Why your favorite worship song's grammar matters
Christianity Today
November 10, 2026
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Aaron Burden / Unsplash
The worship wars have left us feeling weary and worn out.
It sounds like Jesus is my boyfriend.
There is too much I and not enough Thou.
God isn’t the subject of all the verbs.
We’ve all heard variations of these tired complaints about contemporary worship music by traditionalists (of which I am one). And the complaints contain some merit.
Some contemporary songs contain curious lyrics. John Mark McMillan’s infamous “sloppy wet kiss” comes to mind. Other songs focus more on the worshiper than on the one being worshiped. Still others use a lot of words to say very little.
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Critics have identified a real problem with contemporary worship, but the solution isn’t simply more hymnals.
In fact, the same critiques can be used against lyrics in traditionalists’ revered hymnals. Across our denominations, many hymns emphasize the wrong elements and focus too much on the worshiper. Some hymns have questionable theology. And our hymnals contain some real stinkers; the late William H. Petersen had to rewrite portions of the Advent favorite “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending” to remove antisemitism!
But what if the worship wars have been fighting the wrong battle? What if contemporary worship music supplies a necessary register too often missing from our musical praise before our Creator?
The question we should ask of our worship songs is not simply whether they make accurate statements about God. We should also ask what they enable the gathered church to say and do before God. A song may proclaim God’s holiness, confess our sin, cry out for mercy, or teach us to delight in God’s presence. These are not merely different lyrical themes. They are different theological actions.
Christian worship requires the full grammar of the church’s response to God. We need proclamation and petition, confession and adoration, lament and thanksgiving, the corporate “we” and the personal “I.” At its best, contemporary praise music contributes an indispensable register of direct, affective address.
The church should also, however, recover its biblical foundations in the Psalter and expand its range. The problem with contemporary praise music is not that it says “I” too often. It may be that its “I” is not yet capacious enough.
To recover the full first-person grammar of Christian praise, we must return to the Psalms.
The Psalms have long served as Israel’s prayer book and expression of corporate worship. They are not merely 150 religious poems or an anthology of ancient Israelite songs. They are a collection of prayers through which Israel learned to address God in worship. In the early church, Christians continued to pray and sing the Psalms as they worshiped in light of Christ. The Hallelujah Psalms (146–150), the Songs of Ascent (120–134), and the Egyptian Hallel (113–118) form a robust corpus for Israel’s corporate worship. Ellen Davis calls Ashrei, a Jewish prayer centered on Psalm 145 that has been recited three times daily for millennia, an “alphabet of adoration.”
The English Reformation continued this tradition, with Coverdale’s Psalter shaping the Church of England’s prayer from the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 through its formal incorporation into the 1662 edition. Yet the Psalter’s enduring place in corporate worship raises an important question about the grammar of Christian praise.
The Psalter is filled with first-person singular language (NRSVue for all):
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” (23:1)
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” (27:1)
“I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.” (34:1)
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” (51:10)
“I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications” (116:1)
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” (130:1)
Even the Psalter’s greatest hits express praise and adoration in the first-person singular. How can the church’s corporate prayer book so often formulate direct worship with “I”? Augustine’s theology of the totus Christus answers.
For Augustine, when the church prays the Psalms, the totus Christus—“the whole Christ”—prays. Christ the Head and the church his body are united in a single voice of prayer and praise. His commentaries on Psalm 86 and Psalm 131 illuminate this shared voice.
In his treatment of Psalm 86, Augustine describes the Incarnation as God joining humanity to Christ, making Christ the Head and believers his members. This has implications for prayer: “He prays for us, as our Priest; He prays in us, as our Head; He is prayed to by us, as our God.”
The relationship between Christ and his body is essential to both ecclesiology and worship. Because the body of Christ is the church universal, both militant and triumphant, with Christ as our head, it also means that “Christ speaks, and I speak” when we pray the Psalms. The words belong to Christ and to those who are united to him.
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For Augustine, the individual does not disappear into the church, nor does the church dissolve into a collection of isolated individuals.
His examination of Psalm 131 is particularly important for this shared voice. Indeed, the members of the body speak as one because “it ought not to be received as the voice of one man singing, but of all who are in Christ’s Body. And since all are in His Body, as it were one man speaks: and he is one who also is many.”
Christ may be the speaker, but his body speaks with him and through him. The “I” here is singular grammatically, but communal ecclesiologically.
United to Christ as members of his body, the church participates in Christ’s prayer. The first-person singular is therefore not merely personal but profoundly ecclesial. The question, then, is not whether contemporary praise music should use the first-person singular, but whether its language is capacious enough to give voice to the whole body of Christ.
The church does not need to choose between the personal and corporate voices of Christian praise. Our praise and worship can address God through God-focused proclamation, personal first-person singular, and the ecclesial first-person singular.
God-focused language proclaims God’s character and mighty acts. First-person singular language gives voice to the individual worshiper’s love, longing, confession, and lament. Yet this same “I” is also the corporate voice of the church, whose members are united to Christ as his body. The ecclesial “I” does not erase the individual voice but gathers it into the prayer of the whole body of Christ.
To sing “I love you, Lord,” “I need you,” or “I praise you” is not inherently individualistic. Rather than an embarrassment to be explained away, its immediacy and intimacy contribute theologically. It is part of our lexicon of praise, our alphabet of adoration, and it needs to be recovered.
When Christians gather for worship, they come as individuals bringing their joys and griefs, hopes and dreams, praises and laments. This comes with pastoral complications of its own, however. Consider what happens when a grieving parishioner must repeatedly sing about overflowing joy, when a person experiencing spiritual desolation must continually proclaim a sense of God’s immediate presence, or when a repentant believer has no opportunity to confess.
The problem isn’t that those songs are false; it is that they may not provide a sufficiently expansive vocabulary for the church’s actual life. Not every song must contain every theological action, but the church’s repertoire should make room for them all.
Contemporary praise music need not abandon its intimate language, but that language must take its place within a repertoire capable of expressing the full range of the church’s life before God. Traditional hymnody need not abandon its theological precision, but it must make room for the personal and affective dimensions of Christian praiser.
Ultimately, questions over traditional versus contemporary worship don’t require an either/or answer; the church is richer for having both. Both are necessary—and both are certainly worthy of critique! But when done well, both traditional and contemporary forms of worship are necessary and complementary for a well-rounded worship experience.
Rather than being discordant with our alphabet of adoration, contemporary worship reminds us that our “I” and “we” find meaning in “Thou” and “Thee.” Fully praising God in adoration, lament, penitence, and supplication requires more layers than we previously admitted. The church needs the full grammar of Christian praise, including a first-person singular capable of voicing the experiences of the whole body of Christ.
When we lift our voices in praise, we do so as the body of Christ, united with our Head, our personal “I” gathered into the church’s “we.” Perhaps the worship wars will end when we discover that the church’s “I” was never meant to sing alone.
Rev. Dr. Porter C. Taylor is an Episcopal priest, theologian, writer, and teacher whose work explores the intersection of liturgy, theology, and culture for the life of the church and the world. He is the author and editor of several books and writes regularly at porterctaylor.com.
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