Category: Hymns

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Hymns Hymns Multifaith Other search markers worship-planning

“We Are One in the Spirit” revised for interfaith use

Painting of four figures holding hands on the shore, each one marked with a different religious symbol, with an orange sunset sky and water with a boat behind them. Two smaller figures are dancing under a tree nearby.
"Unity in Diversity" by Nayana Mevada

This hymn (original lyrics here) is a beautiful call to solidarity and activism among Christians of all denominations; what if we made it interfaith, too? Revisions alter Christian-specific language and also add in two new verses.

Credit info & explanations of changes are below the lyrics.

We are one in the Spirit,
we are one in the Lord,
we are one in the Spirit,
we are one in the Lord,
and we pray that our unity
will one day be restored —

Refrain:
And they’ll know God is with us
by our love, by our love;
yes, they’ll know God is with us
by our love.

We will move with each other,
we will move hand in hand,
we will move with each other,
we will move hand in hand,
and together we’ll spread the news
that God is in the land —

(Refrain)

We will work with each other,
we will work side by side,
we will work with each other,
we will work side by side,
and we’ll guard each one’s dignity
and save each one’s pride —

(Refrain)

All praise to our Maker,
from whom all things come
and in whose holy image
every human belongs.
Let us join our rich harmonies
in one holy song —

(Refrain)

Credit Info

Please feel free to spread this around, to sing it in your own communities, etc.! Just include credit to Avery Arden at binarybreakingworship.com.

If your community does make use of my revised verses, I would love to know about it. If you post a video of it being sung anywhere, I would love to hear it!! You can contact me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.

And if you have any suggestions for further revision, please do let me know that too. Let us all join together in the endless effort to draw our circles wider!

Reasons for Revision

Also called “They Will Know We Are Christians,” this hymn was written in the 1960s by Catholic priest Peter Scholtes for use at ecumenical and interracial events. Its themes reflect the post-Vatican II urge to bring Catholic tradition to life in new and active ways, and to interact with our neighbors in faith more intentionally.

As such, “We Are One in the Spirit” “has become an important piece in the church’s efforts to sing a theology of active participation and discipleship in and for the world.”

The songs we sing in worship shape the people’s conception of who God is and what God is doing in the world. I think this song excellent as it is! But I think it could be powerful to utilize at interfaith, not only ecumenical, gatherings — particularly gatherings of persons of the Abrahamic faiths, who share our one God and for whom language of spirit and Lord is familiar.

At this moment in time, I am thinking of places like Minneapolis, where leaders of many faiths — particularly so many Jews and Christians! — have joined together to broadcast the message that God is on the side of the immigrant.

My revisions are light, simply taking out the word Christians and altering the last verse so that it is not longer Trinitarian (praising Father, Son, and Spirit) but emphasizes a shared Creator.

Another small revision is altering “walk with each other” to “move with each other” to include wheelchair users and other modes of transportation. (It could also be interpreted as moving together in the form of dancing, or marching, etc.!)


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“What Wondrous Love Is This” revised

Oil painting of the risen Christ, glowing gold, standing over a pit of dead bones and under the blessing hand of God, sweeping up the things of earth into a whirlpool of color. Birds, balls, and bicycles; musical instruments and charcoal grills; plants and houses, pets and people, mowers and swing sets. Also present in the cosmic swirl are a loaf of bread and a glass of wine.
James B. Janknegt, "Make All Things New," 2005

See below for credit info and an explanation of changes made.

What wondrous love is this, o my soul, o my soul!
What wondrous love is this, o my soul!
What wondrous love is this
that caused the God of bliss
to join earth’s wretchedness
and our woe, and our woe —
join brokenness to make
all things whole.

When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down —
oppressed and sinking down, o my soul!
When I had nearly drowned
in suffering’s waves around
Christ cast aside his crown
for my soul, for my soul!
In weakness he was bound,
for my soul.

To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing,
to God and to the Lamb I will sing —
to God and to the Lamb,
who is the great I AM,
while billions join the theme,
I will sing, I will sing!
while billions join the theme,
I will sing.

And when from death we’re free, we’ll sing on, we’ll sing on;
And when from death we’re free, we’ll sing on.
And when from death we’re free,
we’ll build community
in peace and equity
in the Son, in the Son —
shalom community
in the Son.

So all disciples, go, share the news, share the news!
All you disciples, go, share the news!
All you disciples, go
to where injustice grows
and be Christ’s truth that sows
life anew, life anew!
Yes, be Christ’s love that sows
life anew.

