We are taught in the Bible that one of the ways to give praises to our God is through the singing of Spiritual Songs, Hymns, and Psalms, as Psalms 96: 1-2 says: I’m going to say a little bit more about James Weldon Johnson in just a moment, but we must first talk about our openness to receiving the experiences of the afflicted through music. To actually know the song is to know the story of James Weldon Johnson and to recognize how the song lays out God’s actions in history, including how these actions relate to every community, culture, and people group. It has remained circling around the Black community for all these decades.īut here, things get really interesting.
But, the song was adopted by the NAACP as the National Black Anthem, some twenty years later. After the performance, the brothers forgot about the song and went on with their lives. Despite having all the elements of a perfectly written hymn, it unfortunately wasn’t valued as anything significant in the wider body of Christ, namely among White American Christians. For the anniversary on that particular year, Johnson’s song was taught to hundred of young people in a children’s choir. The initial purpose of writing the poem (I’ll refer to it as a song from hereon out) was to celebrate the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. In the Black or African American community (whichever descriptive title you choose to employ), there’s a song dubbed to be the BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM, entitled “LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING.” The song was written as a poem in the late 1800s by James Weldon Johnson and then put to music by his brother Rosamond Johnson. And so, we never truly, as Christ followers, see the value in another group/culture/ethnicity as expressed in their music. Still, I think we often miss an opportunity to truly embrace other cultures in our Christian faith because we never really stop to consider how God, through the power of the Holy spirit, is working in and through the music of a diverse array of people groups.
Big surprise coming from the “Music Guy,” huh? I want to talk a bit about statements we often hear, like “music is universal,” “people can be unified through music,” or “people are introduced to other cultures through music.” All these are true. So, this particular blog is coming from a direction of music.
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