Having had a go at modern church songs elsewhere, now I'm really going to upset all you traditionalists. In Luke 11 we read of Jesus teaching the disciples the pattern prayerthat has become known as the Lord's Prayer or Family Prayer.. In line with most churches, we at Bunyan stick to the traditional form of the prayer with its 'thy' and 'thine' and its 'trespasses', but during our two years at All Saints (the church, not the group) in the town where we live we used to say the modernised version:
Our Father in heaven,
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil,
For the kingdom the power and the glory are yours,
Now and forever.
Amen.
It goes against the grain to say it at first. It screeches against one's inner being rather like nails on a blackboard, or Eric Clapton 'playing' the guitar. But stick with it for a while and its virtues come shining through: it doesn't sound stilted or odd, but natural and meaningful. I particularly like losing the bit about walking around on other peoples' properties. And not sounding like a ham Shakespearean actor makes me confident that the prayer is a little more sincere rather than liturgical. In fact, being a bit of radical on the quiet, I would modernise it even further to bring out the condition inherent in God forgiving us. Can I prompt you to try saying the modern version in your own quiet time for a month and see how you get on with it?
While we're on the subject of words, and before I pop off to Burgler King, here is something I spotted recently on the internet about another site that demonstrates the emotive quality of words:
Amazing CowCam!
http://www.accsyst.com/cow.html
"TuCows" is the name of a famously useful software download site. But
this page, promoting a rural US access
provider, really is just two cows, standing around in a muddy field.
A couple of Jerseys - as in New Jersey - here patrol their paddock beneath
the all-seeing Web camera. Africam this is not, yet despite the lack of
drama, Hamburger and Cheeseburger ("no sense having cute names when you
plan on eating 'em") claim to have generated some 450,000 hits (and that
was some time ago).
Perhaps that's why at work we're all called resources now, as in Human
Resources, rather than personnel. I mean, resources are finite and you
don't feel sorry about disposal. Oh the cynicism of it all!