I just want to say that I grew up evangelical Protestant and played the piano in church almost every Sunday from the time I was 12 until I turned 47 and became Catholic. (Now I play in a Catholic church almost every Sunday!).
I honestly do not agree, based on my many years of extremely close involvement with hymns in the Protestant church, that most Protestant hymns are “I” and “me.”
Up until recently (the last 20 years or so, since the rise of the “Praise and Worship” phenomenon), Protestants were very aware of hymns as corporate worship. There is usually a song leader, and he or she works hard to get the entire church involved in singing the hymns TOGETHER.
We took great pleasure in not only singing our hearts out, but also communicating with each other during the hymns by looking at each other, smiling, nodding, and in more “physical” churches (e.g., the Pentecostal churches), clapping, swaying, and sometimes even dancing together.
Even if the song words were “I” or “me,” we were very aware that the hymn applied to all of us together and that we were praising GOD, not lifting ourselves up.
We knew that this wasn’t “personal” worship time, this was the time when we all joined together and shared our faith in God in song.
We would try to be “one voice” as we sang. I can remember many directors encouraging us to join together and sing out!
One of the first hymns I ever learned was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” This hymn isn’t sung very often anymore (too war-like for some sects). But no one can say that this song is “I” centered. It’s all about marching along and working together to advance the kingdom of Christ. I still love it.
Two other wonderful hymns that I learned as a child were “Fairest Lord Jesus” (some sing it as “Beautiful Savior”) and “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations.”
I have several Protestant hymnals, and if I spent the time going through them, I believe that there would be a fairly even mix of “I, me” and “we, our” hymns.
Perhasp those who believe that Protestant hymns are “I” and “me” are basing this opinion on their experiences in recent years. I do believe that in recent years, the shift towards “Praise and Worship” style music times in the Protestant worship service has resulted in people singing “privately,” not corporately.
I bemoan this trend of privatizing corporate worship. While I believe that it is perfectly OK to worship the Lord in song in the privacy of your prayer closet, when we are with a group of Christians, the worship in music should be corporate, not private devotions.
A lot of P and W songs use “we” and “our,” but the people singing them are using them as private devotions. So IMO, the words of the hymn (the pronouns) don’t mean much. The important thing is the leadership of the music director and the love of the congregation for each other and for the Lord.
I’m glad someone mentioned Rich Mullin’s “The Apostles Creed” song. This is a perfect example of “Catholic thinking in Protestant songs.” If you’ve ever seen that album cover, it has many pictures of Mary. Caused quite a to-do in the Protestant churches!