Credit Info:

Please feel free to spread this around, to sing it in your own communities, etc.! Just include credit to Avery Arden at binarybreakingworship.com.

If your community does make use of my revised verses, I would love to know about it. If you post a video of it being sung anywhere, I would love to hear it!! You can contact me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.

And if you have any suggestions for further revision, please do let me know that too. Let us all join together in the endless effort to draw our circles wider!

Reasons for Revision

I know too many people — mostly exvangelicals — who grew up with the message “Jesus died for YOUR sins; YOU are the reason God had to suffer and die on the cross; every single sin YOU make is a nail in Christ’s body” drilled into them until they were drowning in shame. In Christian Doctrine, Shirley Guthrie shares an anecdote that conveys this terror and shame:

“Once upon a time a boy went to a revival meeting. …The preacher held up a dirty glass. ‘See this glass? That’s you. Filthy, stained with sin, inside and outside.’

He picked up a hammer. ‘This hammer is the righteousness of God. It is the instrument of God’s wrath against sinners. God’s justice can be satisfied only by punishing and destroying people whose lives are filled with vileness and corruption.’

The preacher put the glass on the pulpit and slowly, deliberately drew back the hammer, took deadly aim, and with all his might let the blow fall.

But a miracle happened! At the last moment he covered the glass with a pan. The hammer struck with a crash that echoed through the hushed church. He held up the untouched glass with one hand and the mangled pan with the other.

‘Jesus Christ died for your sins. He took the punishment that ought to have fallen on you. He satisfied the righteousness of God so that you might go free if you believe in him.’

“What Wondrous Love” perpetuates this kind of substitutionary atonement theology, especially in stanza 2. So I decided to change that.

Removing substitutionary atonement in favor of divine solidarity

We are sinking down to hell “beneath God’s righteous frown,” and that’s why Jesus had to lower himself and suffer. It’s our “fault” — it’s your fault. Don’t you feel horrible? Wallow in your guilt!

Guthrie continues his anecdote by pondering the fruit of such theology:

When the boy went to bed that night, he could not sleep. Meditating on what he had seen and heard, he decided that he was terribly afraid of God. But could he love such a God? He could love Jesus, who had sacrificed himself for him. But how could he love a God who wanted to ‘get’ everyone and was only kept from doing it because Jesus got in the way? The thought crossed the boy’s mind that he could only hate such a hammer-swinging God who had to be bought off at such a terrible price. But he quickly dismissed that thought. That very God might read his mind and punish him.

…Finally, he wondered what good it had all done in the end. The glass had escaped being smashed to bits, but nothing had really changed. After the drama was over, it was still just as dirty as it was before. Even if Jesus did save him from God, how did Jesus’ sacrifice help him to be a better person?

There are other ways to understand the salvific power of Jesus’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. That’s why I revised “What Wondrous Love Is This.” My changes remove the disconnect between the will of different Persons of the Trinity: God the Father was wrathful and would have destroyed us; God the Son therefore had to get between us and the Father. As Guthrie says,

“Jesus came to express, not to change, God’s mind. …Reconciliation is the work of God, not…purchased from God. What Jesus does is not done over or against God; his work is God’s work, for he himself is God-with-us.”

So as noted, I removed the sinners in the hands of an angry God type language in stanza 2. What I replaced it with was an emphasis on Christ’s incarnation as kenosis, the divine self-emptying, and as the ultimate act of solidarity — joining in our “wretchedness” in order to transform it into joy. “For God became human so that humans might become God” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p. 60).

Moving from the individual to the communal

The other big thing I wanted to change about the song was its individualistic view of salvation.

I kept some uses of “I / my” in order to honor the intimacy of the original, but included shifts into the communal “we” to stress that all humanity together enjoys the love and liberation of God — e.g. “when from death I’m free” becomes “when from death we’re free.”

Still looking forward to the Kin-dom, but also emphasizing the now

“What Wondrous Love” offers us a beautiful, poetic vision of heaven’s eternity of joyful worship. I kept that in (with a small tweak to its heavenly choir of “millions,” making it “billions” in keeping with my universalist views of how many people “get” to heaven).

But I also added a stanza to the end that reminds us that before that happy day, we are called to be the Kin-dom here and now. (By the way, I built that last stanza, “So all disciples go…”, off of a stanza original to the hymn but usually taken out: “Ye wingéd seraphs fly.” There are several other such stanzas; check them out and see if any stand out to you as worth revising!)

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Hymns Other search markers worship-planning

Why (& when) might we revise a hymn?

