REBIRTH: Singing Death, Singing Life

Glen & Judy Brown Richardson, Sponsors
In Honor of all Emerging Scholars and their valuable endeavors! Keep up the good work!

Facilitated by Steph Budwey, Director of Research

“The Pastoral Implications of John Calvin’s Genevan Psalter for Church Music Ministry in Hong Kong”
Sze Man Symantha Leung
 
The aim of this presentation is to interpret the pastoral meaning and function of Calvin’s Genevan Psalter and to illustrate how it can be applied to Hong Kong church music ministry today. Through the Genevan Psalter, Calvin advocates congregational and vernacular psalm‑singing in Reformed worship. He emphasizes piety, Scripture, congregational participation, and the shaping of daily spirituality beyond Sunday worship. The pastoral insights drawn from the use of the Genevan Psalter in Reformed worship offer five valuable implications for music ministry in Hong Kong today: Spirituality, Unity of the Church in Faith, Theological Education, Liturgical‑Musical Interrelationship, and Inclusiveness.

In addition to Calvin’s pastoral insights, this presentation applies Walter Brueggemann’s model of Orientation, Disorientation, and New Orientation to elaborate the use and function of the Psalms, providing a framework for bridging differences in time, social, and cultural contexts between the Reformation era and today’s Hong Kong. Calvin aims to revive early church worship, emphasize simple, dignified congregational psalmody through unaccompanied unison singing of metrical psalms, and to use tunes of appropriate gravity,^[1] free from secular influences.^[2]

This presentation reviews the social and ecclesial context of Hong Kong churches amid ongoing emigration and an influx of immigrants from mainland China, creating both new opportunities and challenges. Eschatological hope and faith call for discerning pastoral responses in worship, especially in song selection. Psalm‑singing is explored as a lived expression of individual and communal faith, resonating with Calvin’s and Brueggemann’s pastoral perspectives. Inspired by the Genevan Psalter, my psalm‑based compositions are examined within Brueggemann’s tripartite spiritual framework and their Sitz im Leben revealed through performance. The pastoral insights drawn from the Genevan Psalter offer valuable implications for today’s Hong Kong churches and emphasize the Genevan Psalter as a concrete framework for shaping a more deeply theological practice of congregational song.

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of The Christian Religion, ed. by T. McNeill (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 3.20.32, Kindle.
[2] Robin A. Leaver, “Reformation and Music,” in European Music, 1520–1640, 394.

 
“Seasonal Hymnody and the Ecological Imagination of Liturgical Time”
Alice Hyun Tjoelker
 
Seasonal hymnody operates within an implicit liturgical climatology that binds theological meaning to specific seasonal environments, even where such alignments are not fixed by Scripture itself. Within much Anglophone congregational song, the narratives of incarnation and resurrection are articulated through environmental metaphors drawn from the natural cycles of the Northern Hemisphere: Advent anticipates deepening darkness, Christmas evokes winter cold, and Easter aligns resurrection with spring renewal and the passage from death to life. However, in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas occurs in summer and Easter in autumn, the alignment between liturgical symbolism and lived ecological conditions is disrupted. This paper examines what such hemispheric inversion discloses about the ecological assumptions embedded in congregational song.
 
Drawing on ritual theory, this study argues that seasonal hymnody functions as a world-establishing ritual practice, mediating salvation history through lived ecology and forming communities to inhabit liturgical time within environmental imaginaries. Hymns do not simply describe seasonal change; they enact a cosmological order that binds salvation history to patterns of darkness and light, barrenness and growth, and death and rebirth. The paper further demonstrates how such metaphors operate within broader systems of symbolic classification that structure theological meaning.
 
Attention to Southern Hemisphere hymnody, including Christmas texts that situate incarnation within summer conditions, does not simply reveal an inversion between text and climate. Rather, it renders visible the historical and geographic contingency of dominant liturgical-symbolic alignments and highlights the role of ritual practice in naturalizing them. To sing liturgical time is to inhabit an ecological imagination in which environment and communal identity are mutually constituting.
 
 
"Contextualizing the Eucharist: An Analysis of Local Communion Hymns in Contemporary Chinese Protestant Hymnals"
Yongjiang Zhou
 
The contextualization of Chinese hymnody—“Sinicization”—is a centuries-old practice, from the Tang-era Trinity Hymn to the landmark Hymns of Universal Praise (1936). In the post-Reform era, this evolution continued through the Christian Hymns in Chinese (New Edition) (1983), Christian Hymns in Chinese (New Edition) Supplementary Edition (2009), and the recent Hua Yun Xin Ge (New Songs of Chinese Style) (2023). Despite this progress, a significant gap remains in the development of locally rooted sacramental music, specifically regarding the Eucharist. As one of the two primary Protestant sacraments, the Eucharist shapes the theological imagination; yet, in contemporary Chinese hymnals, original liturgical compositions remain disproportionately scarce.
 
This study examines the state of Chinese Eucharistic (Communion) congregational song, focusing primarily on the four original Chinese compositions found within the New Hymnal and its Supplement. Utilizing a multi-dimensional framework, these hymns are analyzed through: (1) the historical and biographical contexts of their authors; (2) literary aesthetics, including poetic diction and indigenous imagery; (3) musical features relating to cultural resonance and singability; and (4) theological themes such as sacrifice, thanksgiving, and eschatological hope. While the paper acknowledges the role of seven translated Western hymns in shaping early sacramental devotion, it prioritizes an evaluation of how these few indigenous works succeed—or fall short—in articulating a distinctively Chinese Eucharistic theology.
 
The analysis reveals critical limitations, notably the complete absence of Communion hymns in the 2023 Hua Yun Xin Ge and a lack of liturgical music for the Eucharistic rite itself. Ultimately, the paper argues that the future of Sinicized hymnody requir