Every Tribe, Every Tongue, Every Nation

By Ken E. Read

Jesus is Lord. Our God reigns over all the earth. We are to make his glory known among the nations, to go into all the world making disciples. The Bible describes people from every nation (political group), tribe (regional subculture), people (ethnicity), and tongue (language and dialect) standing before the Lamb (see Revelation 7:9).

Today, those nations, tribes, people, and tongues may be very different, though made from “one blood.” But one day all the things that divide will fall into profound irrelevance when every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The National Missionary Convention is devoted to both the Great Commission (to go and tell) and the Great Commandment (to love one another). Likewise, the World Music Worship Ensemble at Cincinnati (Ohio) Christian University is committed to proclaiming the truth in love. We try to learn, appreciate, and assimilate the music of every major people group in the world so that we can intercede for them as we worship the Lord Jesus Christ in their musical heart language. We affirm that God left Heaven to join us in our world, to show us the depths of his own scandalous love, and to redeem every culture to himself.

We can learn about another culture by studying its language. But perhaps the best way to really understand another culture is to learn its music. And as we immerse ourselves into others” musical heart language, I think we can begin to pray for them with more fervency and understanding. As we worship our God in their cultural styles, we pray they will join in the worship. The wise missionary understands that the people don”t need to sing our choruses or our hymns in order to find Jesus.

MUSICS OF THE WORLD

NMC President Marsha Relyea Miles and her planning team wanted to highlight a different region of the world in each main session. They began inquiring whether a musical team in the Cincinnati area could provide ethnic music from all over the world. The World Music Worship Ensemble was a team with high ideals but not much opportunity to lead. Early in the planning process for the convention, we were brought together by the sovereign hand of God.

And so our ensemble set about the task of researching, writing, and assimilating the various musics of the world for the convention. It was a formidable task to learn all that music, much of it very foreign to us, and yet make it accessible enough for an American crowd to be able to sing along.

Of course, worship planners face a challenge any time a large group gets together. Young people and old people know and love different songs and styles. And that”s all within the subculture of American Evangelical Christianity. How much more of a challenge to involve everyone from around the world!

Specifically, how could we arrange and balance the songs so that they were familiar and singable for American worshipers, and yet authentic for people from other lands? This was our solution: use a mix of presentation songs to set the style, and then adapt familiar choruses and hymns to the general feel and style of other places.

Programming worship sets in a European style was easy””we used a Celtic sound.¹ And the African and Latin American (or Caribbean) arrangements weren”t too difficult,² because the music is fairly common in the United States. But the Middle Eastern,³ and especially Asian⁴ and the South Pacific styles were big challenges, because those musical languages are so different. As God ordained it, our team was quite diverse and very talented, and we organically discovered solutions as a team. (See the footnotes if you are interested in more details of our worship sets.)

We had one more plan to unify the convention: we wrote a theme song that could be set in several different ways. The song needed to be simple enough to grasp it the first time, and yet with enough lyrical depth to sustain six presentations. We arranged the song in five different keys and set it six different ways, depending on the context.⁵

DAYS OF REJOICING

What were the results? It”s hard to know, because Christian people tend to be polite and not complain to strangers. Nonetheless, we heard many positive comments, at least about the efforts of our project. I have received several encouraging e-mails and several requests for music.⁶ Some people commented that we not only bridged the gap between young and old, but also the gap between cultures.

We heard from at least three people the prediction that this will be the measurement they will use for future conventions. They will say, “Remember when we focused on those different people groups, even with the music? That was a great convention!”

When we all get to Heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be! When we all see Jesus, whose style of music shall we sing? (My apologies to Eliza Hewitt for twisting her fine lyrics.) The question need not be belabored long to realize that no culture “wins” in Heaven. Music in Heaven will be . . . heavenly. And each of us will sing in our own heart language, with no need for compromise.

So how do we best prepare for Heaven”s music? When we”ve been there ten thousand years, we will all still be singing””people from every tribe, language, people, and nation, each in a heart language we do not yet know. In this post-Babel, pre-glory era, we prepare for glory by letting each individual sing in his or her own heart language to the Lord.

And so we shall be with the Lord forever. Amen.

________

¹We had a couple of original tunes, plus two of our members had a great arrangement of “Be Thou My Vision,” which is of Irish origin.

²We set up the Africa arrangement with a song that my daughter had learned in South Africa, and then built familiar songs on a strong percussion base. One of our team members who grew up in Africa helped teach us drumming patterns. Our team also has two Brazilians on it, and they contributed the samba and salsa arrangements of familiar songs. Then we borrowed from a medley of Jamaican songs that had already been arranged and recorded.

³We used a very familiar chorus (“I Could Sing of Your Love Forever”) but set it to a modified scale in order to give it a Middle Eastern flavor. One member suggested we add a musical dance section (similar to Fiddler on the Roof). And another member had written a beautiful song for an Old Testament class project.

⁴Happily, one of our members has studied sitar, and he contributed a great amount to the authenticity of the sound. Otherwise, we used more reflective songs that could be undergirded by a drone.

⁵The song “Compelled” and all of our other original songs can be downloaded for free from the Web site www.cbyondmusic.org. If you can”t find them there (we have had problems with the site lately), feel free to write to me at [email protected] and I will be happy to e-mail chord charts, music, or recordings to you.

⁶See the e-mail and Web addresses in the previous footnote. Of course, we can only share the music to which we own the copyright.

Ken Read is professor of music and worship at Cincinnati (Ohio) Christian University.