“Wesleyan Hymnody” with Ted Campbell

Show Notes:

In case you were wondering, “hymnody” is an actual word and we didn’t make it up. It simply means the singing or composition of hymns, religious songs or poems of praise to God. And today’s guest has a lot to say about hymns.  

Ted Campbell is the Albert C. Outlet Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He has served as a United Methodist pastor and has taught at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, Duke Divinity School, and Wesley Theological Seminary. He is the author of many books, including Wesleyan Beliefs, The Gospel of Christian Tradition, and most recently A Core Methodist Hymnal, which is more like a devotional and less like a traditional hymnal.

Resources:

Learn more about Ted at his website, tedcampbell.com

Buy A Core Methodist Hymnal

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
And I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:03

Today, our guest is Ted Campbell. Ted is the Albert Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at SMU at the Perkins School of Theology. He knows church history. He knows Methodist history, but for the conversation today, we're honing in on his love of and his understanding of Methodist hymnody.

Chris McAlilly 00:24
Yeah, music more broadly, if you don't...

Eddie Rester 00:26
If "hymnody" isn't your word.

Chris McAlilly 00:28

If that isn't your thing, you know, everybody loves music, and Ted does, and I do, and Eddie does, and hopefully you do as well. And one of the things we're thinking about is just the power of music, what it is about music that connects us, that touches our souls, that in some ways, connects us to God. Why is that? And particularly, Ted tells us a story of his mother who suffered the disease of Alzheimer's, and he describes moments where she could no longer remember where she was or what they were doing, but she could remember the hymns of her youth, of when she was a little girl. And we're talking about that. Why is it that music and hymns and spiritual songs can connect with us that deeply? And we talk about formation, we talk about great popular music, and the reasons why we should kind of have a foot in both worlds.

Eddie Rester 01:26

One of the things I loved about the conversation is just the depth of knowledge, not just of hymns, but his understanding of the role of music in the life of the church. And so he's not one that sets up the fight between old hymns and new hymns, but he really understands the movement of the church and theology through music. And for me, I grew up, you'll hear, as we talk, the Cokesbury hymnal on Sunday night, the Methodist hymnal on Sunday morning, in college and high school retreats all sorts of contemporary music, sang "Amazing Grace to the tune of "Peacefully Easy Feeling," at some point along the way. But he just, I think, opens up the importance of music, and I hope that's what he does for you in the conversation today.

Chris McAlilly 02:18
Thanks for being with us on The Weight. [INTRO] The truth is, the world is growing more angry, more bitter, and more cynical. People don't trust one another, and we feel disconnected.

Eddie Rester 02:31

The way forward is not more tribalism. It's more curiosity that challenges what we believe, how we live, and how we treat one another. It's more conversation that inspires wisdom, healing and hope.

Chris McAlilly 02:43

So we launched The Weight podcast as a space to cultivate sacred conversations with a wide range of voices at the intersection of culture and theology, art and technology, science and mental health, and we want you to be a part of it.

Eddie Rester 02:59
Join us each week for the next conversation on The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 03:06
We're here today with Ted Campbell. Ted, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Ted Campbell 03:11
Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Chris McAlilly 03:13

I saw a post of yours recently on Facebook about a new book that you've written on hymnody, on the core Wesleyan hymns. The question I wanted to begin with, if you're good with it, is when did you realize that you loved music? Is there a time when you were a boy or a youth where the music of the faith really grabbed you or captured you?

Ted Campbell 03:38

Well, the first thing was, I had a conversion experience in my home Methodist congregation around 1970, that's when I was a sophomore in high school, and at that point, the new Christian music was Christian folk music. We were singing songs that basically had four chords. We all had guitars and didn't know how to play them, but we were sort of making sounds and stuff like that. And I thought that was cool, that was groovy, and the technical terminology that we used of that era.

Eddie Rester 04:07
Technical terminology. I like that, yeah.

Ted Campbell 04:09
But it wasn't until later that I kind of came back around to the older songs that I had been formed by when I was growing up, and sort of realized what a great treasure that was.

Eddie Rester 04:23

As you think about your work, because you are a professor, a history, church history professor, focusing on Methodism, and people may not know about the importance of that hymnody in the Methodist movement. So would you say just a little bit about that?

