Toolbox For Faith

For pastors and their spouses, the week or two after Easter is a wonderful time to take time off for re-creation after all the Lenten, Holy Week and Easter services. We waited a week before heading off for a few days to Williamsburg. One of our favorite adventures while there was a musical and historical presentation at one museum about hymns.

What intrigued me most was the observation that the hymns were not originally written for a specific tune but most could be sung to a variety of tunes. That is why in so many of the older hymnals, no music was included but only words. We sang “Amazing Grace” to one of the original tunes to which it was paired because the one with which we are all familiar was composed over 50 years after the words were penned by John Newton.

The other interesting observation was how the hymn composers of the pre-colonial era used familiar tunes when they did set the words to a specific melody. The story was shared of how John Wesley and his Method Club members were meeting in a room over a tavern when three sailors decided to interrupt the meeting by singing a bawdy sailing song. The next night, Wesley’s group was meeting again when the sailors came by and to the amazement of the sailors, they heard the same tune that they had been singing the night before set to Christian words that Wesley had written after the meeting the evening before. Wesley ended up composing over 6000 hymns.

Afterwards, I kept thinking of how much fun we had learning things that we didn’t know.