The other day, somebody posted the above hymn on the Facebook group “I’m Fed Up With Bad Church Music”. The posting prompted considerable debate about whether it was, in fact, a bad hymn. My own initial reaction was, “Wow; that’s bad!” My second reaction was, “Why am I so sure that this is bad?”
After all, it isn’t bad in the ways that hymns are usually bad. It has a point. It doesn’t wander from that point. It uses consistent rhythm, rhyme, and meter. Usually, that’s a recipe for a hymn that is at least mediocre. However, I don’t feel like this one even makes it over the bar of mediocrity. In fact, the word it brought to mind was “banal”, which the dictionary tells us means, “commonplace, trite”. It’s simply too inelegant to work well as a hymn. In particular, I think the problems are: Continue reading