Celebrating sixty years of shows, songs and shared stories of grace

IN October 1961 the BBC began broadcasting a weekly programme of hymns and interviews from churches across the United Kingdom. Sixty years later the programme has changed somewhat. These days the songs are as likely to come from a prison or a rock festival as a country parish church.

This seems appropriate in an age where increasingly people are responding to the idea that church is something that we are rather than a building that you go to. Faith cannot be confined to a sixteenth century pew or a pulpit six feet above contradiction but is found wherever people of faith are to be found.

As a student I found myself part of the “congregation” when the programme was filmed at my university. I remember almost nothing of the hymns that we sang but I do remember the interviews including a blind student studying philosophy that would have made most viewers rethink any idea they might have had that disability meant limited possibilities. There was also a member of the student union executive who demonstrated that politics and faith don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

It is sometimes easy to dismiss programmes like this as “religionlight” but the interviews in my student days and the interviews now make it hard to sustain such a view. In a recent service celebrating the sixtieth anniversary former presenter Sally Magnusson said, “Songs of Praise is a profound programme” and I believe she is right.

Week by week stories of grace and hope are shared by people whose ordinary lives are being lived out in extraordinary ways. There is no preaching or discussion of abstruse theology. Rather in the space of just a few minutes men and women have an opportunity to explain how belief in God has impacted their lives. After all the struggles, challenges and confusion of the last eighteenth months these are stories we need to hear.

In another sixty years who knows what shape the programme will have? Of one thing I am certain the Songs of Praise will continue to ring out keeping the rumour of God alive. >