Retune My Heart to Sing Thy Grace: How Old Hymn Texts Found a New Home among Evangelicals (original) (raw)

2014

Abstract

At the height of the Praise & Worship movement,1 a strange thing happened: young Evangelicals started singing hymns. This paper traces the development of the "retuned" hymn movement, a genre of congregational song that combines historic hymn texts with a folk rock music style. It grew primarily among young people of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), and is arguably the place of deepest interaction between traditional hymnody and contemporary worship genres in recent years.A Fertile FieldIn the late 1990s, the "worship wars" in the Evangelical wing of the church were mostly over and the clear winner was Praise and Worship (P&W).2 In many Evangelical congregations, the occasional hymn was sung as a concession to the older generation, and some churches held out for some sort of compromise with "blended" worship services. But by and large contemporary worship music ruled the day. Darlene Zschech's "Shout to the Lord" had rocketed to th...

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