Listening to the Baptists Sing

Last night I visited a buddy engineering a live recording session at First Baptist Nashville, the venerable grand dame of the once-mighty Southern Baptist Convention.

I arrived to find he was recording a live concert, featuring some 150 men assembled in a choir, all of them church music directors from across the South, all of them with music degrees of some variety, and thrilled to be there with one another for the occasion. They are the remnant of a fabulous tradition of church music, forged in both revival meeting tents of the 1800's and conservatories and seminaries of the 1900's. An audience showed up as well, to sing along on the hymns.

What started out as a visit to check out mic placement and pre-amplifiers became a poignant revisit of the world I grew up in. The sound of that choir and that congregation singing those stolid tent-meeting hymns like 'Come Christians, Join to Sing', and 'The Solid Rock' is indescribable. It was a warm evening, and the folks in the balcony were occupied fanning themselves, singing, and daubing tears from their eyes.

Somewhere along the way, most of the Baptists decided that it wasn't that important to sing hymns anymore, and they settled for listening to inane 'praise choruses' sung to them with the words projected to them on a screen. They decided to abandon the glowing theology and inspiring poetry of the hymnal, and settle for bad prose and angry theology from the pulpit.

Now they wonder why things seem to be falling apart.

It was a wonderful evening, an occasion to be grateful for what I was given growing up.

I wish the remnant well, and hope we all find a way to recover and transmit last night's spirit to the next generations.

We are running out of time, as most everyone in the room was over fifty years of age.

To Quote Austin Powers...'Yeah, Baby, Yeah'!

Dan Hannan wisely chose to refrain from Shakespeare tonight. Gordon Brown doesn't deserve to have good words like that wasted on his sorry self.

Hannan instead called upon Dr. Suess.

How very appropriate. Even Gordon Brown and his followers can understand the good Doctor.