Photo of hymnals lined up in their little shelves on the back of pews

What are your favorite hymns? What hymns does your community hold most dear? What makes those specific songs resonate so deeply — their powerful melodies? words of love, of comfort or challenge? Messages that seem to put your most treasured values into words?

On the other hand, are there parts of any of those hymns that don’t sit right with you?

Maybe there’s language that leaves you out as a non-binary person, or implies that your disability makes you broken. Or maybe you have only just noticed that a song you’ve been singing your whole life carries binary language, ableist language, language that equates whiteness with goodness and purity, darkness with sin.

These songs hold a special place in your heart and in your faith; you don’t want to throw them out (or you know that members of your congregation will protest if you try).

But you also know that the words we sing at worship matter — that many people’s beliefs are largely shaped by the hymns we choose. If we keep singing these songs as is, people will continue to absorb their harmful messages.

These hymns call for some wording updates as we seek to draw our circles ever wider, to ensure that we sing out welcome and belonging to all those made in the Divine Image.

For example, “For Everyone Born” is a beloved hymn that Shirley Erena Murray wrote with deep love and a desire to draw people together in our diversity; however, much of the language sets up binaries that unintentionally leave some people out. When I revised it, most of the verses just required breaking out of those binaries — such as expanding “woman and man” to include “all those between, beyond, and besides.”

Hearing these changes to the hymn’s language while in worship was deeply meaningful to me. To have my concerns heard and recommendations acted on, to be acknowledged in that way, explicitly in the song, after so often feeling unheard and left out in faith spaces, was genuinely healing.

…But then there are the hymns that don’t just need some wording tweaks. Some hymns are founded on downright harmful theology — are laden with implications that Christians are supreme; that God’s power is patriarchal; that suffering is either punishment or test; that we are “sinners in the hands of an angry God” who is only kept from smiting us because Jesus puts his body between us and divine wrath (rather than Jesus being God-with-us, expressing the Triune God’s united will).

So what are we to do with a hymn that perpetuates bad theology?

We might choose to dispose of it completely.

Maybe some songs can’t be redeemed. Maybe no changes to it could ever ease the pain you or your community members feel about it.

For me, a song goes straight in the trash if I look into the songwriter and find that they were racist, antisemitic, or even guilty of sexual abuse; if the writer was violently bigoted or abusive, I am not going to try to “fix” their music. There is no fixing the harm that person did. I’m not going to sing any of an abuser’s words in a space where we’re trying to ensure that all belong, especially the most vulnerable.

Even outside that exception, I respect any person or community who decides they would rather retire any given song from their worship, for any reason.

However, I have found that many people find it extremely healing to sing a once-hurtful hymn anew, now with lyrics that talk back to and refute the original message. In bringing the song back transformed instead of quietly discarding it, a more overt, unambiguous message is made about what we believe, who God is, and who we are as a community.

To return to the example of “For Everyone Born,” there is one stanza that needed more than updated wording. The verse beginning “for just and unjust, a place at the table” doesn’t just leave some people out; it has brought deep pain to many survivors of abuse.

The stanza envisions a “table,” a community, where both “abuser, abused” are present, “with need to forgive.” However, ethical frameworks for responding to abuse emphasize the abuser’s accountability and the victim/survivor’s safety, comfort, and even their right to withhold forgiveness if they choose.

So I had to make a choice: throw the stanza out, or rewrite it in a way that directly addresses the old harm? I chose the latter:

For just and unjust, a place at the table,
a chance to repent, reform, and rebuild,
protecting the wronged, without shame or pressure,
for just and unjust, God’s vision fulfilled.

More people have reached out to me about this stanza than any other that I’ve revised, expressing how healing it was to be in worship and hear the old message refuted and replaced with one that prioritizes the person harmed.

If your community simply never speaks of a toxic hymn again, the memory of the pain the song caused you may remain deep in your psyche. You may even believe that that bad theology is the only traditional or “authentic” Christian theology — that you’re a “bad Christian” for hating it. You might think, “my church isn’t singing that hymn anymore because it makes people feel bad; but that doesn’t mean the hymn is wrong.”

But if you can receive the song anew, now with words that tear down that bad theology to build up something better, you receive an explicit message that yes, you were right, that theology was harmful. Your memories, your trauma, can be rewritten or re-woven into a new narrative:

This was a song that hurt; now it is a song that reminds us that we as Christians are constantly reforming and being reformed — constantly being called by God to unlearn and relearn divine love.

What do you think? Which hymns would you love to see transformed — and which would you simply like to never hear again?