By Faith J. H. McDonnell, Patheos.com.
When is singing hymns damning?
When the increased volume of the hymn singing is not out of passion for the Lord, but to drown out the cries for help of those destined for slaughter.
That was the indictment against some churches in WWII Germany within hearing distance of the railroad taking Jews to the concentration camps. I first heard this story, related in Erwin Lutzer’s When a Nation Forgets God, from retired U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-VA), who tells it to challenge American Christians:
Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us. We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.
Some American Christians today are “singing a little louder” in these three ways:
- They are paralyzed by political correctness or brainwashed by moral equivalence.
- They are consumed by their own church politics and/or domestic liberty issues.
- They don’t know what to do to help.
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When you have an institution whose staff members meet with known terrorists and who are more intent on punishing faithful congregations within their midst than naming the evil that lurks outside the door, there is very little that remains for the Lord in righteous justice to do but cast that institution aside.