Ted Campbell 04:40

Yeah, it was really a formative part of the Methodist experience. And there are some myths we have to dispel. I told the story over and over and over again that Charles Wesley took bar room tunes and put religious lyrics to them. And it turns out that's a very confused kind of story. We

tunes and put religious lyrics to them. And it turns out that's a very confused kind of story. We always want to make Charles out to be the sort of counter-cultural guy, because he was doing music, and we have this image of musicians and so forth. But the truth is, John, I think, was the counter-cultural brother. John is the one who illegally went and invaded the parishes of other priests. He knew that by doing that, he's going to cut himself out from ever being, you know, a comfortably established Anglican priest. And it's Charles who was taking the conservative side in this. But nevertheless, they were using hymns that were written with very simple meters that you could sing to some of the 10 or 12 tunes that were popular in that day. And so it sort of made sense. He just had this poetic genius. He wasn't a musician. His sons were. But he was a poet, and he would write poems with 12, 18, 24, stanzas. And no congregation could sing it. They'd all fall dead before...

Eddie Rester 05:45 Dead before, yeah.

Ted Campbell 06:02

Along the away But his brother, John, sort of, as somebody says, John potted Charles's hymns. He was able to cut the snippings out and then find the four or six verses that worked the best and then made that into a collection of hymns. But that's how Methodist people were formed in the past. They were formed by singing and singing and singing things over and over and over, and it just kind of congeals in your soul.

Chris McAlilly 06:35

Yeah, I think that one of the things that I recognize it's very much the case today, I assume it was the case in the 18th century, is that people in general don't read a lot. But, you know, I think that singing is a way to get into your body and into your mind and into your soul, a set of ideas. And there are... I don't know when you set something to music, there's a way in which, I don't know. It connects somehow in a deeper way than when you're just engaging with text on a page. What? Why is that? I mean, from your research and some of the ways in which you've thought deeply about the question of music and its power to form, what have you discovered?

Ted Campbell 07:23

Well, I think the things that we say over and over and over again, repeatedly in groups, and I would say out loud, that's really the key, is that kind of stuff really forms you very, very deeply. There's something about memory. There's a kind of immediately available memory that we have, but then there's a deep, deep memory that's still there. So I begin this core Methodist Hymnal with a story about my mother. My mother suffered from Alzheimer's disease. She and all of her six brothers and sisters died with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. Their mother, my grandmother, died with Alzheimer's as the principal cause of death. And you may say, well, we don't know that. Well, yes, we do in her case, because she willed her body to science and they took it to the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and issued a posthumous reading on it that this is why she died. So it runs in the family. I'm scared of it and so forth. But my mother, when she was descending into Alzheimer's disease, she couldn't remember where we were, what we were doing, the names of friends and so forth. But you could start her out singing, you know, rescue the perishing, care for the dying. And she knew every word. I mean, it was just obviously a different kind of memory that she had. So I think that the things that we say, out loud, in groups of people, together, repeatedly, those things form us. Saying the Lord's Prayer, saying the Apostles' Creed, just saying those. But music has a special power because it's got meter. And meter means, you know, there's a certain number of syllables per line, so with what we call common meter there's an eight line, an eight syllable line, and then a six syllable line, and then an eight syllable line and a six syllable. I hope I've got that right. But in any case, you can sing any of those common meter songs, to the tune of Amazing Grace, or to the tune of the House of the Rising Sun, or to any number of common tunes.

Eddie Rester 09:41
Gilligan's Island, for those who remember, Gilligan's Island was also common meter, yeah.

Ted Campbell 09:46
Yeah, right. Oh no, I'm not gonna do that. You just count the syllables and see if it works right.

Eddie Rester 09:51

Oh, yeah, don't do that. Yeah. And I think that's fascinating, that it's a combination of repetition and saying out loud, groups, and then this meter that allows us to remember. But I think it's even something more, because I've been there. I've been in the, you know, senior adult homes, where people with Alzheimer's, dementia are there. They're brought to a service, and they will sing every verse of "Amazing Grace."

Ted Campbell 10:24 Right.

Eddie Rester 10:25

Every verse of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." It's just something deep inside them. And I wonder if it's more, in your mind. is it more than memory? Is there something else about the words that begins to form? You know, the word in Christianity we use is "catechesis," the learning and the teaching of theology. Why is music there for us in that and maybe ways that other things don't help us learn theology?

