Online House Church Community

May the Spirit move you to speak one to another in hymns and spiritual songs!

In new movements, songs often prove the best means of communication. Songs work really well, for all participate, all express themselves, and all remember the message word perfect.

I remember when, out in the African bush, the Lord saved a wrestler, a big, strong guy. One week he confessed Jesus, the next they baptised him, and the
week following he showed up with a song he had just composed in a language I do not speak. The others translated the simple message of adoration for Jesus,
while I marveled at both God's grace and the beauty of the African melody.

Even the newest of believers can sing and can do so in the style that local folk like best. Songs remain easily transmissible, such that many will teach them to others, in turn. Besides all that, singing proves a lot more fun than listening to some abstract discourse or condemnatory harangue by an untaught teacher.

In 1994, when back in Africa after a 15-year absence, I paid the airfare for an ethnomusicologist to come hold a couple of seminars. Roberta King did not have to teach Africans show to make music, but she did give them "permission", so to speak, to create their own songs in place of the French funeral dirges that the missionaries called hymns. She held one workshiop in the country-side and another in the capital city.

Mamadou, who caught on to the idea of cell groups meeting in folk's dwellings, put Scripture to music to teach the Good News to Moslems, Catholics and
Pagans.

Dr. King suggested a simple plan to follow:

1. Think up a main message or central idea.
2. Say words that develop the central idea.
3. Begin to make fragments of music that fit the words!
4. Bring together the music fragments into a coherent song.
5. Adjust the words and the music to make them both more natural sounding.

Voila! A new song.

Some of those are sung to this day.

Galen