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Text Comparison: It Is Well

Blogger Brian Hehn is the Director of The Center for Congregational Song.

 

Reworking hymns and music of the past

Church musicians have always used, referenced, altered, and/or been inspired by Christian artists of the past. Our current age is no different, and so a common thread in some very popular contemporary…”praise and worship”…CWM…CCM (what do YOU call it!?) songs reference some of the great hymns of the past. One popular example of this in our current song repertoire is the added refrain to “Amazing Grace” which starts with “My Chains Are Gone.” The added refrain is written by Louie Giglio (of the Passion Movement) and Chris Tomlin (probably the reason you know this song). Another well-known example of this type of congregational song is “It Is Well” by Kristene DiMarco, which is the subject of today’s blog.

These types of songs always fascinate me. I end up asking why they felt the need to add or change the hymn. An age-old question asked of every hymnal editor since the beginning of time…How does what they added, subtracted, or altered change the meaning of the hymn? Let’s look at these songs side-by-side to see what’s going on.

Here is the hymn written by Horatio Gates Spafford (1873) and found in over four-hundred hymnals so far. The video below is a lovely TTBB arrangement.

 

Here is the new version of the hymn that heavily references the original but is certainly an original song written by Bethel’s Kristene Elizabeth Dimarco.

Text Comparison

When Peace Like A River (It Is Well)
Horatio Gates Spafford (1873)

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”

Refrain:
It is well with my soul;
it is well, it is well with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
let this blest assurance control:
that Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
and has shed his own blood for my soul. Refrain

My sin oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
my sin, not in part, but the whole,
is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more;
praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul! Refrain

O Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
the clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
the trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend;
even so, it is well with my soul. Refrain

https://hymnary.org/text/when_peace_like_a_river_attendeth_my_way

 

It Is Well
(as performed with Kristene DiMarco)

Grander earth has quaked before
Moved by the sound of His voice
Seas that are shaken and stirred
Can be calmed and broken for my regard
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
Through it all, through it all
It is well
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
It is well with me
Far be it for me to not believe
Even when my eyes can’t see
And this mountain that’s in front of me
Will be thrown into the midst of the sea
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
Through it all, through it all
It is well
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
It is well, it is well
So let go my soul and trust in Him
The waves and wind still know His name
So let go my soul and trust in Him
The waves and wind still know His name
So let go my soul and trust in Him
The waves and wind still know His name
The waves and wind still know His name
It is well with my soul
It is well with my soul
It is well with my soul
It is well, it is well with my soul
It is well, it is well with my soul
It is well with my soul
It is well with my soul
It is well, it is well with my soul
It is well, it is well with my soul
It is well, it is well with my soul
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
Through it all, through it all
It is well, Lord
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
And it is well with me

 

Stanza One

The opening stanza of Spafford’s hymn uses two creation-based images to describe the ups and downs of life. This is immediately followed by “whatever my lot” which alludes to God’s providence and control over all things including one’s station in life. The end of stanza 1 and the refrain then give us the basic idea of always giving praise to God by trusting in God’s love and care. This is the powerful idea that is likely why the hymn continues to be known and loved today. DiMarco’s first four lines double-down on that same idea that God is 100% in control and can (does?) move any part of creation for the sake of a single person. The refrain, while slightly different in text, does not change the essential message of Spafford’s original.

So, after the opening stanzas and refrains, the two songs are tracking well together with no substantial theological changes.

 

Stanza Two

In stanza two, Spafford introduces the idea that Satan is the one who creates the trials and temptations (the “sorrows like sea billows”) which need to be overcome. Indeed, Spafford goes so far as to say that we are helpless in the face of Satan’s trials and temptations. But, it is through Christ’s death that our souls are kept safe (For more on the “ransom atonement theory,” here’s a simple handout from a class at Notre Dame University). And so it is in stanza two that Christ’s saving acts are brought into play.

DiMarco’s text does not move on from stanza one, but rather moves into the responsibility of the believer. “Far be it for me to not believe | Even when my eyes can’t see | And this mountain that’s in front of me | Will be thrown into the midst of the sea” seems to be pulling ideas from John 20:29 (the story of Thomas not believing in Christ’s resurrection and Jesus responding with “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” ) and Matthew 17:20-21 (where Jesus says, “I assure you that if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Go from here to there,’ and it will go. There will be nothing that you can’t do.”).

So it is at stanza two that we have a departure. DiMarco moves into the importance and power of the individual’s faith while Spafford moves to the power of Christ’s salvation over the works and power of Satan. Neither of these are wrong, but they are certainly different.

