April 7 - Hymns and Spiritual Songs

April 7 – Hymns and Spiritual Songs

It’s pretty amazing that short-lived traditions become so ingrained we can’t consider doing anything else. When you consider that Christianity has been around for over 2000 years, and hymn-singing in church has only been strongly adopted for less than 300 years, it seems funny that people insist the ‘traditional’ style of worship is the best way to sing to God.

Martin Luther tried to insist that hymns be used in worship. He wrote several to get things started. The Anglicans didn’t actually use music in their liturgy. By 1562 there was a collection of Psalms that had been metered out for singing and in 1696 a New Version showed up, but if it wasn’t from the Psalms, it might not be a good idea to sing it.

In 1623, a hymnbook was produced, but no one used it.

By the 1700s, people were still only singing Psalms and generally this wasn’t happening in the Anglican churches.

Isaac Watts was a pastor and decided that the people needed something to sing. The Psalms were great, but they didn’t teach much about Christianity. He published “Hymns and Spiritual Songs” in 1709. He published “Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament” and said that he made David speak like a Christian.

Watts wrote more than six hundred hymns. He wrote from the Psalms – “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun” from Psalm 72 and “Joy to the World” from Psalm 98. Some of his other hymns are very well known: “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” and “I Sing the Mighty Power of God.”

He became known as the Father of English Hymnody and his hymns were unmatched until Charles Wesley came along.

It wasn’t until 1861 when the Anglican Church finally published a hymnbook, “Hymns Ancient and Modern” that they began to incorporate hymn singing into their services.