Ted Campbell 10:55

Well, you may be suggesting there's something mystical,and God about it, so then that God is inspiring this. I kind of think that's true. I really believe that there's a God element in music. But it's not... I mean, we learned the popular music of the day and so forth. In my generation, it was all by listening to the radio or buying an album or something like that, and now it's streaming audio and streaming video and so forth, but if you hear it over and over, you begin to get it. But I really do think there's something different about actively saying it, because it engages lots and lots more muscles, different parts of the brain and so forth. So that the act of saying something and hearing other people saying it and repeating it and so forth, that really forms you. In fact, I think it forms our material bodies, because it creates these synaptic connections in the brain, literally connections there, that become mental pathways, and that shapes us very deeply.

Chris McAlilly 12:07

I do think the word is connection. You know, memory is such a... Our brains are so mysterious. And of course, we're understanding more and more about them and more about the way in which music appears to activate broader neural networks than language alone, and that very much is the case if you just look at it from a, you know, kind of a neuro scientific perspective. But I was also listening the other day to... I don't know... There are... Thinking about faith as not just soul or spirit and then removed from the body, but thinking about faith as engaging us in the psychosomatic way. If that's the case, if music does, in fact, engage and activate a broader neural network, there's also a way in which music is, because it's a temporal art form.... You know, there's a beginning, middle and an end. And when you're singing, you're breathing, and you have to breathe in a particular kind of way in order to hit the notes at the right time. And when you're singing, particularly congregational singing, or singing with other people, I've learned that that syncs up our breathing, and it syncs up our breathing in such a way that our heartbeats get in rhythm, which is an incredible thought. So if one way that music activates connection is through neural networks and connecting our body and our minds, there's this other way in which congregational or communal singing connects us with other people, and I know this to be true, both from worship, but also from going to concerts. I mean, there are reasons why people are so drawn to being in a huge amphitheater or stadium with other people, singing the exact same lyrics, because you feel connected. You feel connected with other people. You feel connected with something more. And I do think there's a real power to that. Where have you experienced that, Ted? I mean, where's that been a part of your personal faith journey in a way? Are there any memories that come to mind for you?

Ted Campbell 14:21

Well, lots of them. And because I'm an old guy, and there's been a long faith journey here, but lots of experiences. I mean, as much as anybody else, I was influenced by the popular music of my age. We all sang the Beatles. I was back in London this past summer and walked across Abbey Road and got my picture walking across Abbey Road, just like everybody else of my generation has to do. But those were catchy songs. I mean, and it's been pointed out that some of the meters of the Beatles' songs are the same meters that Charles Wesley had employed. And in fact, one scholar says poets in Charles Wesley's generation were writing with very complex meters. He wrote in very simple, straightforward meters, like 8, 6, 8, 6, you know, eight syllables, six syllables, eight syllables, six syllables. And and ordinary folks could some somehow work into that. Well, that's true with my life and experience as well. Now I'll say something else about that. In my new "Core Methodist Hymnal," there is no music. These are only hymn texts, and that's very different, but that's the way the earliest Methodist hymnals actually work, and to see something written out as poetry, where you don't have to worry about, where is the next note coming and so forth, that's a different kind of experience than singing it, where you've got, like you say, the congregation. And as a singer, you're appropriately worried about, am I singing too loud? Am I singing too soft? Am I keeping precise time? I'm ADHD. We're always ahead of other people. And you can hear the ADHD people come in just ahead of the the other people in the group. But it's not good. I mean, for performance, you really need to be together. So there's a lot going on in the brain about that, but yeah, music has formed me deeply. I sometimes say about scholars, they very often have their field and then they have a secondary field. Like, for example, my friend Amy, I'm going blank on the name. I have a friend who has an expertise in popular advertising culture. She's a Christian ethicist, and she uses this expertise in advertising culture all the time to talk about ethical issues. Well, for me, music is the secondary field. My pen hoovered over the application from my college when it said, "What's your major," and it was either going to be classics or music, and when my pen hit the paper, it was classics, but otherwise I would have studied music and been happy. The problem was I was a percussionist, and nobody gets a degree in percussion. That's just dumb.

