Congregational Singing: Screens vs. Hymnals

Recently, over at Proclaim & Defend, Taigen Joos offered some thoughts on projecting song lyrics on screens during congregational singing.

I appreciate pastor Joos’ focus on practicality, and that’s my focus here also. He’s absolutely correct that there are challenges involved in using screens without hymnals, and that churches should think through their options.

So, should churches use screens or hymnals? I see it as a question of tradeoffs. Both approaches have different strengths and weaknesses.

A bit of my background, so you can filter for bias:

I grew up with hymnals and choir sheet music. I also grew up doing lots of singing without printed notation—with my family, and in a variety of youth group settings.

College extended that. As a member of one of the “vespers” choirs, my fellow students and I were all about sheet music. But those years also included hymnal-free singing at the church I attended Sunday evenings. It was just a guy and a guitar and Psalms. I think he was creating his own tunes half the time. He would teach it, then we would sing it.

So I’ve been enjoying congregational singing, both with and without music notation, for as long as I can remember. Recently, I’ve sung with hymnal-only congregations, hymnal-and-screen-mixed congregations, and screen only congregations.

Joos’ Four Points

Taigen Joos’ article offers five observations on screen-projected song lyrics. I’ll reproduce them here and interact with each.

Observation #1-Even if hymnals are available and acknowledged, hardly anyone (if anyone) in the congregation uses them.

This is consistent with what I’ve seen. I don’t have a lot to say about this one because it’s not important in itself. Its importance depends on the remaining three observations.

Observation #2-Generally, there is very little to no harmony being sung by the congregation.

This also fits what I’ve observed, but with a caveat: In hymnal-focused churches I’ve sung with recently, people aren’t singing harmony much either.

Singing harmony requires skills that aren’t completely met by having musical notation in front of you. You need two things: a) a somewhat trained ear for harmony, and b) some ability to read music. If you have the ear, you can—with practice—generally do pretty well without musical notation. If you have music reading skill without the ear, you’re going to struggle with harmony, even with a hymnal.

I doubt that the presence or absence of music notation is resulting in less skill in reading music. It’s probably the other way around: There is less notation-reading skill, so people see less value in printed music.

Toward solutions: Congregations and music leaders could sometimes teach a harmony part to the congregation in a service. It’s not something you’d want to do every Sunday, but some songs can go two-part pretty easily, and a percentage of people will be able to pick it up without reading music. In youth groups growing up we did this with several songs using nothing but printed lyrics and someone’s memory of a harmony part they learned from someone else.

Some may wonder, “No harmony, so what? Why does it matter?” The answer derives from how you read the Psalms and from your view of why we sing in worship at all. Briefly, the Psalms’ references to lots of instruments encourage us to view musical complexity and variety as things God values. As for why we sing at all, part of the point is to love truth more deeply by beautifying it, and to take truth into our emotional being as well as our intellect. Harmony is more beautiful.

Observation #3-It is much more difficult to teach through the stanza progression of hymns when only a screen is used.

More difficult? To be sure, the process is different—and anything that deviates from what we’re used to is more difficult until we adapt to it.

Toward solutions: This is a technology issue. If you want to teach through stanzas before singing, all you need is a few slides with more text on each. It may also help to have your own slide control so you can go back and forth between slides yourself as the teacher.

You can also print out the text of the hymn and hand out copies before the service. At our church, we always have both the slides and a handout with all the lyrics on it. This accomplishes several things:

• Speakers can easily explain or expand on lyrics ahead of the singing.
• They can just as easily do the same after the singing, to tie themes together, etc.
• Everyone has a backup if there’s a projection glitch or an error on a slide.

Observation #4-Only those familiar with the hymn can sing it.

This is true of most people, with or without hymnals. Few people can pick up printed music and, on the first try, correctly sing a song they’ve never heard before. (Unbelievers visiting a church are even less likely to have this ability.) There is some advantage to printed music, though. Those who can read music will probably pick up the tune a bit more quickly and recall it better the next time around.

In my experience, though, even with a completely new song and no music to read, people stumble around for one verse and chorus and then start to get the hang of it.

Toward solutions: The fix here is mostly the same with or without hymnals:

• Give the congregation multiple exposures to the song before they attempt to sing it together. This can take the form of vocalists singing it or a recorded version playing in the lobby.
• Look for songs or arrangements that help with learning—tunes that move in relatively predictable ways and avoid excessive complexity.
• If using screens, slide timing is important. People need to see what they’re to sing next soon enough to move smoothly into it.
• Some churches use screens that display musical notation. This must require a lot of work, but if the benefits are worth it to you and you have people to do the work, it eliminates every objection I’ve heard to using screens.

Conclusion: The Other Trade-offs

In the trade-offs analysis, it’s true that there are some negatives for screens vs. hymnals. Lyric screens may not harm musical literacy, but they don’t help. Lyric screens offer a slight disadvantage for some in learning new songs. There’s a little extra work involved if you want to be able to discuss lyrics and have people look at them together.

But there are also negatives in the hymnal approach.

• People are looking down at their books a lot rather than forward, heads up. This discourages singing out and breathing deeply.
• Hymnals wear out and are expensive (true also of AV equipment, but the same equipment can be used for teaching, so there is more utility).
• There is less opportunity for non-musicians to be involved in the worship service. With screens, you need volunteers to operate your projector(s)/screens and slides, as well as people to create the slides, track copy permissions, etc.
• People who didn’t grow up singing hymns have a heavier learning curve. They have to find the song in a thick, unfamiliar book that doesn’t have page numbers like a normal book.
• You’re more limited. You can only sing what’s in the hymnal—or, if you want to go outside it, you have to print a lot of copies of sheet music.

Of course, some additional disadvantages of screens could be listed here, too.

The bottom line is that each approach has advantages and disadvantages. I’ve done it both ways quite a bit now, and I don’t have a strong preference one way or the other. For me personally, the screen approach has been a huge blessing the last few years. Serving in a church that uses that approach has allowed me to learn so much excellent music I hadn’t known before, drawn from multiple hymnals and other sources.

Photo: Michael Maasen on Unsplash.