Why I hate hymns

My educated guess is that the title of this post has already made some readers angry and/or shocked. I apologize for making you angry or for freaking you out. I also don't mean any disrespect toward any of my musical forefathers who composed hymns. My intention in writing this post is to simply express myself honestly. In the past, I've written a little bit about my hatred of hymns, and I even wrote a Lemonchicky story about my struggle to worship with hymns. As you can see in this photo, I own a few hymnbooks (that little red one is a Spanish book that has lyrics only), so I'm not launching a campaign to end all hymns. I'm just being honest when I say that I hate hymns in general. And I feel like it's a good idea to simply tell my hymn-hatred story in its entirety here, from beginning to (ongoing) end. Perhaps an alternative title for this post is "How I learned to worship with music."

I was raised in a Pharisaical home. My father was a pastor who had perfect pitch, was very proficient in playing the piano and organ, and who directed church choirs, knew all the parts, and translated choir cantatas into Spanish. My mother was a soprano who usually sang solos. Both my parents grew up in Baptist churches, and they knew the hymnbook backwards and forwards, especially in Spanish.

So, when I went to church, we all sang hymns. Depending on which church we attended, we either sang the hymns in English and/or Spanish. I was an antisocial little girl who refused to attend children's church, so while my little sister went to children's church, I sat at the front of the sanctuary by myself while my father played the piano or organ and while my mother sang in the choir. Anytime we sang hymns, it was all about the music for me. Whenever my grandfather was in town, he would sit next to me in church and share his hymnbook with me, and I would follow along while he would sing bass. I honestly couldn't have cared less about the message of the hymn lyrics. I just went to church because I had no choice but to show up. I got saved when I was 10 years old, but nothing changed about how I felt about church music.

When I was about 15, one of the church deacons/ushers approached me and explained that it was getting harder for my father to play the piano during a worship service right before delivering a sermon. Our church had other pianists, but they were not always reliable. The deacon/usher explained that he knew I could play the piano (I think maybe by that point I was playing Scott Joplin and/or The Carpenters during youth events?), so he said that I was the only one who could do the job. It was up to me. Now I suspect that the deacon/usher's approach may have been mental abuse, but that is how I became the church pianist. My father trained me, I practiced, I compared myself to other pianists, I made many mistakes, I sweated and shook with nerves, I got better, I fell on my face anyway, but I was still the church pianist. The hymns were still just music to me. I didn't have time to learn the lyrics, and I honestly didn't care about what the lyrics were saying. I knew I was saved, I knew I wasn't going to hell, but I didn't have affection for God, and I just wanted each church service to be over so that I could hang out with my friends or go home and watch movies.

That was my life. But when I was 18, I went off to college, where everything changed.

Me being Little Miss Pharisee, I criticized the churches that I visited when I first arrived at school, especially that one charismatic Baptist church that I visited where everybody was raising their hands during the music. However, there was a problem. These people at the charismatic Baptist church had a sincerity and a genuineness that I couldn't criticize. There was something inside them that I admired, that I wanted. It was the same something that many of my fellow students had during my first week of school -- the students who talked about giving their problems to God and who sang to God about how much they loved Him. These people loved God. I knew that I didn't, but I knew that I wanted to.

So, at the charismatic Baptist church that sang praise and worship music while their hymnbooks collected dust in the pews, I learned about the Holy Spirit, who definitely did NOT stop working after the Bible was canonized. One night, I got baptized in the Holy Spirit, and I haven't been the same since. Any tiny little spark inside me that was wanting to love God was suddenly doused with kerosene, and I was smitten with Him forever. My heart had been wrecked. I was ruined. And church music would never be the same for me ever again.

During worship services, we would sing Dennis Jernigan songs, Vineyard songs, Kevin Prosch songs, Keith Green songs, and tons of other praise and worship songs. They were all new to me. I soaked them up like a hard, dry sponge that was dead and damaged with dehydration. I remember being extremely cautious about singing the lyrics. I would hesitate and make sure that I meant what I sang before I would actually sing. I remember closing my eyes and imagining God's ear being right in front of me while I sang. One time during a break from school, I was playing a Dennis Jernigan tape on my boombox, and my uncle came into the room and asked me to turn down the volume. I was on fi-yah.

People everywhere (mostly men) were leading worship with guitar. Being a nonconformist, I did not want to simply follow the crowd, so I resisted learning the guitar, even though I could tell which chords were being played. So, after I started a youth lifegroup at home one summer, I led praise and worship songs on our piano. I didn't think that worked very well, because it didn't seem practical for everybody in the group to crowd around me while I was sitting at the piano and staring at the wall. So, my father taught me a few guitar chords and gave me his classical guitar, and I learned the rest of what I needed to know about simple guitar chords from the back of a hymnbook.

The rest is history. But I still hate hymns.

I think hymns work best when you have people singing all four parts. I think hymns work best when you have a piano and/or an organ to accompany them. I think hymns work best when you're dipping into music history. I don't think hymns work well on guitar -- at least, I personally can't play hymns on my guitar without sounding like I'm playing a country song at a campfire or unless I'm home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play-eee.

All that should be enough for me to vow to never sing a hymn ever again for as long as I live. Except...

"When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives." (Matthew 26:30)

...God likes hymns. I don't understand why, but He does. This particular verse I just quoted happened immediately after Jesus took the Last Supper. I haven't dug into this verse yet, so I don't know if "hymn" really means "psalm," like the kind that are included in the Book of Psalms, or if it means something like "Onward Christian Soldiers" or "Estad por Cristo firmes."

People can truly praise God and worship Him with hymns. That's awesome. I, however, have struggled to be able to do so. Perhaps when you hear a hymn, you get warm fuzzies from your childhood or from your youth, and you know all the words and all the harmonies. I, however, feel like loading my hymnbooks into a cannon and firing them at a Pharisee convention. Hymns don't give me warm fuzzies at all (unless they're Christmas carols), and I barely know any of the words, and the harmonies make me think of nice old ladies in dresses who smelled like cheap lotion and who cooked food that was too spicy for me to eat. So, hymns aren't pleasant for me.

But God likes them. They're a vehicle for connecting with Him. I usually have to remember that whenever I sing a hymn to Him now, because I usually struggle to connect with Him via hymns. Their lyrics usually don't express how I feel.

But God tells us in the Bible to sing a new song to Him, and I appreciate how many contemporary composers have modernized old hymns. Hillsong's "Cornerstone" is an excellent example of this, and I often catch myself singing it just for the fun of it. Zach Neese's "God & King" is my favorite example, and I like it so much that I lead it myself on my guitar any chance I get.

So, singing hymns is definitely NOT in my comfort zone. Hymns stretch me. Honestly, I will possibly continue to hate them until the day I die. But I'm open to learning how to sing them to God as sincerely as I can.

Because He likes them.