UN-LEARNING CHURCH

    When I was in college I actually took a semester of voice lessons. I didn't expect to learn so much!  Getting the “feel” of supporting one’s voice from beneath the lungs and sending the vibrations of the vocal folds not out the neck or mouth, but sending the sound through the face via supportive core muscles. I did sit ups, but not for singing.  I already “knew” how to sing.  Or did I?

    For most of the twenty-plus years I had been singing—singing along with Mitch (I am really that old), with Sheriff John (a west coast children’s show), with the Kingston Trio, with the Beach boys, with Peter, Paul, and Mary, with the Platters, the Drifters, Martha and the Vandellas, Diana Ross and the Supremes.  With the help of crystal radio or transistor I sang along with the many invading British bands of the 60’s, then with John Denver, James Taylor, the Eagles, America, Bread, and The Carpenters.  Hmmm…I even sang along with the show tunes from Oklahoma, South Pacific, Music Man Carousel, Westside Story, then came the fetching lyrics from The Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, Camelot, and Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.  I would even sing along with Barry Manilow, with the Captain & Tennille, and Barbara Streisand (whose passion I loved but whose politics, hmmm...she should just sing).  I sang along with all of it unconsciously and without much discrimination.  I "knew" how to sing.

    In church I “knew” how to sing too.  I sang in a mixed octet called “The Company” (well, it sounded cool back in ’72).  I sang the great hymns of the church, revival hymns, and the new worship music of Cam Floria, Ralph Carmichael, and the Maranatha music emerging from the charismatic ministry of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California.

    But, back to the voice lessons in my twentieth year: my voice teacher said I needed to relax some “interfering muscles.”  I “knew” how to sing, but I was producing the sounds in “a most difficult way,” as she gently put it.  There began a long semester that was short on learning to make sounds and long on unlearning the difficult ways I was producing them.  (In fact, the sounds I was required to make for the sake of proper relaxation and strengthening seemed silly at first—counterintuitive.  I spent most of those fifteen weeks unlearning what I had spent most of my conscious singing life learning to do unconsciously and in a “most difficult way.” 

    Many of us who have grown up in church culture “know” how to “do” church, how to work in the church; we know what’s important, and we know how to get the important things done.  And if we have “done church” long enough in a certain way, those muscles for doing church are very, very strong.  These muscles might be producing church, but producing church in a “most difficult way,” as the gentle voice teacher put it.  Oh, there's so much more to unpack about the "most difficult way" people want to do church in the present culture of spiritual yearning but also institutional wariness.

    For now, just this: every church has muscle and muscles.  Learning to use the appropriate ones while relaxing the others is like kicking a habit you never knew you had.  Sometimes learning begins with un-learning, before we really start to sing.

                    --Larry