The hymn I picked from Sing Praise for Pentecost Sunday itself is “All together in one place” by Brian Hoare. The first three verses re-tell the events of that day as recorded in the Bible: the disciples met together for prayer, waiting (as he told them to) for something to happen, then experiencing the power of the Spirit as wind and flame before they were each prompted to pray and praise God in all the languages of the known world (what that actually looked and sounded like, we shall never know!)
Each verse of the hymn (apart from the last) begins with ‘all together’, and emphasises not only that the disciples had to stick together in order to experience the fullness of Pentecost, but also that they then had to live as community as they carried out Jesus’ work by the power of that same Spirit over subsequent years (verse four) and that the Church today (verse five) also has to act ‘all together’ if we are to experience that same Spirit and be effective witnesses in this generation.
The last verse brings this together, reminding us that the Church begun in Jerusalem all those years ago is the one we still belong to: ‘One in mission, one in faith, still responding to God’s call, one in telling all the world Jesus Christ is Lord of all”.
There is, of course, a fundamental truth in the “all together” repetition of this hymn: the Spirit equips us with gifts so that we may exercise ministry as the body of Christ – and a body cannot be a body if it is not all together. But, sadly, Brian passes from biblical truth into the inconsistencies of the modern age when he moves to verse 5 – the church is not “All together still today” – in fact the many denominations are a standing denial of this reality, and a great undermining of the “telling all the world Jesus Christ is Lord of all!” I cannot work out in my own mind whether Brian is right to write such untrue lines as a challenge to us – an aspiration that we shouldn’t be divided the way we are – or whether he’s pandering to our pretences by getting us to affirm what isn’t?
Somehow the line “for the Pentecostal day” at the end of v1 needs work. Should it maybe be something like:
All together in one place
friends of Jesus prayed each hour,
waiting as the Lord had said
for his Pentecostal power.
Alleluia?
The harmony in A&MR (no 524) is vastly preferable to Vaughan Williams’ harmony, in my view, and that’s what I played (making up the end bit of the tune).