Article

"Telling God's Story With a New Song"
by Roberta R. King, PH.D.

This article has been reproduced with the permission of 'Worship Leader', Vol. 12, No. 6, Sept/Oct 2003, page 12.

It was a pathetic musical situation!  And the missionaries and few local pastors in the northern region of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), West Africa, knew it.  The Senufo peoples they were trying to reach with the Gospel kept dozing off during the singing.  Hymns such as "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" worked like sleeping pills!  The church leaders had no idea what to do.  The missionary-Bible translator had recently discovered that Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" sounded like 'crying' music to the straggling handful of believers.  Yet, everyone knew that the Senufo people love their own music, regularly staying up several nights in a row to sing and dance at funerals.  Finally, in desperation at the end of one service, a missionary challenged the people, "Don't you have something to sing to God?"  With that, an old woman stood up and began singing a Call-and-Response style song.  The atmosphere turned electric, people were captivated, and spontaneously joined in the singing.  Their newly found faith in God had just been articulated through the birth of a new song, one that told God's story.

The Cebaara-Senufo were beginning to understand the Christian story.  They were realizing that God was not foreign, but can speak to them in their own language and music systems.  It was dawning on them that God wanted to communicate with them directly, heart-to-heart.  In such situations, going cross-cultural with music brings new challenges to the Psalmist's call to "sing unto the Lord a new song" (Ps. 96:1).  There are challenges that require the fusion of cultural music expertise with the purposes of God for making His story known and understood among the nations.  How do these musical and theological challenges play out?

First and foremost, telling God's story through song requires moving into the new culture and musical language of a people.  The Senufo's wooden xylophones and throbbing drums with jangling metallic buzzers (njembé) create strikingly exotic and foreign sounds to the outsider, sounds that many in the western church do not naturally appreciate.  Yet, the reverse is also true for many peoples around the world who do not relate to western music.  Playing 'How Great Thou Art' on the piano, for example, drove my Senufo hostess out of the room!  She did not recognize it at all as music.  We must keep in mind that although music is a universal phenomenon, each group defines music according to its cultural community.  Thus, the first Senufo Christian songs were viewed as wonderful in spite of their simplicity. For the first time, the people could understand what they were singing to God!  Unless we use the musical language of a people, Christian songs may be interpreted as mere 'clanging cymbals' -  a noise that confuses rather than communicates our intended message of hope.

Once an appropriate song style is developed, Christian song texts need to bring new theological understandings about God.  For example, as one Senufo man sat listening to a song that declared, 'There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus' (I Tim. 2:5).  He longed for the freedom to come to God directly.  The song text served as a corrective to his cultural assumptions that had taught him the creator God was distant and could not be approached.  The song preached good news to him, sparking his pilgrimage of faith in Jesus Christ.  Thus, Christian song texts speak with greatest power when they address the immediate life situations of a people in ways that reveal the reasons God is worthy of their worship.

A further challenge is to encourage spiritual development, one that fosters transformed lifestyles, through appropriate worship.   For example, a Christian woman attended the local prayer meeting, and as they worshipped, she joined in learning a new song that spoke of taking the log out of one's own eye before criticizing others (Mt. 7:3-5).  The woman decided Jesus wanted her to change her actions by no longer insulting her neighbors.  She was beginning to live a godly life, one that was transformational within her cultural context.

Finally, telling God's story through song is neither complete with the composing of culturally appropriate songs nor the development of authentic worship among just one particular people group.  The cycle of reaching out into new cultural groupings via a people's musical language remains the ultimate challenge.  When a different Senufo language group began singing their own Christian songs, the response of the non-believers was astounding .  The exclaimed. "Heh!  You mean that God is for us?  We thought he belonged to those other Senufos!"  They had assumed that God was not interested in them.  Thus, communicating Christ with impact calls for working within each people's musical system in tandem with God's purposes for making Himself known among the nations.  The result is the joyful release of God's people to dynamic witness and life-changing worship of the living God.

Roberta R. King, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Communication and Ethnomusicology
at Fuller Theological Seminary

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