Eddie Rester 17:24 Not a lot there. Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 17:25

I do, you know, thinking about this, you kind of have, in Christian culture, you know, these different schools. And the way that I was kind of formed to think about this, is that in the 20th century, as the church was declining in America, you kind of had two moves. You had a move backwards and a move to the old, old story. Somehow, maybe we lost touch with the traditions that formed us, and we need to get back to our roots. And yeah, that goes to the Bible. It goes to Jesus, goes to doctrine. It goes to, you know, the traditions of our faith. And we need to get back to singing those old hymns, because those are the ones that made us and formed us. And then there was this other kind of trajectory that we've lost touch, not with our roots, but with our world. And so we need to get, we need to actually look and see what you know, what's hitting and connecting with the kids these days, and we need to be more relevant. And Willow Creek and, you know, Elevation Church and all these other, you know, kind of large, non denominational, kind of Pentecostal type churches have come up. How do you think about that divide? And how should we think about that?

Ted Campbell 18:41

After 40 years of teaching the history of Christianity, not just Methodist history, but Christianity from the very first century all the way through the present time, I have become convinced that there's really two different motions we have to have, and one is the reaching out, and the other is the deep formation. Now, the problem I see is that very often it's different kinds of people with different kinds of gifts that do those two things, and they tend not to appreciate each other very much. You know, the one is always saying, "Well, you got to learn the tradition," and so on and so forth, and the other is like, "But we gotta reach out," and so forth. Well, I see that through the history of Christianity, brothers named Cyril and Methodius back in the eight hundreds AD they feel called to go out to the Slavic peoples. They were Greek, and they were living in Macedonia in the north of Greece. But there were these Slavic people living north of them. Nobody had studied their languages. They go up and they start learning the language. Cyril invent a script to write the Slavic languages in. That's the Cyrillic Alphabet that they use in Russian and Ukrainian today. And they're listening to their folk songs, I'm sure, and hearing how they sing and so forth. These guys are reaching out. And the ones in my generation who were taking rock music and trying to make a kind of Christian music out of it, like at the vineyard in California and so forth, those were the pioneers that were kind of reaching out to the really to the younger people in my own baby boomer generation. The other side of it, though, is people--and this is really where I've come down--who want to form people richly in the faith, and if on Sunday morning, we're using the contemporary Christian music from Elevate and other sources like that, we need some other area, some other place in which we can form people in a Wesleyan way of being Christian. And I'm thinking maybe retreats or something like that. A weekend retreat might be a good way to introduce that kind of formation, but I think you need both of those in the end.

Eddie Rester 21:05

Chris serves here in Oxford in a church that has both types of worship, traditional worship, hymns, hymn books, and modern worship, with a lot of that modern music. And what I love about this church--I served, it before Chris--is that those types of worship aren't put at odds with each other. The leaders of, and Cody, our producer, is one of the leaders of that, they value the work and the ministry of one another. And what that allows is that there's a wide breadth of music that happens within the life of the church. And people, at times, move from one service to the other. Or at times of year, they feel like they want one, like Christmas, sometimes people want just the traditional hymns. At other times of year, they want other types of music. And I wonder, as the pendulum swings, if it's not more important to hold in tension those types of music? You know, I think the church has always leaned forward. Was it... Who wrote "Joy to the World?"

Ted Campbell 22:20 That's Isaac Watts.

Eddie Rester 22:22 Isaac Watts, yeah,

Ted Campbell 22:23
All the boys and girls, joy to the fishes... Is that the one?

Eddie Rester 22:23

You're showing your 1970s upbringing. But you know, I, vaguely ,the story may not be true, but he was complaining about the music the church was singing in his day, and his father told him, then write some.

Ted Campbell 22:40 Do something better.

Eddie Rester 22:41
And the church has always leaned forward with music.

Ted Campbell 22:46

The Wesleys were innovating, especially Charles with respect to music, and Isaac Watts ahead of them had done that. There was no place explicitly for hymn singing in the prayer book of the Church of England. At one point it had a rubric, which means something optional, that just said, "Here may an hymn or anthem be sung." And usually it was an anthem. They got the people in the choir to sing something, but congregational singing wasn't part of it. So this becomes a big deal for Methodists. I have a letter that a guy named John Fletcher wrote to John Wesley, and he said, "I've got this new idea." He says, I'm just thinking about this, you know, but what if, while people are standing in line coming to communion, we just start singing some of the hymns that we sing. And John approves of that. And you know, Methodists do this very often now. But I'm really glad to hear about the connection between your services, because I'm afraid in too many mainline Methodist and Presbyterian and other churches, you've just developed two different congregations that have very different cultures, and it's hard to form people in a particular way of being Christian, when they're kind of divided out like that. I'm concerned about the fact that Christian education, which we used to teach in all our theological schools, that's kind of declining now. It doesn't seem to be valued. Annual Conferences for the United Methodist Church are not asking, have you studied Christian education? They're asking, have you studied evangelism and so forth. But we're not building those structures for education as we did in the past.

