Singing is a practice so deeply embedded in Christian worship that it can easily be taken for granted. Yet singing occupies a distinctive place in the life of the Church: Christians sing in celebration and lament, at weddings and funerals, alone and together, and in words ranging from ancient psalms to contemporary worship songs.
What, then, does singing make possible that speech alone cannot?
That question ran through ‘Reasons to Sing: Singing, Spirituality and the Search for Meaning,’ a two-day conference at the University of Birmingham that brought together theologians, musicians and researchers to explore the physical, social and spiritual dimensions of singing.
Opening the conference, organisers and University of Birmingham research fellows Dr Katie Bank and Dr Rebekah Wallace turned to the 16th-century Catholic composer William Byrd, who argued that singing benefits both body and spirit and is “the best way to glorify God”.
“Since singing is so good a thing, I wish all men would learn to sing,” Byrd wrote in 1588.
Centuries later, the conference returned to many of the same questions: what happens when people sing? Why has Christianity placed such importance on it? And how might singing shape prayer, faith and community?
For Jacqueline Leary-Warsaw, classical soprano and professor at the Catholic University of America, singing occupies a distinctive place between the physical and the transcendent because the human voice cannot be separated from the person producing it.
“The voice is the embodied person made audible,” she said, noting that singing brings together breath, hearing, language, memory, imagination and intention.
This may help explain why singing appears so frequently at the thresholds of human experience, she suggested, including worship, lament, celebration and mourning - moments “where speech alone seems insufficient”.
Drawing on Christian theology, Leary-Warsaw proposed what she termed the “sacramentality of the voice”- not suggesting that singing is itself a sacrament, but that physical sound and the human voice can communicate spiritual meaning.
The voice, she said, can “give audible form to prayer or awaken an awareness of divine presence”.
That becomes especially apparent in communal worship, where words of “lamentation, supplication, or praise are taken into the breath and sounded through the body”.
“They are no longer merely words about prayer,” she said. “The singing itself may become prayer that gives way to transcendence.”
Michael Glover, a priest and theologian whose research includes sacred music and the transmission of faith, argued that sacred music can do more than communicate information about Christianity.
“Sacred music is capable of leading a person into the mystery of salvation,” he said.
He argued that sacred music can make the truths of Christianity more vivid and personal, engaging the affections and conscience alongside the intellect.
He was careful not to suggest that music can manufacture belief, though.
“Not everyone who listens to sacred music will be moved to believe or deepen their faith,” he said. “Faith as a theological virtue is a gift from God.”
Nevertheless, he said sacred music can encourage someone to explore Christianity, stir the conscience towards God, deepen an existing faith and provide believers with a means of prayer and praise.
Looking at musical settings of Christ’s Passion by Bach, John Stainer and James MacMillan, Glover identified “memory, participation and invitation” as ways music can draw listeners more deeply into the Christian story.
Composers, he said, can engage listeners “not simply to retell the story, but allow them to enter into the mystery itself”.
Former Bishop of Kingston, Richard Cheetham, similarly argued that singing can help people engage with truths that cannot always be adequately expressed through analytical language alone.
Recalling his own journey through science, philosophy, ordained ministry and, more recently, choral singing, he said Christian song had taught him that music engages “the head and the heart and the body - a much more holistic thing”.
“For the deepest truths of our lives, prose and mathematics are insufficient,” he said. “You need great art, great poetry and so on.”
Cheetham pointed to the Psalms as an example of music and worship encompassing the breadth of human experience, moving “from the depths of despair and grief and rage and suffering to the heights of joy”.
He said his own experience of choral singing had convinced him that “meaning-making and truth-seeking are multidimensional”, involving not simply the intellect but the whole person.
He also connected singing with the Christian understanding of God as love, quoting 1 John: “God is love. Those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.”
“Singing enables us to express that,” he said.
Cheetham pointed to the longstanding Christian understanding of singing as prayer, citing the saying traditionally attributed to Augustine of Hippo: “He who sings prays twice.”
