LEARNING FROM HYMNALS Part I

In my very first interview with the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry, in preparation for deacon’s orders, I was asked three questions: What did I think of the Methodist hymnal? What did I think of Methodist Sunday school material, and did I smoke. I was hoping or some theological discussion, rather than questions about institutional loyalty, but I responded to what was asked. No, I did not smoke. I grew up with both the hymnal (the 1935 hymnal) and the Sunday school material so I could appreciate the good qualities of both. I did admit that none of the three churches I was serving at the time used either the hymnal or the material.

The question was not a surprise. A few weeks earlier I had completed a seminary course on music and worship. The class was informed about the difference between good music and bad, between good theology and bad, and between what was acceptable and what was not acceptable in Methodist worship. The so-called “gospel hymns” did not fare well in class, whether we were discussing music or theology or any other basis for judgment. “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” could not be defended on any grounds. “Blessed Assurance” called attention to itself. “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” was bad theology and abominable imagery. The class learned that pastors had a responsibility to teach congregations “good music.” Despite what people loved and preferred, they “deserved” to be led to something better. Gospel music, with its continual references to “pie in the sky,” subjective experience, emphasis on blood, and repetitious texts and tunes, represented much of what was wrong with the church.

Fortunately, the class was told, the church would not have to bear with it much longer because, like much that was frivolous, this kind of music and the religion it represented was passing from the scene. An advancing culture simply would not tolerate it. Could any of us imagine respectable people who had “come of age” singing such “trash” as “Standing, standing, standing on the promises of God”?

I suggest that a study of hymnals and “Methodist music” from a different perspective than that of the seminary class I had, can offer insights as to what has happened to Methodism through the years, and how it affects the state of United Methodism today. The first point to be made is that a major part of Methodist revival in England in the 18^th century was singing of Charles Wesley’s hymns. The hymns communicated not only inspiration but doctrine. If someone wanted to know what Methodists believed he or she could simply read (or sing) the hymns. In America in the first “official” (meaning authorized by the General Conference) M.E. hymnal of 1848, of 1148 hymns, 578 (or half of the total) are associated with one of the Wesleys. The Orders of Salvation are clearly outlined in the Table of Contents. Under the heading “The Provisions and Promises of the Gospel” are sections labeled: Depravity, Awakening, Inviting, Penitential, Justification by Faith, Adoption and Assurance, and Sanctification. Call these, if you will, an original version of Campus Crusade’s Four Spiritual Laws.

BUT–and this is a point this article wants to make. That first official hymnal was not an American hymnal. Of the 1148 hymns only two relate to America. The rest were either British or European. And this at a time when the number of Methodists in America far surpassed the number of Methodists in Great Britain. Americans were introducing a new kind of Methodist music. The Americans were taking Wesleyan theology and fitting it for the masses. This was especially true of Methodism in the west (west of the Appalachian Mountains). In the west there was no established religious culture. There were no Congregationalists or Episcopalians and only a few Presbyterians with established beliefs that Methodists had to work around. There were few people of education or social standing. The whole area of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois was a clean slate, religiously speaking, ready to be written on. The earliest settlers (many of whom would convert to Methodism) were from the lower classes. They were poor. They were socially on the fringes of polite society. They were given to exuberance and excesses. To put it a different way, they did not have to learn religion through the lenses of established European churches. For good or ill, they were open to a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

If there was one event that characterized this new expression of Christianity it would be the Cane Ridge camp meeting in Kentucky in 1801. That this was something brand new can be gleaned from James Finley’s account of what took place:

 A vast crowd, supposed by some to have amounted to twenty-five thousand, was collected together…. (and) seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others in wagons…. At one time I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment, as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens….

Cane Ridge itself was not specifically identified as Methodist, but as the camp meeting format spread like wildfire throughout the west and then even to the eastern seaboard, it was the Methodists who soon became the chief sponsors and benefactors of camp meetings. Camp meetings were frequently fourth quarterly conference circuit events, set up to last several days. They introduced the mourner’s bench and the altar call. They served to shift religious authority away from ecclesiastical superiors to uneducated preachers. They served egalitarian purposes. They spread back east across the Appalachians to the east coast. Nathan Hatch, in his classic study, the Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989) concludes that the Western Revival terminated the Puritan era, characterized by the Calvinist belief in a set of people chosen by God and led by elites, and inaugurated the pietist or evangelical age of American church history, characterized by a belief in one’s personal experience with God and understanding of the Bible. The Methodists introduced the protracted meeting, the altar call, the mourner’s bench. To the horror of more cultured and sophisticated easterners they were also associated with “enthusiasm,” visions, healings, and emotional excesses.

