One of the many tasks that I do each month as Rector of two village Churches is to pick the hymns that we are going to sing on Sunday mornings. I usually do this a month at a time, drawing on suggestions from our Choir Director, the seasonal rhythms of the year, and of course the various preferences and dislikes of my congregations!
This year, for the last Sunday of August, we were due to be dedicating a new window in the Church so I picked a variety of hymns on the theme of ‘light’. We sang “Here in this place new light is streaming”, “Christ whose glory fills the skies, Christ, the true and only Light”, and several others in the same vein. The final hymn was an easy one to pick – recently crowned by BBC Songs of Praise as the UK’s favourite school assembly song, we ended with Shine Jesus Shine.
Now I picked these hymns in mid July, and a lot changed between the time of choosing them and the time of singing them. Firstly, we moved the dedication of the window to the Harvest Festival, but hymns about light are good any time right?
Then in August, as the UK heatwave stretched into its third month, wildfires broke out in a number of places including just a couple of miles up the road from us in Stourbridge where some 500 acres of farmland and 37 homes were damaged or destroyed. Then just a week or so later the world was rocked by the glacial flood in Nepal which destroyed a whole valley and left thousands dead or missing.
Both of these events were caused or exacerbated by Climate Change, a result of our relentless burning of fossil fuels and destruction of nature. The specific events in these particular places couldn’t be predicted, but the likelihood of events like these happening is on the rise. This was the context to our service on the last Sunday in August.
Both the local wildfires and the Nepal flood were mentioned in the sermon, prayed for in our intercessions, and were no doubt on the minds of many in the congregation. And then, at the end of the service we sang our final hymn – Shine Jesus Shine. Now I love this hymn, it’s moved past its ‘cheesy’ phase and reached proper classic status and it always goes down well in Church. But on this particular Sunday I realised with dawning horror as we sang it that perhaps it wasn’t such a good choice after all.
The imagery in the song are familiar Christian images, drawn from scripture and used down the ages. But after a week of devastating wildfires and tragic flooding, it felt deeply uncomfortable to sing “Blaze, Spirit, blaze set our hearts on fire, flow, river, flow flood the nations with grace and mercy”. As I looked around the congregation I could tell that I wasn’t the only person having these thoughts.
At a conference on liturgy that I attended recently one of the speakers, Tom O’Loughlin, said that when we come to Church we shouldn’t have to park our scientific minds at the door and enter the pre-scientific world of our ancestors. In a similar vein, the keynote speaker, Margaret Daly-Denton, said that the role of hymns in liturgy is to give voice to our understanding, and that should be our present understanding which may be different to that of earlier generations.
I have been reflecting a lot on what both Tom and Margaret said, and that experience singing Shine Jesus Shine (which incidentally was on the Sunday after I came back from the conference) brought the truth of their words home to me. Those of us tasked with planning the worship of our Churches have a responsibility, not only to ensure that our worship helps give us a right perspective on our relationship with God’s creation, but also that we do not exacerbate the traumas of our current crises.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t sing Shine Jesus Shine anymore – I might be kicked out by my congregation if I suggested that! But I am saying that we need to be mindful of the imagery that we use and the times and places that we use them. This is, in a way, a form of climate adaptation, changing what we do in response to our changing world. I don’t have all the answers, but it’s an important question, and it will certainly be on my mind when I choose next month’s hymns.
Revd Richard Clarkson is chair of JRI. He is the Rector of five rural parishes in North Shropshire. He has degrees in Physics and Theology and has a Master’s dissertation on Nature Contemplation in the writing of Maximus the Confessor. He is a member of the Lichfield Diocese Environmental Group, and dad to three wild boys!