Now that’s what I call church music: which is the best hymn?
Welcome to Ecclesiastical Factor, in which churchgoers in Aylsham, Norfolk, have been asked to use an app to give real-time feedback on their Sunday hymns. Rev Canon Andrew Beane hopes it will make services more interactive, but perhaps he hasn’t considered the potential for democracy to go wrong (hello, Brexit, Matt Terry*, Boaty McBoatface). Also, most hymns are not bangers. All it will take is for one voice to rise up against Morning Has Broken and he could have a revolt on his hands. Our music critic’s entirely subjective ranking of the UK’s Top 5 hymns (as determined by a 2013 BBC poll), gives a taste of what Rev Beane can expect. *The 2016 X Factor winner
5. Be Still, for the Presence of the Lord
The lyrics to this modern hymn set up a power dynamic straight out of a Depeche Mode song, with a dom (God) demanding submission (from lowly mortals). Pretty sexy. The setting, however, is white bread, cotton wool: toothless pap for a nation gone soft in the head.
4. In Christ Alone
The Christian equivalent of Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl, tinged with traditional Irish melodies, simpering delivery and distressing neediness. Like Galway Girl, it is dilettantism – written in 2001 – that nonetheless exerts a vice-like grip over the nation’s consciousness. But, unlike Galway Girl, this is redeemable: it endorses the satisfaction theory of atonement; the controversial notion that Christ suffered as a substitute for human sin. A pleasing whiff of transgression.
3. Here I Am, Lord (I, the Lord of Sea and Sky)
Another cloying canticle, with the fear of God apparently out of fashion. Still, its inviting luminosity evokes John Williams’s warmer Star Wars themes. This humanises God, too, letting him have a chat with his congregants rather than subjecting us yet again to their obsequious devotion. He does seem quite needy, though.
2. How Great Thou Art
On one hand, songs lauding powerful men (ie God) strike a bum note in the #MeToo era. On the other, this adaptation of Swedish writer Carl Boberg’s poem by the missionary Stuart K Hine contains a verse for persecuted peoples in exile, which remains very apt. While this is another soft-hearted sermon, the awed chorus swoons like a lovestruck teenager.
1. Dear Lord and Father of Mankind More like it: magnificent droning gravity, filled with those low notes you can only hit by retracting your jaw until you have five chins. Good story, too: the words are from the US Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier’s bonkers poem The Brewing of Soma, about his horror at Vedic Hindus drinking hallucinogens to get closer to God. To be honest, that sounds much better than hymns on Sunday, but, as those go, this quietly defiant riposte to Greenleaf Whittier’s insistence that worship take place in contemplative silence is a good one.