Something that was brought up at a worship workshop I went to a couple months back was the fact that a lot of recent praise songs are a bit “fluffy” and “empty”, in that they sound nice and have catchy melodies, but there isn’t much substance in the words being sung. I don’t think these songs are necessarily bad, but I do think it would be a mistake to discredit one individual song because the words are a little shallow. Sung within the context of a set of different songs, I think these songs can work well if they are carefully placed in a worship set such that the set as a whole works well together.

Hymns on the other hand are often very theologically rich (almost a mini-sermon unto itself) and full of interesting history. But… even though the words can be great, I think people tend to find hymns a bit boring and uninteresting, because their beats and melodies are often dull and repetitive. Practically speaking, I also don’t really like playing traditional hymns on the guitar¹ because there’s usually about a dozen different chord changes within each measure (read: hard to play). Most modern praise songs stick to the tried and true G-C-D chord progression, which is infinitely easier to play.

So I recently downloaded Hymns Ancient and Modern by the Passion Worship Band from iTunes, and as the name implies, they took old traditional hymns and blended them with contemporary themes to give them a new interesting twist. In some cases a new chorus was added (Raise up the Crown). In others, the words and melody were bent and rearranged to give a something that’s different, but at the same time familiar (Take My Life). In all cases, what they came up with is something that has the richness of hymns combined with the catchiness (for lack of a better word) of modern praise songs.

One of the newer modernizations of a hymn I found is Chris Tomlin’s rendition of Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone) (youtube mirror). The video doesn’t really show the whole song (it’s more of a how-to tutorial), but basically Chris added a new chorus which I think gives it a modern flavor to this already amazing hymn.

My chains are gone, I’ve been set free. My God, my Savior has ransomed me. And like a flood, His mercy rains. Unending love. Amazing Grace.

This past weekend was the annual church retreat at Messiah College, which was pretty fun because I got to hang out with people I don’t normally get to interact with. Also, the Tallys came and spoke to us on discipleship, and they are always very interesting to listen to. They also lead a workshop on relationships / personalities, where everyone took a test of sorts to find out what group they are in. I found out I’m a SC. For me, I’m still not convinced on the helpfulness of these personality tests. They feel kind of like those tests I took in high school which were supposed to tell me what I should be when I grow up. Yeah, the results are interesting, but it doesnt seem possible to me that a single quasi-math formula can capture who I really am.

¹ Which is the only instrument left I can play with any sense of decency