Frontier people also introduced a new brand of music. Persons caught up in the revival sang Wesley, of course, but hymn books on the frontier were hard to come by (and the truth is some could not even read, or at least knew little about music). So, the preachers and others made up new songs. They were labeled “spirituals.” Blacks, who from the beginning were part of camp meeting culture, composed spirituals that reflected their African roots. But blacks and whites together composed what might be called American indigenous frontier “spirituals,” which became the forerunner of gospel music. They were so popular they began to overwhelm the music of a growing respectability associated with Methodism and other religious groups along the eastern seaboard.

Something must have been working. In Indiana, according to the federal census of 1840, the Methodists could claim 480 churches and the Congregational Church, the foremost church of colonial America, a grand total of two. In 1834 The Western Christian Advocate was launched and soon had 5,000 subscribers, one of the highest subscription numbers for newspapers in the nation. By 1870 it had 20,000 subscribers. The Advocate was not above some boosterism. In 1836, when not all of the west had even been settled, the Advocate reported that what was then known as “the west” now had 227,000 members, or 36% of all Methodists.

There was push-back from eastern established churches. This was clearly seen in the second “official” M.E. hymnal, that of 1872. If there was anything worthwhile in the west, especially in the music of the west, it was not noted. Of 307 authors in the 1878 hymnal there were 66 Episcopalians, 22 Congregationalists, 20 Presbyterians and 14 Unitarians, but only 10 Methodists. Methodism with close to 40 percent of all the Protestants in America, and yet the Episcopalian authors outnumbered the Methodists by over 6 to 1, and even the Unitarians outnumbered the American Methodists? Furthermore, out of 1,117 hymns, only three were identified with anyone west of Rochester, New York, or south of Washington, D.C. Only three hymns in the entire hymnal carried a refrain or chorus (the sign of a gospel hymn). And this at a time when unofficial Methodism had published forty-two songbooks filled with the new “Methodist music” (Ellen Jane Lorenz: Glory, Hallelujah! The Story of the Camp Meeting Spiritual. Abingdon, 1978, p. 134).

So, we address the matter of “THE GAP,” or, the significant difference between institutional Methodism and the Methodism of the masses. During the 19^th century this Gap was not so much theological as it was social and cultural. One part of Methodism, the respected leaders, and intellectuals of their time—men like Nathan Bangs, Matthew Simpson (later Bishop Simpson) and Abel Stevens were orthodox in theology and true influencers of society and culture. Men like these were the driving force behind the scholarly Methodist Quarterly Review and Christian Advocate. They wanted Methodism to bring Christian influence into American politics and society. In many respects they succeeded. By the end of the century the country had elected a faithful Methodist, William McKinley, as president of the country.

But it is good to recognize the other part of Methodism. The other part, the revivalists, sought to reform the nation by conversion of the masses. Persons on the fringe, those who filled the Methodist churches, untamed frontier persons, the poor, the uneducated, blacks, women, needed to know Christ.   The heroes for this group were people like the eccentric Lorenzo Dow, Harry Hosier, the black evangelist and friend of Francis Asbury, whose preaching led to the conversion of thousands, Phoebie Palmer, and the abolitionists. Phoebie Palmer, who became famous because of the Tuesday prayer meetings in her New York home her altar theology, her rescue mission work (Five-Points Mission in New York), and her writing the most feminist book of her time, the Promise of the Father, which scripturally justified women prophesying and peaching in the church.

The Wesleyan Church split of 1842 was not just about slavery. It was about the moral compromise of the bishops and the larger church. One of the first hymnals of the new Wesleyan Methodist Church was entitled Miriam’s Timbrel (named after a woman prophet in the Bible) and was not only anti-slavery, but pro-temperance, anti-war, pro-women, and particularly post-millennial. The radicals in the church were working for the Kingdom of God on earth, but it would not come primarily by education or refined social institutions or by politics, but by conversion.

We still, and perhaps particularly so today, have the problem of THE GAP. There are two Methodisms. The one is the Methodism of the institutionalists, the mediating elite, and very often, the Methodism of the seminaries, which has sought for Methodism relevance, respectability, and the adjusting to modern culture. The other is the Methodism of the common people, whether clergy or lay, still committed to Wesleyan essentials, still singing gospel music, still preaching the message of salvation from sin through the blood of Jesus Christ.

(Part 2 of Learning from Hymnals—Elitists and Common People, will deal with Methodism and mainline churches in the 20^th century. Read that post here.)