This seems like stating the obvious: worship songs should have good words.

Well it sort of is, but maybe we should unpack what we mean by ‘good’ here by assuming the case is closed.

Firstly, they should be words the people singing them believe in. State the obvious, but congregations in singing are lending their voice to the words of the hymns and they shouldn’t really be asked to sing something that’s radically out of tune with what they believe. And there are divisions of opinion within Christianity which can be an obstacle. The most obvious, alas, is penal substitution – a cornerstone of belief for many conservative evangelicals but repugnant to many other believers. My local group of churches resorted to editing ‘In Christ alone’ to lessen this problem, probably illegally. If you know the song you’ll know which line I mean, but that’s not really the point. More to the point is that worship songwriting as usually so called has been dominated so far by writers from precisely those conservative evangelical backgrounds; and that ought to give anyone coming from a different theological and spiritual place (like, say, me) pause for thought about what words they give the congregations they minister to to sing.

Secondly, though, good words should have meaty content and make sense. I have had arguments with fellow church musicians over a well-known worship song which is usually printed starting:

Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise
The city of our God the holy place
We fall down on our knees

Now I have gone over and over that and the only sense I can make of it is that the Lord and the city of our God have to be the same thing. Which is fairly clearly nonsense, or certainly not Christianity. But I’ve heard this song sung:

Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise
In the city of our God the holy place
We fall down on our knees

Now that makes perfect sense, even if it’s a little bit Old Testament (isn’t God now understood to be everywhere?). What worries me is that anyone would prefer the first version unless it was absolutely thrust on them!

Secondly, decent solid content. Ideally, I think the words we sing in church – and hopefully remember through the week because words set to music are generally so much more memorable than words alone – should mirror the range of our prayer and our preaching. That means that we have to get a long way beyond lyrics that don’t say much more than ‘God I love you, you’re very powerful and I want to say that I love you and you make me feel good. That’s fine, but if that’s as much content as your whole service-worth of songs has, I recommend expanding your repertoire. Stuart Townend commented, when I saw him touring his last but one album (the very folky one, Creation Sings) that too many of our songs are about our experience of God when there is so much more to Him than that. And I agree. But there is also so much more to our experience of God than worship and praise, important though they are, and the label ‘worship music’ perhaps illustrates a narrowness of outlook in the genre. Penitence, intercession, social justice, questioning, wrestling, desire (including unfulfilled), discovery – all these are places the songs of the Church should go. We’ve only ever scratched the surface of the infinite God, and as I see it the job of the Christian artist – in this instance, songwriter – is to enrich their fellow believers with as much as they can convey or hint at of that infinite nature.

Just a small challenge to write at the top of our game, then.