This musical is one of my all-time favorites. So well-written and hilarious!

Now, that's a great point. I'm all about a great sound system with clarity and volume...but if you can't hear others singing, they won't sing over it. "But they do at rock concerts!" Yeah, they do...but that's usually with the aid of a beer or two. Don't think we really want to go there... ;-) We need to remember that part of the corporate experience is, indeed, hearing others sing WITH us...not just seeing their mouths move.

The interesting thing is that even more than the subjective lyrics, Watts had push-back from others because he wanted to sing hymns rather than just psalms. Psalm chanting had degenerated into a lethargic activity and Watts wanted to rejuvenate corporate singing. We have a great deal that we owe Watts in terms of corporate singing.

My first line of defense is to choose hymns that are hard to individualize. "The Church's One Foundation" is one. My other line of defense is to run the risk of 'the teacher' during the service. Sometimes the only way is just to teach...but if done in an appropriate way in a smooth transitional fashion, I think it's entirely appropriate to do that.

Hymns like "A Church's One Foundation" are the types of hymns I engage to keep it a "singing to each other" or "we're here as a group, not as a collection of individuals" type of experience. The other thing I do, at risk of being 'the teacher' that Bob Kauflin recently blogged about, is to instruct, briefly, the congregation in how the hymn actually applies to the Church Universal.

Sometimes teaching is the only way out of this, since individualism is the water we're swimming in, especially in America and in American Evangelicalism. But I think it's a valid question and I'm not certain I get this one right in the best way.

Honestly, it looks a lot like the hymnody that we were utilizing in the Reformed tradition prior to about 1850. The whole love-song to Jesus really seemed to catch on in the 1800s with the 'gospel-song' movement. There IS indeed a place for corporate bodies to sing personal pronouns...the psalms are replete with them. But also, Psalm 103 and others like it are the congregation addressing themselves...and it's basically God using his word to encourage his people and communicate His grace.

In terms of what it looks like in real time on a Sunday morning, I have incorporated a great many hymns into my church's gatherings. We sing them in an Indelible Grace or Sovereign Grace style. IG, SG and Red Mountain Music have even encouraged me in my own tune-writing and a fair number of the songs we do with regularity are ones I've chosen from hymnals and have composed entirely new tunes.

Sometimes we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes all it needs is a new hubcap. It's hard to find good modern worship music which addresses the congregation or sensitive topics like indwelling sin and the fight against it. These are things which our predecessors wrote about and sang about. Let's sing with them!