I’ve been exploring some of the very modern worship songs as an old guy 😀. But now, I’ve decided to alternate between very modern hymns, old hymns, and in-between hymns, namely the worship songs from the 60s to the 90s that feature in hymnbooks such as Mission Praise. Today it’s the turn of the very modern hymns.
Today’s song is O Church, Arise from 2005.
This is a lovely hymn, sung by Kristyn Getty from Northern Ireland. I used to travel to Northern Ireland back in the 1990s to speak at various Baptist churches. Kristyn Getty would have only been in her teens then. Yet, she’s become more famous than me 😩. Still, she’s great and I always love anything I hear from the Gettys. They often collaborate with Stuart Townend from England. He’s a year younger than me, and he’s more famous than me too 😱. I used to think that I was great, but I keep coming across people who are better than me 😀.
But seriously, I love this song. Like so many hymns, and like the New Testament, it uses miltary metaphors, but the church was never meant to make military conquests. It’s more about having the committment and readiness that a soldier might have, to spread and implement the Christian message. If we’re passive, we can easily drift into putting God out of the picture and coming under the control of the evil one.
Here’s a passage that the hymn is partly based on:
Here are some other versions of today’s hymn:
Hibernia Gospel 