THE FUTURE FORETASTING
CONFRONTING OUR FOCUS ON THE HERE & NOW BY
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hristians sing because we are people of hope. But what do we sing about when we sing about hope? In part of my doctoral research, I asked almost a thousand worship leaders to name a song that brought them hope in a time of despair and a song that brought their church hope. Combing through the responses to both of those question, nine songs rose to the top of the list of mentions. I’m not going to list the songs because the goal is not to critique a song. Instead, I’d like to share one observation that emerged: these songs of hope tended to focus on the present tense and the proximate space; they were fixated on the here and now. If Christian hope is about resurrection and new creation, why are the songs we say bring hope preoccupied with the here and now? There are several possible explanations. The first and most innocuous one is that that it is the nature of Christian worship to focus on who God is rather than what God will do. This does not negate an orientation toward the future; it may simply mean that confidence for the future is grounded in the unchanging nature of who God is. Praising God for who He is, as His character and nature are made manifest by his divine actions, is a longstanding Christian practice.
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LOST IN TRANSITION Another possible explanation is that the lack of narrative in these songs of hope is part of a larger trend in contemporary worship songs and an even wider trend in culture. Comparing contemporary worship songs with historically significant American evangelical hymns, worship historian Lester Ruth observes a shift from a pilgrimage paradigm to an end-times paradigm. Discipleship is no longer “a long journey toward our final destiny” but rather a faithful waiting for the imminent return of Christ. This loss of narrative in contemporary worship songs must also be situated within wider cultural trends. Philosopher Charles Taylor, describing this new “secular age,” notes the loss of the “idea that God was planning a transformation of human beings which would take them beyond the limitations which inhere in their present condition.”1 Without a grand telos or an eschatological vision, the story humans narrate and inhabit is much smaller. Truncated salvation narratives encoded in contemporary worship songs are surely a product of this age. But there is one more possible explanation. It is less comfortable to suggest or consider. And it is the one to which I want to give particular attention.
James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 26, 48-50. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007).
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