 

Stanza Three

In stanza three Spafford doubles down on the importance of Christ’s crucifixion with “my sin…is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more” and follows it with words of praise. The focus of the text remains the work of Christ and not the work of the individual.

DiMarco’s text continues to focus on the faith of the individual by entreating the singer’s soul to “let go” and “trust in Him…The waves and wind still know His name” multiple times. This desperate plea seems to have resonances with the story in Mark 9 where the father of a demon-possessed child is told by Jesus “All things are possible for the one who has faith” to which the father cries back “I have faith; help my lack of faith!”. There’s a noticeable difference, though, in that DiMarco’s text placing the responsibility of belief on only the singer while the Gospel of Mark seems to be acknowledging the complexities of faith when we do believe…but we still need help from God to fully believe.

 

Stanza Four

Spafford concludes the hymn as many great hymns do, with an eye towards the coming kingdom of God. This eschatological turn using images from the Book of Revelation reminds the singer that the struggle between Satan and God, the persistence of evil and pain and suffering are not the end of the story. The final stanza ends with an acknowledgement that even though we live in a time when evil and pain and suffering do still exist, “even so, it is well with my soul.”

DiMarco does not provide a fourth stanza but rather moves into a repetition of “It is well with my soul” as somewhat of a mantra. Those familiar with meditation or the power of cyclical song forms such as those from Taize or parts of Sub-Saharan Africa understand the power that the repetition of a single phrase can have. As is common in many songs in the CWM/CCM/Praise&Worship genre, the emphasis of the song is to experience God through the making of music together rather than by the attempted explanation of God through words.

 

Conclusion

While the two songs share a common refrain, the trajectory of the texts and the ultimate purpose of the songs are different. Spafford’s text places the majority of the agency on the salvific works of Christ with an eschatological hopefulness. DiMarco’s text is an statement of God’s power followed by a mantra designed for the singer to manifest a belief in that powerful God. With that conclusion, my recommendation is this: do not replace one song for the other! Spafford’s hymn is a powerful text that keeps us focused on the work of Christ that was done, is still being accomplished, and will ultimately be completed. DiMarco’s song provides a powerful opportunity to sing our faith into being. If I had it my way, I’d use DiMarco’s song near the beginning of the service and use Spafford’s hymn for a sending song. If I had to choose one or the other, I’ll stick with Spafford’s consistent focus on Christ.

 

Blogger Brian Hehn is the Director of The Center for Congregational Song.

 

VARIETY OF SONG

The United Methodist (UMC) organization “Discipleship Ministries” has just released a project that has been years in the making. As a denomination (like many mainline Protestant denominations in the U.S.), the variety of worship practices, music accompaniment styles, and song selection in the United Methodist Church is all over the map. For many genres that work well in printed song collections, the curation of hymns and songs has been handled through the creation of hymnals and hymnal supplements (The United Methodist Hymnal 1989, The Faith We Sing 2001, and Worship & Song 2011). For songs and genres that do not work as well on the printed page or that have been left out of those collections, however, there has been little guidance on which songs and hymns are best suited for congregational song in United Methodist worship services.

This situation is not unique to United Methodists, but is a broader issue that the majority of denominations find themselves in today.

 

BACKGROUND

A few years ago, a group of UMC musicians and theologians set out to “vet” the CCLI-Top 100 List in order to give UMC pastors and worship leaders guidance on which of those songs are well suited for United Methodist worship. After creating a rubric tool (found here) to use on each song in the top-100 list, the group published the results of that vetting process here: 2017 CCLI Top 100 Commended List January 2018.

 

THE PROJECT

After the completion of this first step and identifying some striking representation omissions and theological gaps in the CCLI Top-100 list, a new group was formed to bring the vetting project to begin working on creating another list called the “CCLI Top 100+ Beyond” project. The group and its work are described on the project’s homepage as…

…a diverse team of eleven United Methodist and pan-Methodist pastors, theologians, and contemporary worship practitioners who not only evaluated the latest CCLI Top 100 songs, but supplemented this list by evaluating and recommending other contemporary worship songs that more accurately reflect the richness of our United Methodist connection. This vetting team represents the diversity of our denomination; each member has a strong facility with contemporary congregational song (including Contemporary Praise and Worship Music, Contemporary Gospel Music, Global Song, and other genres/forms of contemporary song).

