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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Bruce Ashton - Heavenly Harmony: Soaring to New Musical Heights

J. Bruce Ashton

This Mystery Called Music

The Eleven O’Clock WHAT Hour?

What’s So Yucky About Hymns?

Five Names You Deserve to Know

The Crossroads of Church and Culture

Selling Worship or Selling-out Worship?

By my watch, it's time to start, so let's start.

I would like to start by having you sing the third of the songs that is in your sheet, which should be the front side of about the third page.

And it should say, How Firm a Foundation, if I'm at the right place.

Even before we sing it, I am going to point out that I'm trying to teach a lesson by example as it happens we have how firm a foundation same tune in the church hymnal And I wanted to make a copy and hand it out.

That particular arrangement is under copyright.

Now I happen to know the man that owns the copyright, but I haven't talked to him for a long time.

I would have had to find his phone number, call him up, get permission.

So I looked around and I found in the Baptist hymnal they have the same tune in a setting that isn't copyright.

So it doesn't look like an Adventist hymnal page, although there's not that much difference.

This 1 happens to be from the Baptist Seminal, but it's not a copyright version.

Church choirs are probably the worst offenders in all of America.

If you don't own it, you don't have a right to sing it.

So, here is How Firm a Foundation, 1 of the most marvelous uplifting hymns, the ones that the students in my class almost always pick from the list of things that they're supposed to learn.

The firm affirmation, ye saints of the Lord.

He has laid for your faith in his excellent word.

What more can he say than to you he hath said, O you unto Jephthah, Jesus hath led.

Fear not, I am with thee, obey not, dismay, for I am thy God and will still give thee aid.

I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand, Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

William, through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, Thy grace, so sufficient will be thy supply.

The flame shall not hurt thee, I only design ♪ ♪ Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine ♪ ♪ All that on Jesus the flame foreclose ♪ ♪ I will not, I will not desire to dispose ♪ And they left out a verse.

Father in heaven, what a magnificent assurance that we cannot be put in a situation where you will not go with us.

That you do not send us into trial, that when necessary you lead us into trial.

But wherever we are, we are in your hands, and you are there with us.

For this we praise you, and we ask for your guidance and blessing as we think together about the ways we can praise you this afternoon.

Pretty much throughout the second half of the 20th century, hymns have suffered a major decline in popularity, even in some circles in acceptability.

So here are my first 8 ideas about why people have not sung hymns as much lately.

Number 1, It may be just a kind of a normal cycle sort of thing.

Like those who don't believe in global warming would like to tell us it's just a matter of going around again, not a serious issue.

Any look at the history of hymn singing in the Christian church will show you anything but a straight line.

It has not been constant progression up, constant progression down, or constant flat.

I think there may be a decline in seriously invested, accompanying musicians.

Any of you know the name Seaborne Becker?

Any of you who heard Andrews and heard him lead song services?

Now I know he wasn't the 1 up there at the pulpit, he was the 1 at the organ and he could make a congregation sing like I have not heard very many other places and he could build you up and he could set you down gently and he could take you to a spiritual climax with nothing but the pipes of his organ brilliant brilliant musician brilliant church musician there aren't a whole lot of them left, there are some, yes, not saying he was the only 1 but he certainly was a figure who taught many others and his heart was singing through his fingers and his feet he would have been as influential if he had not had it in his heart first it can be done on the piano also, it doesn't have to be organ but it does require a Christian who cares and who thinks.

Number 3, there seems to have been somewhat of a decline in available accompanists, period.

When I was growing up, taking the piano was everybody's, every child's job.

Well, not every child, you know, but a great majority.

My aunt was a music teacher in Worthington, Ohio, and many of the neighborhood children were in there taking lessons, and they got to where they could play for song service.

And I find that the percentage of young people doing the same now is considerably smaller.

Maybe there just aren't people to do the job.

Number 4, our culture does not invite us to sing.

By and large, we are not a singing culture.

I don't care whether you go to the symphony concert or the ball game, whenever they do the national anthem, what percentage of the audience sings?

And I wonder how many of those who can sing the national anthem can still sing Take Me Out to the Ball Game or Let Me Call You Sweetheart or any 1 of Oodles' songs that the last generation knew, just knew inside, because they sang them.

On the boat ride, when Southern's faculty would go getting together for a social occasion, we could sit and sing for 40 minutes songs everybody knew.

Some of those songs haven't come through lately.

Part of the reason for that, I think, is the fact that we keep getting better and better performances available for our listening, not singing.

I can Remember the days of old 78 records, shellac records.

And then the vinyl LPs, which most of you still don't know how to run, but that's all right.

And then cassettes came and went, and CDs, who knows how long they'll be around, and iPods.

Why should we bother to sing everybody else's singing?

Part of it comes also from changes in taste foisted on us by the producers of all of these CDs and iPods.

The stuff that's out there to sing is not all as singable as on top of Old Smokey was, or White Christmas, or How Far From the Foundation, even.

Number 5, I think maybe there's been a change in the general attitudes of society in the shadow of the atomic bomb, which was all through the Cold War, under the threat of another 9-11, with a whole lot more global orientation making us more aware of the invisible children of Darfur, of whatever.

Maybe we just haven't got the heart to sing anymore.

And I think our culture has responded somewhat.

Number 6, there's a decline, I think, in the universality of vocal training.

I talked about kids taking piano lessons.

There aren't as many kids taking voice lessons anymore.

I remember, it was a standard scenario 50 years ago in funny movies for the family.

The teenage girl who had to get up and do her recital and was hanging from the drapes because she was so scared and so on.

It's an experience a lot of people never had.

We haven't studied vocal culture to the same extent, perhaps, that happened in the past.

And Furthermore, if you've got a lollipop you can hold in front of you like this, you don't really have to sing well anyway, because the microphone will take care of it all, and you can sing as badly as you want, and nobody cares.

Number 7, I think we are a less poetic generation than in the past.

How many of you know Jack be nimble, Jack be quick?

I have students in my Music in the Christian Church class, when I come up with nursery rhymes, they say, huh?

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Bruce Ashton - Heavenly Harmony: Soaring to New Musical Heights

What’s So Yucky About Hymns?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Bruce Ashton - Heavenly Harmony: Soaring to New Musical Heights

Five Names You Deserve to Know

56m

Bruce Ashton - My Way or God's Way: Defining Christian Worship

This Mystery Called Music

52m

Myth or Miracle: The Virgin Birth

57m

In Harmony With God?- Music Overview

1h 10m

Bruce Ashton - My Way or God's Way: Defining Christian Worship

Selling Worship or Selling-out Worship?

48m

A Song in My Heart

27m

Seven Keys to Sabbath Delights

1h 54m

The Heavenly Sanctuary and the Universal Characteristics of Worship and Music

1h 1m

Bruce Ashton - Heavenly Harmony: Soaring to New Musical Heights

Selling Worship or Selling-out Worship?

52m

Sound Doctrine