I've been rummaging around for the past few weeks and doing some selected readings on the history of congregational singing. I initially used AI to help me choose the sources, and since then have found a few on my own. I'm not too ashamed of using AI here, because it was just my librarian. I printed out sources, underlined phrases, scrawled in the margins, copied paragraphs into my journal, typed passages into a Word document, and generally made them my own, until what you see here is basically what I'd tell you about over a cup of gelato at Chuck's Produce, if we had time to sit and visit.
Here is a mini-literature review.
Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, 6,14-7,16; Book X, 33,49-50 [I'm citing from the New City Press edition; the NPNF1 edition can be read here: Book IX, Chapter 6; Book IX, Chapter 7; Book X, Chapter 33]
Augustine moved to Milan in 386. That year, the empress demanded that Bishop Ambrose give one of his church buildings to the Arians, but Ambrose refused, and instead held an all-night vigil in the church with his congregation to prevent its takeover. In order to keep up their spirits, Ambrose got them singing hymns that night. Up until then, hymn-singing hadn't really been a thing in the Latin-speaking western church, although it was a practice in the Greek-speaking eastern church. After this, hymn-singing took off and spread throughout the western Roman empire.
The following year, Augustine was baptized, and he recalls weeping when he heard the congregation singing hymns, because he realized that God's wind had finally reached him and blown through his "house of straw", and that he now believed and knew the words for himself.
Reflecting later, he was somewhat troubled that he sometimes loved the sound more than the words, and he sometimes felt like singing should be abolished in church just to be on the safe side, like how Athanasius in Alexandria, Egypt used to require the one reading the Psalms in the church service to keep their voice even, so it sounded like proclaiming rather than singing or chanting.
However, Augustine finally admitted that singing was ultimately beneficial, despite the danger, because it helped bring God's words home to his soul, and whenever he started loving the sound of the melody more than the words, he had to repent and pray for help.
Augustine, Revisions (Retractationes), Book II, 11 (38) [I'm citing from the New City Press edition; the Fathers of the Church edition cites it as Book 2, Chapter 37.]
In the early 400s, when Augustine was now a priest, and possibly had already been made bishop, a church member named Hilary objected strongly to their new practice of singing Psalms during communion. So after the brothers asked him to respond, Augustine wrote a book (now lost) in reply to Hilary, defending the practice.
I admire how Augustine was able to examine so closely his own thoughts and feelings, regarding how music affected his soul. I also admire his restraint in waiting to respond to Hilary until after others asked for his answer, and his diligence in making a thorough go of it. Music is worth debating because it does affect people deeply, for good or ill. Change is often uncomfortable. And it's good to talk through how it affects people, and discern whether it is helping people hear from God and proclaim his truth, or hindering them.
Charles Garside, Jr., "The Origins of Calvin's Theology of Music: 1536-1543", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 69, Part 4 (1979)
John Calvin, Preface to the Genevan Psalter (1543)
Next, I want to look at the French reformer John Calvin in the mid-1500s. In the first edition of his Institutes (1536), he was writing for French protestants who were fleeing or hiding from persecution from the Roman Catholics, and so in the rare mention of music, he focused more on the heart; after all, you wouldn't want to do much singing if you were worried your neighbors would turn you in. But in the next few years, Calvin seemed to take more of an interest in congregational singing, probably under the influence of the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer.
By 1543 when he wrote the preface to the Genevan Psalter, a hymnbook consisting mainly of Psalms set to poetry (many written by the French court poet Clément Marot and set to music from composers Matthäus Greitter and Wolfgang Dachstein), he had some definite convictions: singing is a type of public prayer, set to music. True devotion comes from the Holy Spirit touching the heart and enlightening the understanding, and this can only happen when the worshiper understands what they are singing, and so it needs to be in their native language.
Following Plato, Calvin argued that music pierces the heart more deeply, for good or ill, than mere spoken words, like pouring wine into a vessel with a funnel. For this reason, he said that the church needs music with weight and majesty, not light and frivolous, different from the kind of music used for entertainment. And it needs the best lyrics to express praise to God -- those found in the book of Psalms.
Charles Garside goes in depth in interpreting the evolution of Calvin's thought on music, and how he was influenced by Plato, Augustine, and Bucer. Calvin was much more austere and disciplined in his approach to music than was Martin Luther, who pulled tunes from many sources in order to develop trust in the newly protestant words through tunes that the people already knew. There's a place for both approaches, but I'm feeling a bit more Calvinish these days -- I think we need to strip back the show and feel the weightiness of the words of Scripture that we sing. One last thing that Calvin recommended was memorizing the songs they sang in church, so that there would be no interference between the cup and the lip, between the mouth and the heart.
Westminster Assembly, "Of Singing of Psalms" in the Directory for the Publick Worship of God (1645)
The Westminster Assembly was tasked by the English parliament with writing a replacement for the Book of Common Prayer, which was a thing of beauty but which had wounded many consciences by strict enforcement of uniformity. And so, along with a confession of faith and two catechisms, the Assembly drafted a public worship directory, that is, basic instructions for how to run a church service according to the principles found in the Bible.
A short, three-paragraph section toward the end gives instructions for leading singing. It says that praising God publicly by singing psalms together in the congregation, and privately in the family, is the duty of Christians. In doing this, "the voice is to be tunably and gravely ordered; but the chief care must be to sing with understanding, and with grace in the heart, making melody unto the Lord."
