by J. Senja Morgan- Director of Music Ministries
Last month, our daughter Fiona got to experience several days of the "Asbury Outpouring" (AKA "Asbury Revival") at Asbury University in Wilmore KY. She has never been the "charismatic type" but she told me: "Mom, I can't explain it. I just felt called to go. And there was a thick presence of God there."
She graduated from Asbury U in 2019 and took a full-time journalism job not far from there about a year ago. So, she was close by and went back to the revival several times. Each time she went she was drawn closer to God through the worship.
I asked her how the music was being organized. Fiona said: it just happened spontaneously. Nobody used hymnals, and there were no projection screens. No lyrics on paper. No choir, no worship team. Sometimes someone would lead singing from the front, play guitar, or use the box drum you sit on (Cajon).
A song could start out of the congregation and people would sing without instruments. A lot of the students knew the praise songs or familiar hymns, and if you didn't you could pray, hum or listen until one came along that you knew. Or it would be repeated and you'd learn it. Most of the time it just happened. Grassroots worship music!
The beauty of familiar hymns and praise songs with repetitive refrains is their accessibility to all worshippers. Some of the earliest American worship songs came from rural churches where there weren't many, if any instruments, no hymnals, and in remote areas where not everybody could read even if they had music.
This Lent we'll be singing the hymn What Wondrous Love is This, which comes from Appalachia and dates to the early 1800s. People learned hymns by singing them again and again. So this hymn repeats ”What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul, what wondrous love is this, O my soul!"
The tune is plaintive and haunting in a minor key. It uses only six notes and is similar to an ancient chant melody. And yet the final verse is joyful and triumphant, even though it remains in the paradoxical minor key: ”And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on.”
Author Richard Niell Donovan writes this about that last verse:
We don’t like to think about death, but death is a fact of life. This hymn reminds us that Christ frees us from death––makes it possible for death to be more the opening than the closing of a door. It looks forward to an eternity filled with song––joyful song. On earth, some of us have good singing voices and others don’t. But in heaven, every voice will ring loud and true in honor of the God who blesses us and gives us great joy.
Below is a link to a version of this hymn that is perhaps closest to how it might have first sounded in Appalachia!
Also listed below is a link to a brief documentary about the "Asbury Outpouring," which I believe reflects what Fiona described to me. While there are plenty of "naysayers" out there who don't think it's real, I trust my daughter. It is certainly a real experience for her, and the more she has shared about it with me, the more revived I feel!