Science Themed Songs and Hymns

Show me a church’s songs and I’ll show you their theology.
— Gordon Fee, Professor Emeritus, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Science may be sermonised in the classroom but we embody it in the field and the lab. Likewise, our Christian formation may be sermonised from the pulpit but we embody it in our participative song.

We learn much more by doing than by listening. From Mondays to Saturdays, on the bus, at the washing-up bowl, in that day-dream moment, in our leisure and down-time, a Sunday song is much more likely to spring to mind than a Sunday sermon.

It is in the liturgy, the work of the people, that this “doing” happens. And for us in the congregation, our “doing”, our formation, happens more, and for some mostly, through our active singing rather than our passive listening. We are what we sing.

But do we ever sing God-and-science?

Reflect on your church’s worship pattern. On the hymns, songs and psalm-settings that we choose and include. And on those we don’t choose, and thereby implicitly exclude. On our corporate prayers and responses. On the liturgical texts that we recite.

• Do they ever mention anything connected, even tangentially, to the God-given science by which we understand the world? In both its beauty and its peril?
• Is science included? And thus are God-given science vocations acknowledged?
• Or it is ignored? And thus are scientists subliminally expected to leave their vocationsoutwith the church door, on the pavement, in the rain, divorced from worship?

Does the Sunday congregation subliminally receive the message-by-absence that science is divorced from faith? That science is not considered a Christian vocation?

The resources here enable us, the lay congregation, to acknowledge science as a God-given gift that can be fully acknowledged in the worshipping life of our churches. There already are, of course, several hymns and songs that include nature. Hymns such as “How great thou art”; “All creatures of our God and King”. Lines such as “Summer and winter and springtime and harvest”; “For by his power each tree and flower was planned and made”.

But science is more that that. The resources here go beyond visible nature; they embrace science.

David Lee, scientist, musician and songwriter