Real Hope: WorshipSýnishorn

The Plumber, Pastor And How Great Thou Art

He conducted us as if we were the Trinity College Choir launching into an obscure passage from Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Our church pastor was also church maintenance man and choir master. 

We were thirteen folks in a small fibro church blessed by but three or four possessing the musical wit to hold any melody whatsoever.  

He’d raise his left arm, then thrust downward, and we’d commence what is best described as a musical mumble until we found a note. Any note. Then with newfound confidence we’d lurch toward the first chorus. That was the thing with hymns – enough verses for us to belt out some top-shelf praise by the fourth stanza!

Years later, standing in a cathedral featuring a pipe organ so sonorous it changed the rhythm of your heartbeat, I cried. Sure, I was in awe of the organist’s giddying key changes and the choir’s cascading descants; however, my tears came from those worshipful stanzas of my childhood. My brother and I singing beside a fireman, a single mum hugging a disinterested teenage boy, a plumber and his wife, an accountant, a retired country cop sharing a pew with two widows, and my parents standing arms entwined as Dad searched for the bass line and Mum’s soprano voice soared toward heaven. In our singing we were all needed. If one of us stopped we all knew it.

As ungracious a noise as it may have been to passers-by, we loved to sing together. This is no lament of a lost era of hymn singing, more a simple reflection on the holy power of generous, full-throated, humble, willing worship. To worshipers everywhere who DO sing in time and in tune, I pray you accept my quaking apology and grateful thanks. God has never been more real to me than in song. 

written by DWAYNE JEFFRIES