on a Sunday morning, which we do at my church, it is fitting (and fun!) to engage your congregation more.

 

Make your choir shine

When taking a creative bent on Lessons and Carols, the more difficult job can be finding the right anthems for the choir to sing. Certain anthems have carved a special place in my heart, and my choir members feel the same way. After the reading from Genesis 3, for instance, it’s hard not to hear Elizabeth Poston’s “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree.” “To Dust” by Karen Marrolli (a living composer!) is a new anthem that I’ve tried in this slot with much success. It makes an impression on listeners and has become a favorite of my choir. Since I like hearing from as many prophets as possible, I sometimes add Zephaniah 3:14-18 and have the choir sing a setting of Psalm 96 or 98 (perhaps your choir already knows a setting of one of those they can dust off and perform with gusto). Pitoni’s “Cantate Domino” worked well for us. Stainer’s “How Beautiful Upon the Mountains” and Carl Schalk’s “As the Dark Awaits the Dawn” work well with any prophetic passage, are fun to learn, and allow volunteer choirs to shine.

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The King’s College version of Lessons and Carols is not feasible for the vast majority of us who work at modest churches with volunteer choirs. This isn’t a bad thing. Tinkering with their version to make it fit your congregation is quite enjoyable. In the process, you’ll learn a lot more about the individuals you’re working with and the message of the service you’re planning. Happy planning, and happy Advent!

 

For more blogs by Ginny Chilton Maxwell, go to the Centered in Song Blog Page.

 

Author – Ginny Chilton is Music Minister at Church of the Ascension in Norfolk, Virginia, where she serves as organist, choirmaster, and elementary music teacher.

It’s a struggle every year: how can I balance the quiet expectation of the Advent season with the rush and excitement of Christmas? You would think that as a church musician in an Episcopal church, I’d get plenty of Advent, but that’s not the case. As many of you know, I’m sure, if you’re involved in church, you’re spending the four weeks of Advent in a rush to be ready for Christmas: getting the kids ready for the pageant, prepping for the church Christmas dinner, practicing your Christmas choir music. Then you leave church, and our stores, radios, and neighborhoods are full of reindeer and bright lights. It feels like it’s Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. What can you do?

There are all sorts of answers to that question, but here I am writing a blog for the Center for Congregational Song, so I have to say: community singing can help set the mood for Advent. I’ve been angst-ing over how to bring more Advent into my family and church life this season, perhaps more so than in previous years. My son is growing up, and it feels more imperative than ever that I figure out how to bring Advent into our home—without being the “Scrooge” mom who won’t allow anything fun before December 25th. And in my work as a church musician, I help plan beautiful worship services of expectation on Sundays, but during the week I’m singing Christmas songs and ringing jingle bells with the children in our parish school.

I think many of us came feeling much like I was: stressed about everything I had to do at work, everyone I hadn’t found a present for, etc.

All of this came to a head this past Thursday. I’ve been leading a new weekday gathering at our church for parents and young children. Each week we have about a dozen parents and small children gather to sing songs, play instruments, and play or do a craft together. This past week we made plans to meet at the local assisted living facility to sing Christmas songs with the residents. I think many of us came feeling much like I was: stressed about everything I had to do at work, everyone I hadn’t found a present for, etc. It didn’t help that it was about 90 degrees in the facility, and there was a bit of a holdup before we could start singing. The children were getting restless, and the elderly residents were giving us a skeptical look. I was beginning to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake in planning something like this so close to Christmas.

But then we started singing. The children calmed down. The residents perked up, and even those who had been confused a moment before, sang as loudly as anyone.

There’s something about making eye contact with others while you’re singing together that ignites a little flame in your chest. What do you call that? Love? Belonging? Joy? God? It brings a sort of hush even in the midst of commotion. It was the Advent moment I had been hoping for all month, and a perfect way to set our hearts in the right place as we wait for Emmanuel, God with us.

Do you struggle to experience Advent in the midst of all the busyness December brings? What have been your moments of Advent hush this season? Does group singing play a part in any of that? Happy Advent and Merry Christmas, everyone!

 

Author – Adam Perez is a doctoral student in liturgical studies at Duke Divinity School.

I am going to be upfront with you that, for some, this post may contain an unwelcomed or unpopular suggestion. And I know that I kind of “missed the boat” on the timing of this post—it probably would have been more appropriate before Advent, on Christ the King. Oh, one other thing to be candid about: this is a post that is going to suggest that if you don’t already sing some praise and worship in your congregation, now might be the best time, in this month and a half-ish between Christ the King and Epiphany. In fact, I won’t be suggesting you try on just any praise and worship from the last 40 years, but what we might call “classic” praise and worship. Better yet, you’re welcome to call it “traditional” praise and worship. I’m talking about the stuff from the mid- and late-1980s, the songs that came out before CCLI was a thing and before Christian bookstores picked it up and before the CCM industry saw the market value in it. I guess you might just call it “hipster” in that way—”traditional” praise and worship was doing it before it was cool.

You might be wondering what, exactly, this so-called “traditional” praise and worship was doing? And what that non-liturgical charismatic praise and worship stuff has to do with the so-called “liturgical” calendar?

