If you go to a church service today, and you sit down in the sanctuary, how do you see with a hymnal sitting in the pew? How many churches even have pews anymore? Or sing hymns? What’s a pew? What’s a hymn?
A pew is the scantily padded wooden bench in the sanctuary of a church. Thereon the congregants sit during the entirety of the church service, standing occasionally for the reading of the Word (Bible) or for other holy matters, like the singing of hymns. Pews are stacked in rows from the front of the church to the back.
Hymns are Christian songs, written by Christians, for the church. They contain a lot of thees and thous and wither thou goests.
Part of praise and worship is singing hymns, or singing more modern songs, for those more contemporary services.
These pews in church stretch from aisle to aisle, one long line of bench, no separation between congregants when seated for the church service.
Now, pews are better than courtroom seats—at least pews have pads. If you’ve been to jury duty recently, likely you sat on a wooden bench with no padding, crammed in, shoulder to shoulder, with 30 to 60 of your new best friends, to listen to a couple lawyers ask you the occasional uncomfortable question. You won’t see many churches as packed as courtrooms during jury service.
The ones that are packed are typically Megachurches, and the rest of those trying to be hip, and they will likely have stadium seating. They might even have cupholders, though there will be no sweaty hot dog vendor going up and down the aisle, praise God.
But back to the older churches: there will be a holder built into the back of each pew that is in front of you, that holds bibles, envelopes for offering, and hymnals.
Hymnals are where we get hymns. Hymns are old-timey choral songs. Usually with too many stanzas. Though there are some good ones—see “Amazing Grace”—the music is severely out of date. Maybe that’s part of the appeal. But it goes without saying that hymns these days are not drawing in the younger crowd.
But that is not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is that when a hymn is to be sung in service, no one looks at the hymn in the hymnal anymore. If no one looks at the hymnal anymore, how do they know the words of the hymn? Screens! Big fat TV screens mounted at the front of the sanctuary.
But, and here’s the big but, how do we know what the song sounds like? We look at the hymnal which has the musical notes and timing of the song!
A couple problems with this. Can the average congregant read music? Answer: no. So then how do we sing together a hymn which (a) we don’t know how it sounds or how it goes, and (b) we can’t read the music that would tell us how the song sounds?
This is one of God’s great mysteries. Because, with help from the choir—which you absolutely need if you sing hymns—we are all able to mouth out the words until we get something close to unison in how we sing the song.
If you’ve gone to see a live show of a band you really like, you know the songs. Even if you can’t sing, collectively, the audience there, assuming they also know the songs, you can all sing back the words in a somewhat cohesive sound. We see it all the time. Or at a baseball game when we sing Sweet Caroline, or some other silly rallying song. We all are able get into a relative pitch that makes it sound not half-bad.
This to me is one of those great mysteries, that humans can all sing a song, having never heard it before, and after a verse or two of it, can all start humming along at the same sound frequency. It really is quite something.
To round this out, I could do without church hymns. They are strangely lyrical songs, using words you had no idea existed, and frankly do not exist anymore except in hymn form. That’s just my new-age silly church opinion, though.
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