The project results were just released (Monday, March 8th, 2021) and can be found as two resources:

The first is the recommended song list of 89 songs from a variety of sources. Each song includes a YouTube link to a performance, a “key Wesleyan theological emphasis” found in the song, the song’s perspective (Personal, Personal & Corporate, or Corporate), a paragraph description of the song’s context, and finally links to additional arrangements of the song.

Click To Download The Song List

The second is a 14-page PDF entitled “toolbox for worship leaders” that includes short entries from the project team on topics such as the “History of The Project,” “Making Your Song Choices Contextual,” “Cultural Competence In Song Adaptation,” and more. While the project and this resource’s audience is certainly leaders within the United Methodist Church, worship leaders from any denomination should read it. The recommendations, insights, and practical advice contained within these fourteen pages are an excellent guide to thinking theologically, practically, and critically about congregational song.

Click To Download The Toolbox PDF

 

A CALL FOR OTHER GROUPS TO FOLLOW

This project is a great first step in helping to prayerfully, critically, and intentionally curate the church’s song that has largely been missing from printed publications over the past few decades. While I’m sure the results of the project will be scrutinized and criticized by many (hey, I’ve got my own thoughts on the list, but that’s not what this blog entry is about), the main point is this:

Discipleship Ministries has given us a viable model for how denominations and/or organizations can provide ongoing guidance to pastors, worship leaders, and church musicians on how to faithfully choose band-driven and electronically available congregational song. For the health of the church’s song repertoire and to enable disciples who are intentional in living out their faith, I believe it is now an imperative that the leaders of other denominations (and/or organizations that resource and support those denominations) follow suit with similar projects. I’m looking at you Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and more…

 

 

Blogger David Bjorlin is a worship pastor at Resurrection Covenant Church (Chicago), a lecturer in worship at North Park Theological Seminary (Chicago), and a published hymnwriter.

 

It can be a difficult time to be happy in our world. I could run through the list of reasons, but I think most people do not need a reminder that we are living in fraught times. As someone not naturally given over to optimism or cheerfulness, I’ve been trying to cultivate in myself a habit of gratitude and thankfulness as an antidote to the fear and anxiety that is swirling around us.

So, one of my latest practices has been listening to The Happiness Lab, a podcast from Yale Psychologist Laurie Santos about what the latest scientific research says will make us objectively happier human beings. Often, what will make us happier seems at first glance counterintuitive. For example, while many people dread small talk on the subway, research has found that these small social interactions with strangers throughout our day actually make us happier (So take those headphones off in public once in a while!).

In one of the early episodes, Santos explains a concept that many of us have probably never heard of but most have experienced: hedonic adaptation. From the Greek word for pleasure, hedonic adaptation is the idea that humans will quickly adapt to good (or bad) fortune in their lives in order to return to the relative stasis they knew before. So, we mistakenly believe that once we get married, land our dream job, take that vacation, or make our first million, then we will be happy. However, for those of us who have achieved one of these goals, we find that after the initial luster wears off, we basically return to how we felt before our success. We have hedonically adapted. Instead of asking whether we are playing an unwinnable game, most of us set a new and bigger goal and believe the next success will be the one that finally brings happiness. Like a drug fix, we keep needing bigger and bigger doses of success to feel fulfilled for shorter and shorter periods of time. The antidote, Santos suggests, is to get off the “hedonic treadmill” and find gratitude in the present moment.

 

Hedonic Adaptation and Worship

Before jumping into what hedonic adaptation has to do with congregational song, I think it’s helpful to ask how this concept can help us think about worship more generally. Namely, I believe an understanding of hedonic adaptation can help pastors, worship leaders, and planners avoid the trap of needing to make each Sunday, each series, each feast day bigger and better than the one before it. We’ve all experienced this, right? A series or a season goes really well, and immediately the question becomes, “How can we make the next one even better?” So, like the guitar amp in This Is Spinal Tap, we grow accustomed to a 10, so we try to turn the next service up to 11. Hedonic adaptation tells us that this is a losing game. When every Sunday has to be a mountaintop experience, we have to keep elevating the mountain to give worshipers the same emotional experience. From what I have observed, this tends to lead to an insatiable congregation and a burnt out pastoral staff.

