The Story to tell about "We've A Story To Tell"...
One of the values that we have as a community is in how we view what we sing.
Ephesians 5:19 talks about "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs". In other words, songs of worship to our Lord are also to be sung to one another. There is a profoundly horizontal nature to our singing on Sunday mornings and throughout the week!
I don't just sing for my benefit, but to bless my brothers and sisters around me.
Church community, like any committed relationship, is not easy. It's not even compromise. It's about sacrificial love that is like a dance, much like family, or marriage, or life with siblings. All of us to different degrees actively make sacrifices to be together as a church community. Every community has a culture. How do people make friends? How long should they spend time together on Sunday? What kind of food do they eat? What songs do they sing? How long is a sermon, and how responsive is the congregation to that sermon? Is God best met in silence and stillness, with minds focused on proper doctrine? With raucous shouting and the clanging of cymbals, spontaneous prayers lifted together simultaneously?
Now with respect to music in a church as diverse as ours, this means something very interesting. It means singing songs that minister to the hearts of others, even if those songs don't necessarily speak as loudly to my own heart. It is indeed loving others in a godly way; by singing the song that benefits my neighbor even if it benefits me very little.
This principle guides how we've historically tried to cultivate a culture of music at CoaH Brookline; we've tried to find music that as many of us can connect to as possible, all the while expanding our horizons into music that help others on the margins of our church feel more at home. It's why most newcomers come to our church and find at least one or two songs to be unfamiliar. It's why we play songs that lean towards black gospel, play modern CCM, or find ourselves still singing hymns from long ago.
Now, if you've been worshipping with us the last month or so, you may have noticed a song which seemed to be a bit of an aberration from our usual "flavor" of song.
The song was entitled "We've A Story To Tell To The Nations", an old hymn set to feel like a shuffling jazz waltz.
Two things may have seemed odd: the shuffling jazz waltz, and the hymn choice itself.
Certainly not a the most popular hymn, you might think. Pastor Bland himself mentioned that the last place he had sung this hymn was in rural Kentucky!
What you may actually not know is that this 100 year old hymn originally from Yorkshire, England, is still popular, and a seminal song to this day....in Korea!
We were in the midst of our series on mission, and as we sat in the office wondering what songs would best help the church lean into God's call on our lives, we found ourselves wanting to find more songs that would explicitly talk about the church's mission in the world. Few modern worship songs these days seemed to do this. It turned out that quite a few hymns did, however! And then we stumbled on to this hymn.
"We've A Story To Tell" is a hymn that took off among Korean congregations in a way that it did not here in the States. The mission of God is something that the Korean church has historically really been passionate about (South Korea actually is the second largest sender of overseas missionaries in the world), and so this hymn is still a staple in churches there today!
In fact, I didn't actually know this until the hymns lyrics drew my interest, and searching online for versions of this hymn, it turned out a majority of the artists who were recording modern renditions of this hymn were Korean artists.
(Imagine an American worship ministry reimagining "Come Thou Fount" or some other classic hymn. This is very much in the same vein.)
And so we stumbled upon a strange intersection: A hymn from Yorkshire, England, brought over and translated for the church in Korea, then remade by a current-day worship ministry in Korea who decided to sing the song in English with a jazzy waltz feel.
What an interesting way the Spirit moves! We knew it would certainly feel slightly strange to sing on a Sunday, and yet it felt like a growing point for us. I found myself marveling that a hymn composed over 100 years ago has endured....still sung in rural Kentucky, across the globe South Korea, and now in our little congregation in Brookline, MA.
May our God continue to bless us as we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to one another.
In His Grace,
Pastor Mike Hong