The third paragraph says, "That the whole congregation may join herein, every one that can read is to have a psalm book" and those who can't read should be encouraged to learn, and meanwhile, for the benefit of illiterate congregants, someone in the church should be appointed to read the psalm out line by line before the singing starts.
I didn't realize before I read this that illiteracy in church was such a hindering factor that they had to make special provisions for.
The Directory didn't find much use in English churches, after the Church of England was restored several decades later, but it did have an influence on Scottish presbyterianism.
Isaac Watts, Preface to Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707)
Isaac Watts, Preface to The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Applied to the Christian State and Worship (1719)
I had heard of Isaac Watts as a famous writer of hymns such as "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross", but I wasn't really aware that he had definite convictions that led him to write, delineated in the prefaces of two of his hymnbooks.
He argued that the Psalms-only movement (associated with Calvin and the Westminster Assembly) had its drawbacks, and that it was totally legitimate to sing songs in church that didn't come directly from Scripture, as long as the ideas agreed with Scripture.
He also complained that if you sing the psalms as written (or as paraphrased by previous English Psalter-writer-editor poets), you would have to sing a lot of Jewish Old Testament details that didn't apply to you as a Christian, and you'd also have to sing imprecatory psalms or psalms written for a particular occasion in the life of David or Asaph (such as maybe lament or pleas for rescue from human enemies).
And so, to show how you could do it better, Watts edited two songbooks: a book of hymns and spiritual songs (religious poetry set to music for congregational singing), and a book of psalms that he had recast in a Christian frame of mind, removing the specific Old Testament Jewish elements, adding Jesus and sweetness and light, and removing most of the sadness.
Although many of Watts's songs have stood the test of time, I think maybe he overdid it in writing the sadness and strangeness out of the psalms. It is my opinion that if church music is meant to be a continual updating of the words of God in ways that we can understand and sing today, then yesterday's "sweetness and light" might be today's "embarrassingly sappy", but we can always dip our nets in the Scriptures and find fresh fish, and the verse that sounded strange a generation ago may now prove to be just what we needed now.
As for the manner of singing, Watts recommended singing not too slow, and he really disliked the reading out line by line before the singing (already mentioned by the Westminster Assembly as a stopgap for accommodating those who couldn't read), but if it had to be done, he wanted the clerk to read out the whole psalm first before reading it out line by line, so the congregants could get the sense of what they were about to sing.
John Wesley, instructions for congregational singing, in the preface to Sacred Melody (1761)
I can't go on without mentioning John Wesley's punchy seven rules for singing (which I think I first heard in a Mark Dever podcast interview): most memorably, "sing lustily", not "half dead or half asleep", and "sing modestly", "[d]o not bawl", "but strive to unite your voices together", and aim at pleasing God, attending "strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your Heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually..."
With this last comment, we can hear echoes of Augustine. Wesley, like Watts, preferred his hymns sung quickly and joyfully. Like Calvin, he valued memorization, so he urged his readers to learn the tunes and sing the hymns exactly as written.
Molly Worthen, "Sacred Reverb", Christianity Today (Sep/Oct 2025)
Molly Worthen, a researcher of American religion who came to faith in an evangelical megachurch in the course of her research, writes here with an eye to what is happening inside her as her contempt fades into appreciation for the soul-shaking truth of the lyrics in even the most banal-sounding contemporary worship song.
She knows what every corner of the internet is saying about Christian music, and she loves plainchant and the Book of Common Prayer too. It's just that contemporary worship music happened be the thing that stripped away her distractions of intellect while she was searching for reasons not to believe.
She pings back against an exclusive spiritual diet of song, arguing that the diet intended for us is found in an ecosystem of sermon and scripture reading and relationships, fortified by song, and that where one part lacks, another part makes up. As a fellow snob, and an aspiring ethnographer, I resonated with her beyond words.
Josh Hoekstra, "Modern Worship Music: The Contemporary Praise and Worship Movement and the Reformed Reaction with the Theology and Philosophy of the Movements", Bell Tower (Hope College) Volume 4, Issue 1 (8 May 2025).
Josh Hoekstra dives deep into the history of 20th and 21st century worship music, focusing on the history of contemporary praise and worship from its roots in pentecostalism to its extension through the Jesus movement of the 1960s and 70s with its Scripture songs, to John Wimber, Maranatha, Jack Hayford, and finally the big worship music industry today of Bethel, Hillsong, Passion, and Elevation.
Along the way, he weaves in the response of the Reformed church world, in the form of the retuned hymns movement in the 1990s -- I had no idea that Indelible Grace and its leader Kevin Twit were associated with Reformed University Fellowship in Nashville and the Presbyterian Church in America. But it all makes sense when you consider the theological clarity and the roots-Americana-folk style that they started out with, which I keep hoping our music will draw back to.
The retuned hymns movement was supplemented by the modern hymns movement with the Gettys, Shane & Shane, CityAlight, and others. Hoekstra analyzes lyrics of a couple of modern hymns, showing their theological emphases on the substitutionary atonement and God's sovereignty and kindness, which diverge somewhat from the overall contemporary praise and worship movement's focus on intimacy with God, and God's victory over sin and death.
Importantly, he points out that Reformed worship requires confession of sin as preparation to draw near to God, which is sometimes skipped in contemporary worship. He also highlights how Reformed worship, with its method of singing especially the psalms, offers worshipers the opportunity to express lament and other difficult emotions which are found in the psalms, and which contemporary worship (following Isaac Watts) often bypasses.
Thus, Hoekstra's article pulls together strands from all the other readings above, and shows a way forward for including the best from contemporary traditions and infusing it with the best instincts of the past.