To me, this is one of the greatest gifts of the Church Year. Yes, we have our great feasts and fasts, but we also have that long stretch of the calendar known as Ordinary Time. Now, I know that “Ordinary” does not mean mundane—it comes from “ordinal,” simply meaning “counted”— but I believe we in the church need to reclaim Ordinary Time in all of its ordinariness. If we think of the other seasons and feasts as the inhale of our worship, this might be the exhale, where in a culture of frenetic work and consumption, we learn the wisdom of rest and lying fallow and conserving time and energy. And for those churches that do not follow the Church Year, perhaps hedonic adaptation suggests that we need to be intentional about planning seasons of rest into the rhythm of the church. For not only does embracing the mundane and ordinary help us to find God in those places where most of us live the majority of our lives, it also allows the special seasons and feasts to retain their peaks of wonder and awe.

 

Hedonic Adaptation and Congregational Song

Just as we sometimes attempt to scale newer and larger heights in our worship services, so too we often are tempted to create endless mountaintop experiences in our congregational song. This is a subtle temptation because it often starts with giving appropriate attention to the shape and flow and dynamic contrasts of the music that help to give the song that same shape and flow and dynamism. Yet, slowly this care can shift into believing that we manufacture an encounter with God through creating musical mountaintop experiences, and soon we are back on the hedonic treadmill.

And this temptation knows no bounds of style or genre. In styles influenced by contemporary worship music (CWM), this sometimes can be seen in the necessity of every set or every song starting softly and simply and slowly building to a climactic climax or catharsis, with every instrument and voice set to fortissimo and the worship environment pulsing with smoke and lights. In more traditional services, the virtuosity and power of the organ or choir can occasionally drown out the voice of the congregation, as the haze of the smoke machine is replaced by the smoke of the thurible. In both, the song structure is often visualized consciously or unconsciously as an ascent to the mountaintop.

 

Not Height, But Depth

Perhaps one possible remedy to this problem of hedonic adaptation in both worship and congregational song is to use other spatial metaphors for worship. What if we are not always moving to the heights of ecstasy but also to the depths of being, not inhaling to climb higher but exhaling to sink deeper into God’s embrace? In Arthur Green’s Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology, he suggests just such a proposition for a new way of understanding spirituality:

The Torah tells us that our early ancestors were diggers of wells. Suppose we try to reach for the understanding that flowed as water from the depths of Abraham’s well, rather, for the moment, than the one that came down from the top of Moses’ mountain. This journey inward would be one that peels off layer after layer of externals, striving ever for the inward truth, rather than one that consists of climbing rung after rung, reaching ever and ever higher. Spiritual growth, in this metaphor, is a matter of uncovering new depths rather than attaining new heights.[1]

Perhaps leaders and planners of worship and congregational song could also think about worship and song as a movement toward depth rather than height. If I think about this movement in my own worship planning and song leading, I think it might call for: 

  • More cyclical songs. While verse-chorus-bridge songs or stanzic hymns are a staple of many of our traditions, the very structure often suggests the build-up to the mountain. On the other hand, cyclical songs (like songs from the Taizé community) often work to plumb the depths rather than scale the heights.
  • Less Instrumentation. Every song or every service does not call for every instrument to be used. Using less instrumentation and sparer arrangements on occasion can keep us from trying to make every song better than the last. You might also consider using less instrumentation during a particular season, like Lent, to musically remind people of the solemnity of the season.
  • No Instrumentation. Singing a capella recenters the human voice as the center of congregational song and empowers the congregation to claim their voice in worship while enacting and building a listening community. Perhaps consider joining the Center for Congregational Song’s yearly A Capella Sunday!
  • More silence. Every moment of the service does not need words or songs—or even meditative background music to accompany our prayers. Sometimes the silence helps to receive the word God has for us and give new meaning to the words we do sing and speak.

The purpose of expanding our spatial metaphors for worship is not to rid our communities of mountaintop experiences in worship or song (God forbid!). Rather, it is perhaps one way to avoid hedonic adaptation that ultimately becomes unsatisfied with a God of the plains, the silences, the ordinary moments, and if we cannot find God in those moments, we will miss God in the majority of our lives that are usually lived far from the summit. So, let our worship help congregations find God in both Eastertide and Ordinary Time, in the ecstasy and the stillness, in the heights and the depths.

 

[1] Arthur Green, Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003), 9.

 

 

Introduction

This episode is with ethnomusicologist and professor at Baylor University Monique Ingalls. Recorded at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship during their annual Worship Symposium, host Ben Brody once again hosts a lovely conversation that is both informative and challenging.

 

Season 2 – Episode 2

In this interview with Dr. Monique Ingalls, she shares her story about a home church that struggled with worship music style changes and her journey to becoming a ethnomusicologist focusing on modern worship music and congregational singing.

 

 

Listening time: 43 minutes

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