Chris McAlilly 24:31

There's a guy named Jamie Smith who teaches up in Grand Rapids and has written a book called "Desiring the Kingdom." And it's really about, it's about this problem, the problem of, how do you form the next generation. And one of the things that he argues in the book is that we have valued too much an anthropology, an understanding of what it means to be human as just thinking. You know, we're just thinkers. And he wants to argue for a more fully developed Augustinian understanding of the human person as a lover, someone who must be formed, not only in the right ideas, but to love and desire the right things and in the right way. And one of the arguments he makes in the book is that worship really is the venue for catechesis and formation, rather than the classroom, and that music plays this extraordinary role in creating the drum beat and the rhythm and the movement of of Christian formation. And I found his work to be incredibly instructive for me, because it helps me deal with the fact that people just have less time and are giving, sometimes not two or three or four hours to the church on a particular week, but maybe they're going to give an hour, or, you know, an hour every other then write some. week. And so I think in the midst of it, you've got to make the worship experience count from a formative dimension. And I think rather than bemoan that fact that we don't have folks coming to worship and then go into Sunday school or going into some kind of a teaching environment, I think just really leaning into the power of music in worship to form people, I do think that's a good move. I do think that's happening in more non denominational Pentecostal type settings. They see the power of music, not only to reach and grab people's hearts, but to form.

Eddie Rester 26:52 To teach them.

Chris McAlilly 26:53

Yeah, and so I went to this worship experience on campus the other day with college students, and what I found to be quite extraordinary. These people would not consider that. I mean, this is very much brand new music, and it's, you know, this is a group that probably have never picked up a hymnal, I doubt. But I was blown away by the arc of the narrative from creation through the fall, through Israel into the story of Jesus as King and Lord over the reign of sin and death. And at the end, we got all the way to new creation. It was this incredible formative journey through the music before the teaching moment, and I was just... You know, I think probably both. I don't want to underestimate the power of new music to do some of that old formative work, while also, you know, I do think some of the language of the old hymns is worth not only retaining but passing on.

Eddie Rester 27:59
And even sometimes, when you're in a modern worship setting and an old hymn is brought in suddenly, suddenly, there's a swell of emotion and connection to that.

Chris McAlilly 28:09
I think thatmight be a reflection of your age.

Eddie Rester 28:11 It's my age. Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 28:13

There's a swell of emotion that Eddie feels with the old hymns. As an old man. As an older gentleman.

Eddie Rester 28:19

This is, Ted, this is what I put up with all day long, all from these folks. One of the... I want to go back to your Core Methodist Hymnal for just a second. What? How did you pick the hymns, and maybe some of the hymns that you decided, these are core for us. And maybe something that's surprising that you chose.

Ted Campbell 28:42

Well, we had a sort of scientific way to go about this. Now, first of all, these are all public domain hymns. These are hymns that have been in the public domain for a long time. So there's the most contemporary hymn in this collection is 1906, okay, everything is that or earlier, which means we don't have to hassle with music rights managements and so forth like that. But what we did was I had a research assistant, Mara Richards Bim, and Mara did a lot of work for me. She created a huge spreadsheet of, really 13 hymnals, but it came down to nine hymnals. And they were not just American, but British, and not just the sort of predecessors of The United Methodist Church, but African Methodist Episcopal Church, Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Church of the Nazarene and so forth. And we took these nine hymnals in a long period, including right up to 1989 and we asked which hymns from that period prior to 1930 have been used most frequently? And so we built this scientific kind of spreadsheet and said, okay, these are the ones. As you might guess, Charles Wesley is hands down the winner of the whole thing. I mean, of 126 hymns, I think 42 of them are from Charles Wesley. He's got a third of the whole collection there. So in a sense, it was not just our opinion. However, we noticed as we were coming down to the final selection, there were not enough hymns written by women, and in particular the great Methodist hymn writer Francis Jane nee Crosby Van Alstyne. How do you like that? Known as Fanny...