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It’s no mystery that the central themes of the Advent season revolve around waiting, anticipation, patience, preparation, and expectation. These themes are quite appropriate for this first season of the church calendar that celebrates the grand narrative of Christian hope that ended last week with Christ the King Sunday. The King has now crowned the liturgical year, and we’re back to the beginning of our story in time: Christ the King not-yet.

If your experience in congregational song is anything like mine, the deepest sense of expectation during Advent is actually for the opportunity to sing Christmas carols. Radios and shopping malls everywhere have long beat us to the punch, and it’ll be another three weeks before many communities let their O come‘s become has come’s. We (myself included) can often be quite zealous about our careful navigation of the liturgical calendar. We’ve got a cosmic story to tell and only 52ish Sundays a year to tell it, much less the four of Advent and the one Sunday after Christmas. Time is short. Choose carefully, choose wisely.

For so many, the songs themselves are the greatest reason for the season. I don’t mean to be harsh but—as you probably know from experience—no other season of the Christian year is so infused with popular demand for a certain repertoire of music. In the span of just a few days, many communities celebrate a Lessons and Carols service, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Church Christmas Pageants/musicals, not to mention all the concerts put on by schools and community organizations (also not to mention those of you who livestream musical events like those at St. Olaf College or King’s College Choir Cambridge—you know who you are).

In the midst of our waiting for this short flurry and flourish of appropriately Christmas-y repertoire, how can we infuse a deep sense of expectation for the coming of Christ himself? How can we help Advent sound its own part of the story? Do we commit to only the “traditional” Advent carols and the medieval church modes?

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Pentecostal and charismatic traditions have something to teach the rest of the church about a fervent expectation and experience of God in worship. Sure, we have had some inter-Christian disagreements about what happens when God is “manifestly” present, and that’s fair enough. But what I think we in congregational song can learn is another musical way to celebrate the basic rhythm of Christian worship in revelation and response and in expectation and fulfillment and how we might more deeply join in the palpable sense of excitement that God is truly making Godself present in our worship and in the world, and God is doing so powerfully.

One thing traditional praise and worship does well is generate a sense expectation. In fact, the expressed goal of these songs and their use in worship is to facilitate the journey from expectation to fulfillment of God’s coming in Christ through the power of the Spirit. And not with the journey itself as the goal, but the celebration of the very presence of God.

Now, if there’s one thing that I feel confident in saying that this season of Advent to Christmas is about; one thing that matters for our participation in the present portion the Christian narrative; one thing that we can hang our discipleship hats on, it’s so that we have the palpable sense of expectation that is ultimately fulfilled with an enjoyment of God’s presence in the incarnation; Emmanuel, God with us. Traditional praise and worship can help us do this well, if we give it the opportunity and take it on its own terms.

Here’s one great example: go have a look/listen at the early Integrity’s Hosanna! Music tapes from the mid 1980s—a great place to start would be the tape “All Hail King Jesus”[1] from 1985 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlAWfJl8Ljo). I mentioned in the opening that this would have been quite appropriate on Christ the King Sunday— “but wait, there’s more!”—listen to how chock-full the songs are with language of expectation directly from the Psalms and Prophets and invites our direct response to the great acts of God, especially in the person and presence of Jesus Christ. Over the course of the album, it moves from boisterous praise and confident statements of beckoning or expectation into quieter songs of response to the enthroned Jesus Christ. It’s a very cosmic—and very Advent-friendly—narrative.

Use these (or others from this repertoire), and make them your own. But also be sure to give them the space they need to do the work they were made to do. So to say, take some cues from this album as to how the performance practices might do as much work as the texts in generating a strong sense of expectation and fulfillment. The other great part about traditional praise and worship is that the instrumentation is highly adaptable. You can do it with virtually any arrangement of musicians that will suit your context and your services. Because these were originally done in orchestral settings, it makes for a much easier process of simplifying to suit your context than “complexifying” to suit. Take for example the title track mentioned above, “All Hail King Jesus” that Lifeway offers in lead sheet, chord chart, piano, vocal, and full orchestral versions (print or as digital files).[2] All very easily accessible. But don’t just do one song, do a whole set, musical transitions and all. It’s called “flow.”

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All this to say: I hope we continue to reach across the musical boundaries that have grown up around us to celebrate the good in other traditions of congregational song in Christian worship by participating in them. “Traditional” praise and worship has something to offer all of us in learning how to deeply experience and rehearse the story of the coming of Christ in Advent and Christmas as more than a symbol of Christian unity, but an embodiment of it. As Rosa’s recent blog reminded us so keenly: our singing is an act of love, not just with our lips or ears but with our actions and our presence. We celebrate in sung prayer and presence as an act of love for each others’ diverse experiences of God. And all of this stems from the layers of hope, expectation, and ultimate fulfillment we find in this first season of the Christian year, and ultimately in God’s eschatological fulfillment to which the year so beautifully points.

 

[1] The title track of the album, “All Hail King Jesus” Words and music by Dave Moody. © Copyright 1978 Dayspring Music, LLC.

[2] https://www.lifewayworship.com/findAndBuy/songPage/AllHailKingJesus?versionId=90387&searchString=null#song-Parts

 

 

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