Worship Education through Music
For many students, worship is more caught than taught both in the church context and the classroom setting. Worship music plays an increasingly prominent role in educating worshipers of all ages. The music we perform and the songs we sing in church and in the classroom are formative as they instruct a community in the ways of worship.
I grew up in a church that loved to sing, and I attended a Christian high school that regularly gathered for worship in chapel. The songs of my church and Christian school shaped my understanding of a self-giving God who calls us to self-giving (Rom 12:1). My worship education through music taught me that God poured out his love for me and called me to pour out my love for him. In my experience, worship music embodied joyful celebration, thankful praise, and hopeful expectation. Music in the church gave me language to express positive emotions of heartfelt gratitude and devotion but had very little content that addressed negative emotions. I had a limited vocabulary for dealing with grief, brokenness, lament, or injustice. I was ill-equipped for facing adversity and the challenges of life because I had not practiced that repertoire. That repertoire is well represented in the psalms.
Music in the church gave me language to express positive emotions of heartfelt gratitude and devotion but had very little content that addressed negative emotions.
The Psalms
The psalms explore all aspects of human experience and emotion and bring them all into worship, surrendered in God’s presence. The early church apologist Athanasius wrote that “the whole of human existence, both the dispositions of the soul and the movements of the thoughts, have been measured out and encompassed in those very words of the Psalter” (126). At the very least, our musical participation in the church and in the classroom should emulate the breadth of emotion and expression found in God’s Word. In this way, we incorporate speech habits through song and music that align with our internal dispositions in a way that promotes honesty and growth (Witvliet 8-9).
Constance Cherry contends that worship music functions best when it serves the dialogue of encounter between God and his people (177). The rhythm of worship begins with God who makes himself known and calls us to respond faithfully. To the extent that music frames our participation, the music we make and the songs we sing are part of the story we tell and the story in which we dwell. That we may offer a breadth of emotion and expression in worship is an essential human response that corresponds to God who has made us in his image. In this way, we acknowledge our relationship to God, our Creator, who calls us to put our faith in him.
The psalms are uniquely positioned in Scripture to be received as God speaking to us and to be spoken, prayed, and sung as we speak to God. They possess the “double character of word of God and prayer of the community” (Gelineau 68). As such, they speak to us and for us. The psalms, unlike noncanonical worship material, are authored by God and established by the authority of the king (1 Ch 25). Jesus, our King, leads the church’s worship (Heb 2; Ps 22:22) in the words of the psalms as “mediated praises in which Jesus is present singing with us” (Lefebvre 63). When we sing the psalms, we do not just sing to or about Jesus—we sing with Jesus.
When we sing the psalms, we do not just sing to or about Jesus—we sing with Jesus.
The Responsorial Psalm
In the fourth century (the time of Athanasius), the early church developed a responsorial pattern of psalm-singing to teach the many new converts to Christian faith how to sing with Jesus (White 70). The responsorial psalm guided congregants in worship while safeguarding orthodox Christian worship principles. By engaging with the entirety of the psalms, the early church created space for people to bring their full selves to God in worship.
A responsorial psalm is part of the call and response tradition—a methodology for teaching complex musical patterns. The responsorial element refers to a consistently repeated refrain by the congregation (Westermeyer 18). Translating this practice to the classroom setting, students are taught a short refrain or chorus that focuses on a key idea in the psalm. Very often, this is directly taken from one of the verses in the psalm itself. For example, in Psalm 71, the writer reflects on how his past experience of God’s faithfulness gives him hope in his present challenging circumstances and fuels his hope for the future. He links his experience of hope with his participation in worship, acknowledging that while hope leads to praise, praise also leads to hope. In the responsorial rhythm, the repeated refrain might therefore focus on the summary declaration of verse 14: “As for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more.”
After leading the sung refrain, the teacher reads the opening verses from the psalm aloud before the class returns to the refrain. The teacher continues with the next section of verses and the students respond once again with the same refrain. This is repeated back and forth until the entire psalm has been alternately read and sung together. The class is encouraged to read the verses aloud with the teacher, placing the words of Scripture on their lips in a corporate act of worship. Speaking the words together further engages musical principles like cadence, melody, and rhythm (Westermeyer, 20).
Some psalms have a built-in responsorial structure. Psalm 136 repeats the refrain, “his love endures forever” after every line. Psalms 42 and 43 are connected with the repeated question and answer “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Ps 42:5, 11; Ps 43:5). Psalm 80 returns to a variation of the phrase, “Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved” in verses 3, 7, and 19. Further, a number of psalms have inclusios, where the first and last verses are repeated, forming a bracket around the psalm content. Psalm 8 begins and ends with the inclusio, “Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth” while Psalms 145-150 all begin and end with the call to “praise the Lord.”
Responsorial Psalms in the Classroom
When we embrace an entire psalm, we have a fuller context in which to understand the richness of particular verses.
Incorporating a form of psalm-singing in the classroom encourages students to engage with psalms in their entirety. While it is not uncommon to sing worship material that is inspired from the psalms, in most cases, only a portion of the psalm is included. Historically, although new songs have always been added to worship repertoire, they were intended to supplement rather than supplant the psalms (Lefebvre 20). When we embrace an entire psalm, we have a fuller context in which to understand the richness of particular verses. Further, we are exposed to a wider range of emotion and experience that may be offered within a worship setting.
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Dr. Ken Michell is Assistant Professor of Music & Worship Arts and the Music Department Chair at Tyndale University in Toronto, Ontario. Over the last four years, he has written responsorial settings for more than fifty psalms for personal and corporate worship participation.
Works Cited
Athanasius. The Life of Antony and The Letter to Marcellinus. Translated by Robert C. Gregg, Paulist Press, 1980.
Cherry, Constance M. The Worship Architect: A Blueprint for Designing Culturally Relevant and Biblically Faithful Services. Baker Academic, 2021.
Gelineau, Joseph. Voices and Instruments in Christian Worship. Liturgical Press, 1964.
Lefebvre, Michael. Singing the Songs of Jesus: Revisiting the Psalms. Christian Focus Publications, 2010.
Westermeyer, Paul. Te Deum: The Church and Music. Augsburg Fortress, 1998.
Witvliet, John. “Words to Grow Into: The Psalms as Formative Speech.” Forgotten Songs: Reclaiming the Psalms for Christian Worship, edited by C. Richard Wells and Ray Van Neste, B & H Publishing Group, 2012, pp. 7-16.
White, James F. A Brief History of Christian Worship. Abingdon Press, 1993.