One church I served had an annual dinner and celebration for the feast of the Epiphany. It was my job to arrange for some kind of entertainment to take place at the party, but there was a year that Christmas came and went and I found myself completely unprepared for Epiphany. So I decided we’d have a sing-along. Before the event, I worried that it would float about as well as a lead balloon; people were used to REAL entertainment at these parties! I pulled out some caroling booklets from a dusty shelf in the office and loaded up a cart with hymnals, and prayed that no one would be too upset at my crazy, awful, boring idea. My trepidation continued as I started distributing hymnals at people’s tables after dinner to responses like “Oh, no!” and “What are we going to have to do?” But I soldiered ahead, announced my scheme, and waited for someone to call out a song. And wouldn’t you know… people loved it! Within a minute there were so many requests I couldn’t keep track of them all. We sang Christmas songs from the familiar (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) to the long-forgotten (The Snow Lay on the Ground). Patriotic tunes were sung with gusto (Onward, Christian Soldiers and America the Beautiful) along with some of the secular Christmas songs (Frosty the Snowman)! Then there were those who asked, movingly, to sing songs that will be sung at their funerals (Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and Abide with Me). We sang for an hour and probably could have gone on an hour more. The next Sunday people were still talking about the fun they had. All in all, one of the more successful events we’d ever had!

I’ve always been a big fan of Advent. Of course, in my childhood it was easy to associate Advent with preparation for Christmas—stores, home, and church being decorated with evergreens and colored lights, the house filled with the scent of cookies and breads in the oven when I came home from school, and carols playing on LPs on our big wooden cabinet stereo. The South Dakota winter was growing colder, darker, and snowier, but indoors was a four-week bustle of growing anticipation.

Nearly all church musicians think it’s important to introduce new music to our assemblies. Nearly all of us have probably felt the sting of criticism from members of our congregations who don’t want to learn new music. In attempting to respond to these comments I like to get at three underlying questions: WHY do we sing new (or new to us) music? WHAT new music is worth learning? HOW can “non-musicians” learn to sing this new music?