Earlier this summer Chuck Colson celebrated a new trend: putting old hymns to contemporary music. One of the groups doing this is Indelible Grace. Matthew Smith, one of the lead singers of the group, has this to say:
“The praise songs I sang in high school mainly spoke about what I wanted to do: how I wanted to worship God, how I wanted to be renewed, et cetera. While those things were true, singing my desires didn’t produce
any kind of worship in my heart. In fact, it made me feel miserable. I felt like a failure. Singing about how I wanted to worship God was a kind of half-lie. In other words, I felt obligated to give God glory, because mentally I knew he deserved it, but it never sprung from being overwhelmed at who God is or what He has done.”
Smith believes many of the old hymns are marked by honesty.
If a hurt or discouraged person walks into your worship service, will they be met where they are in the songs? What encourages me about so many of the hymns is that they meet us whee we are and gently guide us in the ruth--Psalm-like hymns of lament which cry out to God in the midst of hard circumstances, but nevertries to minimize the reality of pain and a broken world.
Read more about Indelible Grace's perspective here.