Description: I grew up singing hymns in my father’s small, Reformed Congregational church. My mother was the church accompanist. She carried a knowledge of and a sensitivity towards the hymns we sang in church, which in part stemmed from her own solo piano arrangements of the same hymns. Most of my indoor childhood life was spent around the piano(s) in our living room. My earliest memories are of being under the piano, where I would study the details of the massive soundboard, trying to catch the patterns of the sustain pedal while my mum worked out her hymn arrangements. When I got a bit older I would sit on the piano bench with my mum, while my family sang an after dinner hymn. I was literally surrounded by hymns, and it's almost like I didn't really have a choice in the matter—that I was bound to do something with these old songs at some point. Over the years I’ve realised that the extremely frustrating thing with sappy Contemporary Christian Music culture or stately hymns culture, is that it subconsciously coerces people into thinking Christianity has a certain personality. That if you aren’t intellectual (hymns) or emotional (choruses) in your faith then you’re just not being godly and you need to get it together. It’s something that wouldn’t ever be vocalised by church leaders, but it’s a very subtly suffocating part of church culture. In fact, it’s part of every culture. It’s the re-ordering of one’s identity from firstly being in Christ to firstly being in America (or, in Calvinism, the black church, suburbia or whatever). When I began spending significant amounts of time with goofy and nerdy and brilliant and dumb and Australian and Arab and old and young Christians, I just couldn’t accept the current two-party stately/sappy church music system anymore. I had to do something. Fortunately, God’s grace spared me from rejecting church music wholesale and allowed me, in a very challenging yet supportive community, to work out my ideas—my goal of more honestly and more personally responding to the texts I grew up with. This is what I’m trying to do with JG HYMNS.
Hymns: