John Wesley was pretty notorious as an “editor.”  Whether he was republishing other people’s tracts as his own work (with a few revisions), or enhancing brother Charles’ lyrics, John had no qualms with taking material that he thought was good and rearranging it to make it better fit the overall thrust of the Methodist movement.  This was fairly common practice for his day, as there were no real copyright laws governing these shenanigans.  Some of Wesley’s editing cuts resulted in more popular versions of the original song.  A case in point is the hymn in the background of this comic, Praise to the Lord  From All Nations, by Isaac Watts.  Watts had made a few minor revisions of his own work, but Wesley went crazy with it, rearranging the lines of the verses, scrapping entire concepts within the song, and finally resulting in the weirdly named, Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne.  This actually became a much beloved hymn after Wesley’s revisions.  What I love about all this is that even though John allowed himself free reign to alter other’s lyrics, he was pretty opposed to anyone else revising the songs written by himself and his brother.  “I desire they would not attempt to mend them; for they really are not able…None of them is able to mend either the sense or the verse,” he said, because he and Charles wrote such perfect songs.

I share this snippet with you because Discipleship Ministries of The UMC just vetted the top 100 CCLI Songs.  This means a group of people looked at the most song contemporary praise songs and have chosen which ones are Green Lighted (okay for Methodists to sing as-is…most of these are just contemporary versions of existing hymns), and which ones are Yellow Lighted (proceed with caution). It’s a fascinating article (read it here), where they recognize that a majority of praise songs are coming out of “charismatic, Pentecostal, Calvinist, or neo-Calvinist” communities.  In a world where you don’t need a hymnal to have music in worship, where any worship leader can choose songs based on their radio popularity, or whatever she or he is most moved by, it can be useful to have the denomination regularly take a look at these songs and offer some theological insight.  Hopefully, theologically trained pastors and worship leaders are already doing this in their own congregations.

I want you to draw your own conclusions on the report from Discipleship Ministries, so I won’t say much more.  I think that the best worship leaders know the theology of their community, and are willing to change some of the lyrics to better fit their tradition.  We just did it in my congregation this week singing Faith of Our Fathers/Martyrs/Mothers.  If the masculine language of many praise songs drives your people nuts, it’s easy to change a word or two here or there…the problem is that the denomination is not allowed to print these alterations as a resource for you without the permission of the author, which the author probably won’t give.  And if a song is too focused on one aspect of God’s truth (like all those amazing Calvinist hymns by Stuart Townend), balance them out by singing another song in the same worship service that offers a different perspective on the work and person of God.