Eddie Rester 30:36 Fanny.

Ted Campbell 30:36

Crosby. But the problem, you know, one of the problems, is internationally that word F-A-N-N-Y, look it up in the urban dictionary. In Britain, it does not mean what it means. here in the United States. It's considered absolutely trash, filthy word, and British Methodists can hardly--old fashion ones--can hardly pronounce Fanny Crosby without blushing or something like that. So anyway, we've not included any of hers, and she's in the time frame we were looking at. So we included three or four of her hymns. And then we realized we'd left out this fantastic Methodist hymn writer, Charles Albert Tindley of Philadelphia. Charles Albert Tindley was the pastor of a multi-racial congregation around the early 20th century. And he wrote both hymn texts and music. And we wanted to include some of his stuff. I mean, he wrote a wide range of stuff, a lot of it about sanctification. You know, nothing between myself and my Savior. You know, that's what I would call entire sanctification, where there's nothing between you and God. And we added some more to that. So that's how we made that decision. But this is really for formation. This is not for singing in church. This is a devotional guide. This is for using in Sunday school classes. I'm actually building projection slides of the whole hymnal so you can take it in your Sunday school class and project the words on the screen and so forth. That's how we did it. I want to come back around to something that Chris said about the book you've been reading by someone from Michigan. What was the...

Chris McAlilly 32:18
Yeah, that's James K.A. Smith, and the book is called "Desiring the Kingdom."

Ted Campbell 32:23

"You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength." The Great Commandment is a command not just to know about something, but to love about it and to love it. And I have challenged fellow Wesleyan scholars, we get into deep debates about the doctrine of entire sanctification. Now, John and Charles Wesley were interested in the doctrine of entire sanctification, but there was something they were far more interested in than the doctrine of entire sanctification, and that was entire sanctification. You can know all about entire sanctification, but what they wanted was holiness. That was the operative. It was to love God and love one's neighbor.

Chris McAlilly 33:10

So for folks who may not know what that means, I wonder if you could go back and just kind of lay out just the keystrokes of how Wesleyans would understand sanctification, and then kind of this last move towards entire sanctification. And maybe also just beware that you might have some skeptics out there, and you may need to...

Eddie Rester 33:38
As there were skeptics of Charles and John.

Chris McAlilly 33:40 Yeah.

Ted Campbell 33:40

That's right. Well, I love skeptics, so come along and, you know, come back with us on this. Yeah, you know, give us some of your own thoughts. One of the ways the hymnals function was they had an outline. And it starts typically, with God, with Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit. We don't have many hymns on the Holy Spirit. One Catholic theologian has written about how we're always forgetting the Holy Spirit. But then we go on to talk about the way of salvation. So there's a section of hymns on what I call preparing grace, God's grace coming before our believing in Christ and preparing us. And then there's a section on justifying grace, that's God's grace forgiving our sins based on our trust, our faith in Christ. And then there's this category of sanctification, which is kind of the living room of the Christian faith. It's the growing in grace, growing in faith, and it deals with all kinds of topics, like trials of the soul when you're frankly, I think a lot of it's describing what today we would diagnose as depression, where you're down, you're... It doesn't look like you have hope and so forth. And there are hymns that are designed to sort of push you on and be the light beyond the problems that you may be facing. So think that's part of it, was that it gave you a framework. Now today, even in a lot of traditional services, one of the issues is we don't see the hymnals with that outline shape. We just project the words up on the screen, and that means you get the words of the hymn, but you don't see the place where they fit. And I think it's going to take someone interpreting that to maybe help us with it. But I very much resonate with your author's idea that it's not just about learning a set of facts. It's about shaping the soul so that we love God, we love our neighbor. That's what we're headed for. And

Eddie Rester 35:49

Wesley really, you know, people came after him when he talked about Christian perfection, entire sanctification, because people thought he was talking about just absolute perfection, sinless perfection. And he was very clear that it was--and you'll have the right words for us. But it was this ability to be motivated by nothing but the love of Jesus Christ, the ability to love God and love others completely. And that doesn't mean that you wouldn't sin or wouldn't make mistakes along, but it's that underlying rhythm of life was the love of Jesus Christ.