The same theme appeared in Vedran Obucina’s examination of the debates over singing during the Reformation.
Obucina, who leads the Centre for Inter-religious Dialogue in Rijeka, Croatia, said some Protestant reformers feared that elaborate ceremony and musical beauty could become “an unnecessary barrier between the believer and the Word”, raising the question of whether religious meaning comes primarily through words or whether sound itself can communicate something of faith.
Drawing on Byrd, he argued that singing brings together “breath, body, intellect, emotion and attention”.
He connected breath itself with Genesis and God’s breathing life into Adam.
Through the voice, he said, “what a person believes and feels becomes audible.”
That physicality is not necessarily a distraction from spiritual life, he argued, but can become a means of spiritual formation.
Music can also intensify “memory, emotion, attention” and communal participation in Scripture.
“It is another way of experiencing the Word,” Obucina said.
“It doesn't have to be that we must experience the Word only by reading and listening.”
Ultimately, he linked singing with Psalm 150 and humanity’s purpose of worship.
“Why do we have this voice? Why do we sing?” he asked, before describing singing “as an expression of what the human person is ultimately created to do: praise God”.
Kate Fawcett, a musician and music therapist working in paediatric palliative care, also reflected on the spiritual significance of breath.
Although she said she does not consider herself religious, performing sacred music in churches and cathedrals is deeply meaningful to her.
She pointed to the biblical Hebrew word ‘ruach’, which can be translated “according to context as wind, breath, or spirit, breath of life, spirit of God”.
“Without breath, there is no song to save the world,” she said.
Drawing on Bach’s ‘St John Passion’, Fawcett argued that spiritual meaning can reside not only in sacred words but also in the embodied act of making music together.
The conference also challenged the idea that church music is simply something added to worship.
Daniele Sabaino, professor of musicology and music history at the University of Pavia and a longstanding consultant on liturgical music to the Italian Bishops’ Conference, traced changes in the Catholic understanding of liturgical music following the Second Vatican Council, describing a movement away from “music in the liturgy” towards “music as liturgy”.
Rather than treating music as a sacred object performed by specialists for a largely passive congregation, he said singing can be understood as one of the ways the gathered Church itself participates in worship.
Music in the liturgy, he said, finds its purpose “in the service it renders to the act of celebration”.
Nor does this require every worshipper to be singing continuously.
“Singing, listening, silence, ministerial intervention and communal response all belong to a single act of celebration,” Sabaino said.
He rejected the idea that one particular musical grammar or style is inherently Christian, saying that musical forms could instead vary “according to time, place and culture”.
June Boyce-Tillman, professor emerita of applied music at the University of Winchester, similarly emphasised community over musical perfection.
Drawing on Hildegard of Bingen, she said music expresses “the unity of the world as God first made it and the unity which is restored through repentance and reconciliation”.
Reflecting on the deeper significance of song, she warned: “If we take away singing from people, we take away their power. It’s not taking away a decoration. We take away their power.”
Boyce-Tillman spoke warmly of projects that had brought together conventional choirs, dementia sufferers, children with profound learning difficulties, schools and audiences.
“It was an attempt to create a truly inclusive community,” she said. “Blurring the boundary between the audience or congregation and the singers is a very powerful one.”
Musicians and educators Katherine Zeserson and Guiliana Frozoni distilled this relational dimension into perhaps the conference’s simplest answer to the question of why people sing: “We sing because we love.”
Gareth Wilson, director of music at Girton College, Cambridge, argued that music’s theological value may lie precisely in the fact that it cannot be completely translated into concepts.
“Abrahamic monotheism resists the attempt to reduce God to what can be said,” he said.
Just as God cannot be contained within human categories, music confronts people with forms of meaning that resist complete verbal explanation.
Wilson suggested that this can teach something important about faith.
“To understand is to be in control, which chafes against the de-centering required by faith,” he said.
Reflecting on Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’, he put the point more starkly: “The idol is intellectual control. The idol is the self.”
Wilson connected singing and music with the Christian theology of creation and beauty.
