Music and Worship: Common Ground - a Song Book for All the Churches

Nowadays there are probably more collections of hymns and worship songs available than at any previous time. Common Ground is one of several with an ecumenical flavour. St Boniface Choir has music copies and sometimes a song from this collection has been used on a Sunday morning, especially during communion.

Hymns provided common ground between Christian denominations for years before relations became as comparatively close as they are today. Church of England congregations have long sung, for example, hymns both by Isaac Watts, an eighteenth-century nonconformist, and John Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century convert to Roman Catholicism. But all this was a kind of accidental ecumenism.

The songbook Common Ground, on the other hand, was a deliberate collaboration between different Christian traditions in Scotland. Not surprisingly there is a Scottish bias: nearly half of the 150 songs are Scottish, including some with Iona connections, including the now fairly familiar ‘A touching place’ and ‘Will you come and follow me’. Among other Scottish items are very evocative settings of the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei by James MacMillan (b. 1959).

Items headed ‘England’ form the second largest group: there are about 30, including a few (such as ‘Shine, Jesus, shine’ and ‘Be still’) familiar from other sources. ‘Comes Mary to the grave’ has a beautiful Eastertide text by Michael Perry, and a lovely tune by David Iliff which manages to be minor but not sad. The handful of older items includes George Herbert’s ‘Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life’, with music arranged from one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs.

A small number of songs come from Africa, Asia and South America, including ‘Sent by the Lord am I’ from Chile, ‘Thuma Mina’ from South Africa, and the ‘Peruvian Gloria’, all of which we have sung over the years at family services.

The contents of Common Ground employ many poetic metres and musical styles. Not all are easy to sing or immediately attractive, but there is a genuine breadth and a readiness to experiment both in terms of music and words. It is good to find a number of substantial, well-crafted lyrics, for these are quite rare in some recent collections. There is not enough in Common Ground to make it more than a secondary or supplementary resource, but it can have considerable value in broadening and deepening the musical and theological experience of a worshipping community.

Christ, you lead and we shall follow,
stumbling though our steps may be,
One with you in joy and sorrow,
we the river, you the sea,
we the river, you the sea.

Words from Tree of Life by Marty Haugen. Copyright 1984, GIA Publications Inc. Reprinted in ‘Music and Worship’ by permission of Calamus, Oak House, 70 High Street, Brandon, Suffolk, IP27 0AU.