Ted Campbell 36:18

I think that's right. The idea is to become the point where we desire God. We desire what God desires, and that's only for the good of God's people, of God's creatures and so forth. And we frame our lives, eventually, around that sense of love of God, love of neighbor, and that's how we try to grow in the faith. But one of the things they acknowledged was the tough points along the way. Early Methodist people would talk about their trials, their tribulations. It's depressing stuff, but Methodists created a space in which you could say that in a religious gathering, and it was okay, because they're going to say, "We're all there, okay. We're all facing these issues and problems."

Eddie Rester 37:15 I love... Oh go ahead.

Ted Campbell 37:17 ... that full love for God.

Eddie Rester 37:20

I love that you've created this core Methodist hymnal as a devotional book. One of the things, when you talked about earlier, that it doesn't have music in it. I was in seminary before I realized that the first Methodist hymnals up until like 1939...

Ted Campbell 37:36 Oh, okay...

Eddie Rester 37:39
Maybe it's the one of the hymnals, but it was right around that era, before they ever put music to them. I know the Cokesbury...

Ted Campbell 37:45
It was extremely expensive to print music. So Methodist hymnals in the past were tiny, little book. You had to have spectacles.

Eddie Rester 37:53 You couldn't read it, yeah.

Ted Campbell 37:54 But they were cheap.

Eddie Rester 37:55
And they crammed so many hymns in them.

Ted Campbell 37:58 That's right.

Eddie Rester 37:58

And what I would ask you, is that, if you were to say to someone, as we've been talking about sanctification and growth, and this, you know, really meditating on the the words of the hymns, for you, is there one of those hymns that you would say, this is the one, or these are the two that are worth your time to really allow them in, to do their work, to really meditate on the message that they're speaking.

Ted Campbell 38:27

The last few days, I've been thinking about Charles Wesley's hymn text called "Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee." It's a wonderful text about coming out of a kind of depression, coming out of a kind of sense of lostness and just asking for help from God. But I was especially thinking about it because 40 years ago, when I started my teaching ministers, teaching a course at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and I had a brilliant young African American guy who was just all into music. He created a gospel choir there and got Catholic priest candidates from the Pontifical Josephine to come down and sing in his gospel choir. And one night, I said, "Todd, give us a song, teach us a song." And he said, I'm going to teach you how to sing Charles Wesley in a style that he called singing a Dr. Watts hymn. And that really meant the way Methodist sang before they could read. Okay, there's an old joke, you know, that a Baptist is a Methodist... A Methodist is a Baptist who's learned how to read. I think that's how the joke goes. But there was a time when most Methodists couldn't read. They couldn't use hymnals, so they had someone called a precentor, a presinger, who would say out the words, "Father, I stretch my hands unto thee," and and then they're going to sing ot back with the precentor. It's an amazing sound, because the way they did it in African American churches was a very slow, very spiritual way of singing. And I said to Todd, as I was driving through Mississippi the other day, I was on Facebook or Facebook Messenger with him, and I said, "Todd, I need a recording of you singing that." This was like on a Friday or Saturday, Sunday morning. He got someone to record his congregation in Cincinnati singing that. So I've got this, and I just posted it to my Facebook page last night, but it got this great video of him teaching that congregation. That's a wonderful sound. That's just a different kind of rhythm and a different kind of... It sort of slows you down and so forth. So that's the one I've been thinking about, "Father, I stretch my hands unto thee. No other help I know. If thou withdraw thyself from me, ah, whither shall I go?"

Eddie Rester 41:09

Are there? Is there a hymn in there that you would say surprised you that y'all included it? Maybe something that is not, you know, on the beaten path, something that's very much off the beaten path.

Ted Campbell 41:21

You know, the one that I'm going to find it here, it's going to take me a second to find it. The one that really surprised me, that was very popular in the 1800s was a hymn called "Prayer Is the Soul's Sincere Desire." It's number 96 in this particular collection of mine. It's by a poet named James Montgomery, written in 1818, and I realized when I started reading it carefully, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, unuttered or unexpressed, the motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breast. Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try. Prayer, the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on high." It's, what he's saying, basically, is in our moments of grief and trial and even in our moments of joy, that's prayer, whether you call it prayer or not. It's a very expansive view of what prayer is. And I I just always thought that's some old hymn that my grandmother's saying. But when I began reading it, I began realizing this guy had an expansive view of the scope of what prayer means.

