Lowell rants a bit about modern worship leaders leading hymns

(Lowell is going to be complaining in generalizations for a few lines. It might sound like he is whining. If this does not appeal to you, please bypass this post.)

I grew up singing hymns a cappelo. And the advantage to doing it a lot, is that you get good at it. And although we were a small Church, we were pretty good at it. No one at the Church I grew up in had any musical training… we just sang a lot. And we were good.

With that in mind, I get very frustrated at how modern worship leaders “lead” hymns.

For starters, their repertoire is extremely limited. The same twenty hymns get repeated over and over and over, all over the USA. (“Great is Thy Faithfulness” is a wonderful hymn, but what about the scores of other hymns about the faithfulness of God that we haven’t sung in years?) It is amusing to me that, in an age when everyone wants to learn new songs, no one will learn songs that are new to them (but were written awhile back).

And then there is timing…which part of “four-four” or “three-four” timing don’t you understand? The majority of all western songs (let alone hymns) are written in one of these two timings. If you can lead some of the complex rhythms that are sung in many modern worship tunes, surely you can handle leading a hymn in its correct timing.

And then there is tempo… goodness, I could fall asleep sometimes. Most hymns have an upbeat, buoyant tempo, not a funeral dirge. Why can we sing a modern song with a good tempo, but then when we switch to a hymn, all of a sudden everything sloooooows waaaaaay dooooown. Keep it moving there, buddy.

This concludes Lowell whining about modern worship leaders leading hymns. He readily admits that there are lots of exceptions to what he has said. He apologizes to anyone who may have been offended.