Drawing on theologian David Bentley Hart, he said that “when we delight in beauty, we participate in God’s delight in beauty”, describing this shared delight as part of the purpose for which humanity was created.
If creation itself is God’s prior act of communication, Wilson argued, the boundary between sacred and secular becomes more nuanced.
“If God created all that exists and remains in sustaining relationship with it … there can be no such thing as a secular or profane space. All space is sacred,” he said.
The power of song becomes particularly apparent in suffering, the conference heard.
Sarah Moerman, a research fellow at the University of St Andrews working at the intersection of theology and music, explored the history of African American spirituals, describing songs born amid enslavement and oppression yet characterised by “hope, comfort, strength, resilience, deliverance, liberation, freedom and justice”.
Though sometimes described as “sorrow songs”, she said spirituals are ultimately “always looking upward, reaching for hope.”
She linked this explicitly to faith, arguing that suffering can become an opening towards a deeper experience of God.
“Sorrow and suffering is the entrance,” she said.
For enslaved people, singing could help imagine “a world where there was no pain”, where “tears are wiped away.”
It was also an assertion of human dignity.
“The act of singing for the slaves was a way to maintain a sense of ownership and agency over their own selves despite the commodification of their bodies,” Moerman said.
She connected this with the Christian Passion tradition, where familiar hymns inserted into accounts of Christ’s crucifixion bring worshippers into the biblical narrative and encourage them to consider its meaning in the present.
Borrowed songs, she argued, can “honour the past”, help people make sense of and bear witness to the present and “give hope for the future”.
Community musician Daisy Widdicombe offered examples of this power of song in contemporary chaplaincy.
Her research into chaplains working in hospitals, prisons, mental health services and care settings found that more than 64% of those surveyed had incorporated singing into their work, including many without formal musical training.
One chaplain described singing hymns with mental health patients “as a means of reconnecting with faith and as a way of helping to express feelings”.
Another recalled singing to a patient confined to a bedroom in a secure hospital from the other side of a locked door.
“We sing together through a small hatch in the door, which can develop a sense of connection for someone who is otherwise quite isolated,” the chaplain said. “When someone is very acutely mentally ill and unable to speak, I’ve occasionally used song as a way to try and connect.”
Widdicombe said the skills shared by singing and pastoral care include attentiveness to breath, pauses, tone and emotion. Formal musical training is not essential.
“The one core characteristic that links musicianship and effective chaplaincy is the true ability to listen,” she said.
For Widdicombe, singing can offer “profound musical experiences of meaning and beauty for those seeking spiritual relief or connection”, even without instruments, formal instruction or, in some cases, words.
Other contributions widened the meaning of singing itself.
Chae-Lin Kim, a cellist and ethnomusicologist researching music and deaf culture, presented research into the Berlin Sign Choir, attached to a Protestant deaf church, where signed songs form part of the liturgy.
One song’s title translates as ‘God is pleased to sign’, and the lyrics speak of a God who understands, comforts, strengthens, forgives and loves.
“In this song, God is depicted as a signing God who communicates with them in sign language,” Kim explained.
Kim also noted that language around “hearing the Word of God” can be reimagined in deaf worship through seeing and signing.
Rather than treating deafness primarily as something requiring healing, she said the community understands it as a linguistic and cultural identity, with sign language becoming a means through which Christian faith, worship and relationship with God are expressed.
For Cheetham, the Christian vision of singing ultimately extends beyond humanity altogether.
Pointing to Psalm 148, he said Scripture pictures “the mountains, the birds, the animals, all creation singing”.
“One of the missteps that the Christian faith can sometimes take is that it becomes very anthropocentric and focused on the individual and your relationship with God,” he said.
“I think that is actually a misreading of Christian theology. It’s all about the whole of creation.”
Christian worship, by this account, is not simply a collection of individuals singing religious words. Human voices join something much larger - praising together with creation.
As Cheetham concluded: “Learning to sing [is] vital to our humanity. It’s vital to our meaning-making, and it’s vital to our truth-seeking and our experience of all that is and of God.”