Chris McAlilly 42:46
I wonder if you could tell us about maybe a hymn or a song. You mentioned in a post about your mother, and maybe we could just come back to her, and what you said was that she could, when she could no longer remember where she was or what we were doing, or even the names of her closest friends, she could still remember all the words of the hymns

Ted Campbell 43:07

And gospel music was very popular, and these folks despised gospel music. I mean, they allowed three or four songs in it. But my parents grew up on the gospel songs that they put in the Cokesbury hymnal in 1939. So what the Southern Methodists did was, that snob hymnal came out in 1935 and they realized they had four years to do something different, so they put out the Cokesbury Hymnal in 1938, the year before Northern and Southern Methodists united. And it became the kind of favored folk hymnal and all those old hymns. "There's a church in the valley by the wild wood," all those... She could do all the words of the songs "I Need Thee Every Hour," "Most Precious Lord," and so forth. That was one of the ones that she could sing, but really any of the hymns that were part of what we used to call the Cokesbury Hymnal. That was the little brown hymnal that Southern Methodists published in response to this is kind of hymn wars. In 1935, the Northern Methodists and Southern Methodists together produced a new hymnal, but it was, as the grandson of one of the editors of it told me, it was a musical snob hymnal. They really thought Methodists ought to be singing Beethoven and Bach and Mozart and stuff like that.

Chris McAlilly 44:39 "Oh come, come, come..."

Ted Campbell 44:39
Yes, exactly that. "Oh, come, come, come." Yes.

Eddie Rester 44:43
We use that hymnal on Sunday nights in my home church growing up.

Ted Campbell 44:46

Yes, that's right, it was the Sunday night hymnal. Sunday morning, we were Metho-Catholic. Sunday evening, we were Metho-costals and singing with the Cokesbury Hymnal. Those are the kind of songs that really formed my mom in the faith, and they were the contemporary Christian hymns of her time.

Eddie Rester 45:02 Right.

Ted Campbell 45:02 They really were...

Chris McAlilly 45:03 Yeah, maybe...

Ted Campbell 45:04
They were controversial. A lot of people said, "Nah, we don't sing that kind of stuff in church," you know...

Chris McAlilly 45:08 And we don't...

Ted Campbell 45:09
That's why the musical snob people didn't like it.

Chris McAlilly 45:11
Yeah, and so this is, you know, thinking about this, that there's a particular... I think of that as, like the old folks loved that hymnal.

Ted Campbell 45:20 Yep, yeah.

Chris McAlilly 45:20

But there was a time where that was the new hymnal, you know, and so, you know, I think about, I connect, I associate that with my grandparents, and particularly my grandmother, who would play the piano and she'd play out of that old hymnal, and we'd all stand around and we would sing.

Ted Campbell 45:36 Yep.

Chris McAlilly 45:37

And, you know, I think maybe to tie this off. You know, hymnals come and hymnals go. Songs come and they go. And there's some that stay. There are some that transcend their cultural moment. They become part of the fabric of the faith through the generations: "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," or "Amazing Grace,"

Ted Campbell 45:59 That's one of them.

Chris McAlilly 46:00

Yeah, they kind of transcend their moment. And so maybe, you know, for me, I guess what I'm... Maybe what I'll take away from this conversation is to try hard not... To try to stay open to the way in which God's Spirit is perhaps inspiring and writing new music for a new generation. And I have to, as I, you know, kind of cross middle age and begin to, you know, think back to, maybe more sentimentally or nostalgically for some of those early memories, when the Lord really captured my heart through song. And, you know, my kids are going to come up with a different experience of music than I did, and that's okay. And also, those songs that really did, that God worked through to form my faith, you know, those are worthy songs to pass on. It's not an either-or.

Eddie Rester 47:02 Right.

Chris McAlilly 47:03

I guess that's where, well, I'll land today. You've helped me tremendously, Ted in getting to that kind of place. Not an either-or, but it's a both-and, and an openness to the work of God's Spirit in every generation. And that can transcend even the loss of memory, and can draw together and connect the dots for us. So I'm grateful, Ted. Thank you so much for your passion and work. It comes through every time I talk with you.

Ted Campbell 47:35 Thank you.

Chris McAlilly 47:35
So grateful. So grateful for your work and for this conversation.

Eddie Rester 47:39
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Chris McAlilly 47:48

If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]