Voices: Thank God for the women who sing

This article is part of “Some truth and unity for Texas Baptists” series.

It is a Wednesday night in 1991, and we are sitting on the floor.

Our youth group meets in an old white clapboard building that had been a hundred things before it was ours.

We have no musician among us. No keyboard. No guitar. We don’t even have a hand drum. So, on these nights I ask the students to do it themselves.

I turn the lights down, not because I’m overly spiritual, but because the youth guy before me had painted every wall UCLA yellow and blue. Someone prays a sentence of thanks. Someone reads a psalm that matters to them. And if anyone knows enough of the words to get us through, they are welcome to start a song.

Lots of one-sentence prayers of gratitude are lifted. A couple of psalms are read, but no one jumps in to sing.

I try to model what I have in mind by leading us in “Amazing Grace.” It is one of the worst renditions in the history of the church, but I know the words.

Others pray. Another psalm is offered up.

Then a senior named Beth James finds her courage. She is not a trained singer. She simply loves God, and on this night, she opens her mouth and begins, alone, the simple chorus “I Love You Lord.”

Her brave, unaccompanied voice lifts in worship, and in a moment the whole room has joined her. Her courage led us all to affirm we do indeed love Jesus. (It was 1991. Don’t you judge our song choice.)

You may think I am beginning this conversation on common ground. I hope so. Most of us have been greatly blessed by women leading us in worship through instrument, lyric, and voice.

A once-contested gift

It is worth remembering this gift was once contested among our own people. In the late 1600s, the Particular Baptist pastor Benjamin Keach fought to bring congregational singing into Baptist worship, and he met fierce resistance.

Some of his fellow Baptists were narrow men who guarded a single line in 1 Corinthians 14 and passed over the rest, including 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul already assumes women praying and prophesying aloud in the gathered church.

Among their objections was the worry that congregational singing would put women’s voices in the assembly, where they insisted women must keep silent.

Keach answered them. He held the whole church was meant to lift its voice, women included, and to silence them would rob the body of Christ of a gift God had given it.

He won the argument. Baptists have been singing ever since, our daughters and sisters, wives and mothers with us.

Scripture on songs

As always, we should turn to Scripture.

Paul tells the church at Colossae to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly, “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Colossians 3:16). Don’t miss this. The teaching of the church happens when we sing.

Paul tells the Ephesians the same thing.

Song is not the warm-up before the teaching. Song is teaching. It is the word of Christ carried into the gathered assembly on a melody, instructing the whole body, men and women together, and Paul commands it of everyone. He attaches no condition of sex to it at all.

Who has done that teaching across the whole of Christian history?

We have the songs of David and the sons of Korah, of course. But we also know Miriam took up her timbrel at the sea and led God’s rescued people in song before they had walked a mile into freedom. We find Deborah’s song in the book of Judges.

And the first song of the new covenant is also a woman’s. When Mary learns what God is doing in her, she answers with the Magnificat, a soaring exposition of mercy, justice, and the lifting of the lowly, drawn straight from Hannah and the prophets (Luke 1). The church has sung Mary’s theology for two thousand years. Whoever leads it, the words the congregation learns are hers.

Songs of the church

From the women’s choirs of ancient Syria to the singers of Byzantium, the church has long lifted women’s voices in its worship. And in our own stream, the English Baptist Anne Steele filled our hymnals through the 18th century.

A hundred years later, Fanny Crosby, blind nearly all her life, gave us more than 8,000 songs and is remembered as the mother of modern congregational singing in America.

Charlotte Elliott, an invalid who doubted her own usefulness to God, wrote “Just As I Am,” the hymn Billy Graham used to close almost every crusade, because he believed it made the strongest possible case for the call of Christ.

Even though Paul plainly says singing in the gathered assembly is teaching, every Texas Baptist I have ever known supports women singing, and we celebrate them singing solos about the deepest matters of Scripture and faith in the heart of our worship each Sunday.

We might take them for granted, but the worship services in our churches each week are such a beautiful picture of the body of Christ working together to accomplish God’s purposes. Men and women in various combinations take turns singing the great truths of Scripture to and with a gathered assembly of men and women. This pattern binds Christians together across the ages and cultures and is the most natural outflow of Paul’s instructions in Colossians.

I for one am so very thankful for all women have encouraged and taught me through the songs they have written and sung across my many years in Texas Baptist worship services, and I can’t wait to experience what they will help me to know more deeply this coming Sunday.

Brent Gentzel gives leadership to First Baptist Church in Kaufman. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.