My Ebenezer

I have a love/hate relationship with some of the songs we sing at church. Many of them are older hymns, with Ye Olde English lyrics that barely make sense to me as a native English speaker, and I’m certain mean nothing to the majority of the congregation that speak English as a second language. Maybe they’re like me and google words they don’t understand or maybe they aren’t “word people” and blissfully skim over them in their enthusiastic singing. Meanwhile I’m parsing and studying and getting annoyed by shouldsts and blests in our songs and wondering why no one else seems to think this is a problem. If you are trying to teach people about Jesus and God’s love for us, why wouldn’t you use language that the people listening would understand?

Lest you think I’m being picky, even the classic How Great Thou Art isn’t easily understood by someone from a different language background. If I’m translating word for word, Art = paintings so does the woman next to me think we’re singing about God’s great museum?

My trigger word to this issue was good old ebenezer from Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, written in the 1700s. One of our first weekends at church in Abu Dhabi they sang this song and when we got to the line Here I raise my Ebenezer my gut reaction was “What the hell am I singing here? (yes, even the hell part) Who knows what that means?!” So as the congregation went on singing their thines and thous I googled it and figured out that it’s a memorial stone that the Israelites used to remind them how God had acted to save them in the past. Great concept, terrible execution. In the 1700s Robert Robinson’s audience probably understood his symbolism when they sang “raise my Ebenezer,” but I can guarantee that most of the people in church today don’t. That line conjures up images of Scrooge McDuck being hoisted in the air (if you’ve ever seen Mickey’s Christmas Carol, you’re right there with me, aren’t you?) and distracts from the message of the song. And at our current church, they probably don’t have that cultural reference; it’s just a word to gloss over as they filter known words from unknown and infer meaning from the leftover phrases that make sense.

I’m about 10 seconds away from dropping a note in the offering plate and suggesting that someone be conscious of our second language members when choosing songs. Instead of:

Here I raise my Ebenezer,
Hither by Thy help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

Hither by thy help I’ve come? I think that means we’ve gotten here because of God’s help. But by the time I mentally got there, the congregation would already be onto the 3rd verse . . . Instead of requiring mental gymnastics to come up with the meaning, we could sing something like:

My Savior
He can move the mountains
My God is Mighty to save
He is Mighty to save

I’m sure there are even better substitutes, but I quickly found this one that is in easily understood English and expresses the sentiment that God is our help and saves us in times of trouble. But for some unknown reason we keep singing about ebenezers, hasts, and hithers. Maybe I’m more sensitive to it because I’ve witnessed the struggles of an English speaker trying to understand the nuances of colloquial Arabic?

Sigh. Music is always the problem child in a church.