Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another on the theme of “The word of God”: “Speak, O Lord, as we come to you” by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. It’s a straightforward hymn of three eight-line verses, with no chorus or bridge – surprisingly traditional for Townend, although there is no attempt at rhyming the lines and the text by itself reads as a prose prayer rather than poetry.
The overall theme is that God’s ‘word’ is something living. Not just the written word of the Bible (although presumably that is meant by the words “Truths unchanged from the dawn of time that will echo down through eternity”) but God’s message to us today. So the first and last verses start by asking him to speak to us (the middle verse starts “Teach us…”).
Although throughout the hymn the text refers to “us” and “we”, much of it is personal. Listening to God is the work of personal devotion. Asking to be “fashioned in God’s likeness” (v.1), or to have thoughts and attitudes tested against God’s purity (v.2), or to have minds renewed (v.3) are really the requests of an individual. But when many people pray in this way and find themselves changed in response, that is when the Church as a whole (the “we”) can, as the last line puts it, be built and the earth filled with God’s glory.
I confess to being rather disappointed with this hymn.
I do agree with the prayer expressed, although I’d have liked a line which said something along the lines of “that the light of Christ might be seen today in the way we take to heart and put into practice the particular bible passage we are looking at” rather than just “… in our acts of love and our deeds of faith”. Evangelicalism has sometimes been criticised for giving the impression that standing on the bible is more important than taking the trouble to unpack what the bible actually says.
I think Stephen is right when he says the text reads like a prose prayer rather than a poem-prayer. I think it’s a shame that the words don’t rhyme; and in a way even more that there are some occasional rhymes (e.g. verse 2 lines 2 & 4) which only serve to highlight the lack of rhymes elsewhere. I think it was the writers of Psalm Praise who later on deduced that if you’re going to write lines which don’t rhyme you need to make absolutely sure that they don’t, because otherwise the ear will hear the occasional rhyme and then notice the lack elsewhere and lament it.
And I think there are two shames about the tune. One is the distressing anticipation of the final beat at the ends lines 1,2,3,5 and 7: this is the kind of subtlety that the majority of congregation members can’t hack, and it simply leads to ragged singing if one tries it corporately. And the other is the very weak chord and bass structure at the starts of lines 1,3 and 7. Surely there are better ways to write music?