Bonding Through Singing: Try a Sunday With the Choir This Summer!

What do a Welsh football (soccer) game and a typical American church service have in common? Depending on how many levels deep one looks, perhaps quite a lot. But for our purposes in this article, the correct answer is ... corporate singing! I have been told of––and I've seen on video––stadiums full of Welshmen singing out their national anthem or even Cwm Rhondda (Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah) at an athletic event. Likewise, at an American baseball game, one is often invited to sing along to a couple well-known songs during the seventh-inning stretch. When you stop and think about it, is this a little bizarre? Why sing together at sports games?

A December 2023 article in The Guardian helps explain corporate singing both at sport and at church. Author Ian Sample extolled the wellness benefits of singing together, and in fact, one of his sources, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, called group singing "a mega-mechanism for bonding." Bonding people together isn't the first thing that comes to mind when I think of singing, but surely this is exactly why sports fan sing: to add their corporate voice to all the other aspects of the experience that bonds them together as fans. Bonding with other people makes us feel whole and needed, a part of something larger than ourselves.

It's no accident then that singing is one of the main activities we do in church. First of all, it's a pleasing sound to the Lord: Oh sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth! Sing to the Lord, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples! For great is the Lord ... (Psalm 96:1-4a). Second, as we learned above, it's good for us personally and for the church corporately because it binds us together into one whole. As marvelous as it is to sing together in the sports arena, it is more marvelous to sing to the Lord because of who he is and what he has done.

So, this brief insight into singing is one of what I hope will be several invitations you receive to come together to form a men's choir on Sunday, July 27, and a women's choir on Sunday, August 10. We aren't really thinking about this as an audition for choir (although it could be that if you want). What I hope is that you would consider coming to experience in a deeper way this mega-bonding mechanism, singing together, that we all partake of in a small way each Sunday. These two Sundays are about spending an hour rehearsing and then singing a service together to create deeper bonds of Christian fellowship. We've designed the music choices so that if you can follow the melody of a hymn on Sunday, you will be successful. If you have a little more training, the music will have enough complexity that you too can feel challenged.

Bottom line: come sing! It's helpful but not necessary to drop me a line telling me you plan to sing: preese@stphilipschurchsc.org (or click here to register).

The rehearsal for both Sundays will be at 9:00 a.m. in the choir room (second floor of the church office). Last year we had at least one mother/daughter pair, and even a mother/daughter/granddaughter trio! All generations invited.