Where does the Trinity Show Up in our Worship Music?

This semester at Duke Divinity School I am taking Introduction to Christian Worship with Lester Ruth, who has written prolifically about Christian worship practices past and present. One of his current research emphases is the corpus of contemporary worship songs that have topped the CCLI usage rankings since they began keeping records in 1989.

In a recent article in Artistic Theologian, Dr. Ruth compares the content of these newer worship songs with those of evangelical hymns that were published in American hymnbooks between 1737 and 1969. Since there was no licensing agency to track which songs were actually sung back then, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the methodology for creating these two similar lists from different eras is quite sound.

One of Ruth's main findings is that both eras of worship music -- the older evangelical hymns as well as the newer contemporary songs -- emphasize the person of Jesus over the other persons of the Trinity. Christianity Today wrote a profile of these findings titled "Yes, Jesus Has Always Been Our Boyfriend." There is much one can say about deficiencies in today's body of popular worship music, and many people argue that the songs in American churches were better in previous eras. As the CT article title hints, some complain that there is an overly-familiar tone in today's music, making God seem too chummy. But we have never been that great at worshiping God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and our song choices show that a close and personal Jesus has consistently been more important to us. Ruth's study shows that American evangelical churches are actually being quite consistent in their song choices over several hundred years.

Ruth delves into several possible reasons for this emphasis on Jesus. He notes that the very nature of the incarnation makes Christ more tangible than the abstract notion of three-persons-in-one. Indeed, Jesus is a personal name, which makes him approachable, and his role as savior has been a cornerstone of theology in America since the beginning. I have written elsewhere about the earnestness that pervades most contemporary worship. Dr. Ruth has shown us that this tendency to project emotion toward God, through Jesus, is nothing new.