Last Friday I attended a hymn-singalong for seniors held at Boandik Lodge, an aged care facility here in Mount Gambier.
I come along and help out because a strong voice assists the older folk to sing up.
I liked the selections.
Over the hour we sang:
To God Be The Glory
Now Thank We All Our God
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
What A Friend We Have In Jesus
My Hope Is Built On Nothing Less
When Peace Like A River
The Old Rugged Cross
Safe In The Arms Of Jesus
In The Sweet Bye And Bye
O God Our Help In Ages Past
When I Survey The Wondrous Cross
Amazing Grace
Blessed Assurance
Jesus Loves Me
It’s a privilege to stand up the front and lead because you can see what the hymns mean to the folk as they sing along.
Seeing tears in people’s eyes after we’d sung Jesus Loves Me.
As mind and memory flee these truths are engraved in their brains and emerge even when many other thoughts are lost.
With the Christian Music Industry ™ creating the notion that new is best and not so new is best forgotten to keep CD sales and royalties ticking I wonder what songs are Christians today laying down in their hearts?
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Thanks for that, Gary.
I share similar thoughts to those expressed in your last three paragraphs.
Encouraging the saints is a real privilege.
How often have these godly saints encouraged us when we thought we had gone to minister to them?
Hi Neil.
Read Stephen’s post earlier. All the best for your move.
One of the points that I’ve taken up when doing a devotional service for the residents at Boandik is to appeal to, and apply, mature Christian experience.
One of the things that older Christians hate is being treated to Gospel appeal after Gospel appeal with the assumption that they’re not saved.
Thanks for sharing that list, I’ve been trying to put together a list of hymns for seniors myself, so it’s good to know what speaks to and for older people.
And your last sentence reminds me that when I was trying to find out what contemporary Christian songs people liked (I knew very few at the time), I asked a couple of friends who belonged to churches where that is what is sung, to tell me what songs they liked, and they had trouble thinking of any contemporary songs that they liked, or could even remember (though one told me that she loved Christmas because you got to sing hymns).
(And hi Neil)
Caroline
Earlier this year I conducted a wedding.
The bride to be resolutely wanted ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ sung as she’d learnt it in Sunday School/Youth Group in the nineties.
Predictably enough I sang a solo of ‘Shine Jesus Shine’. (No, I didn’t do the hand-claps)
Later at the reception one young man helpfully told me he remembered it from his days at Catholic High School.
I wonder whether another factor in the laying down in our hearts of hymns is the move from hymnbooks to overhead projections. When the words are before you on the page, you can have a second look at a line, if you found it good and helpful, or if you found it hard to understand at first glance. When the words are projected onto a screen, you can only read them while you are actually singing that verse, and often not a second more before or after, which makes it harder to sing with your mind and heart, and more likely that you will sing with your lips only, particularly if you don’t know the song very well.
I keep hearing that observation in a variety of guises.
My problem with it is that poetry and songs are vehicles for memorisation by oral transmission.
Everyone having a book in front of them from which they could read has only been a limited experience for some of God’s people through history.
I wonder if everyone having a book helps memory or makes our memories lazy.
Most of the songs we’ve learned we never sat and read them to learn, we learned them by hearing them sung and by singing them.
Bigger problems today are poor poetry, disjointed lyrics that simply express thought bubbles in loops instead of developed themes, and melodies that want to take center stage instead of serving the aim of helping us remember the lyrics.
We do publish a list of next week’s songs in our bulletin. All the songs are rehearsed directly before the service.