Over the Grave is a radical re-envisioning of the hymns of
Isaac Watts, entirely written, recorded and performed by members of Sojourn Community Church.
Since planting in 2000,
Sojourn has been a creative and vibrant community, writing and recording songs for six records. The latest record began as an exploration of the hymns of Isaac Watts (1674-1748), who is widely regarded as the father of the English hymn. Using his texts as source material,the songwriters re-crafted them into modern worship songs.
The result is an eclectic and vibey record that ranges from 1970’s era rock to modern indie pop, incorporating a host of sounds and moods not often heard in worship music-–almost like a
Sgt. Pepper’s for worship. Because of the richness of Watts’s texts, they not only hit the listener hard musically, but lyrically as well.
NRT Contributor Holly Russell recently had the opportunity to talk to Mike Cosper, the worship pastor of Sojourn Community Church, to find out about
Over the Grave: The Isaac Watts Project and what makes this album unlike anything else that has been written...well, since Isaac Watts.
Your CD Over the Grave is subtitled The Isaac Watts project. What inspired you to rewrite his songs?
Rewriting Watts songs is not something I set out to do. It is a journey the Lord took me on. Sojourn church is nine years old and it is evolving into a different type of community. It is evolving differently for a variety of reasons. For example, from the very beginning of life at Sojourn we wanted to explore different kind of opportunities for worship. We have explored different sounds, different musical ideas and different theatrical ideas. Over the years the pursuit of being “different” has evolved into many directions. One of the ways it has evolved is a real hunger on everyone’s part for lyrics that carry alot of weight and content.
Worship music can be framed in a couple of different ways. The first way is that worship is primarily expressive. It is a time of communicating our emotions, thoughts and feelings toward God. The second way to frame it is to think of worship as being formative. Meaning that the things we sing about shape and form our beliefs and shape and form who we believe God to be. Modern worship has done a great job with the expressive side of worship. There is a lot of great stuff out there that helps the church sing what they are thinking and feeling. However, there has not been alot of great stuff written in the last 20 years telling the God-story about who God is and what God has done. In order to get that picture of God’s character, we went after the hymnal. The hymnal is an incredible resource for that. We locked into Watts pretty early. We were just consistently blown away by his text. Fundamentally, we wanted to come back to something that communicated a deep and powerful truth about our God and his Gospel. So rewriting was just a part of the equation that made these hymns more palatable for our church.
Isaac Watts is known as the father of the modern hymn. Have you received any negative reaction, people saying, “no, don’t mess with Isaac Watts.”
We definitely had a little bit of that. One of the things that helps us in that arena is that Watts didn’t write tunes. Watts wasn’t a musician, he was a pastor and a poet. He wrote text, either in common meter or long meter. The text, or lyrics, could then be sung to a whole variety of tunes. So the idea of taking the text and setting it to a different tune definitely wouldn’t have bothered Watts. I think where we get the “raised eyebrows” has more a connection with where we have rewritten or adjusted words. Even at that, for the most part, people have been really supportive. Even those who have raised their eyebrows.
Watts’ own journey was one where he was seeking to contextualize music to where the people understood. If you read Watts’ writings, he would talk about going to church on Sunday. In his day the practice was to sing the Psalms. He realized as he sang the Psalms that people did not understand the imagery about David the King, war and victory. Watts made a connection between old testament imagery and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I hope what we have done is in line with that spirit--of taking rich songs and re-working melody and lyrics so that they are words, concepts and ideas that people can understand. The English language has changed alot in the last 300 years and so has common everyday dialect. Unfortunately we don’t live in a culture where theological language is as easily understood or as palatable as it once was.
You lead the Sojourn community Church. How many of those songs are you able to incorporate into worship?
In some form or another we are able to incorporate every song. Not necessarily as a worship or congregational song, but as something to get people’s attention or as a “call to worship.” “How Long” is a good example of that. It is heavily driven by rock where the melody is difficult and the chorus is high. There are all kinds of reasons people can not really participate in it as a congregational song.
Congregations can learn to sing alot of stuff if they are equipped with it. People don’t really read music anymore but everyone has an ipod and you can teach people to sing all kinds of stuff by showing them where they can get the song or where they can download it. We have a blog where every Thursday it is posted with the songs we are singing for the weekend and we encourage people to get ready for Sunday by listening and learning the songs so they can be ready to sing along. It has been surprising to see after hearing a song two or three times how people can participate in that. For example, “Warrior” is a weird song with weird rhythms. It is not your typical song for worship. Yet, it is a song we sing and sing it loud.
Some of the songs from the album I could automatically recognize as Isaac Watts. Others I knew as Psalms. Are all of them from Isaac Watts?
Yes. Every song on the record is taken is adapted from Isaac Watts. You will notice in the liners it will say in the liners adapted or inspired by Watts. A ton of the content of this record came from his reworking of the Psalms. Watts took most of the Psalms and rewrote them. He did the Psalms first and later he wrote the hymns.
I understand the artwork on your cover was also done by someone in-house. Tell me about the artwork to the cover.
There is a married couple in our church, who leads our visual arts ministry. They got together with Neil, who produced the record, and together the three of them up with the concept and put it together. Essentially, it is a variety of images that is meant to convey that God has given us victory over death and that apart from Christ we are nothing but dry bones. Without HIm we are dead and dying. Contrast that to: in Christ there is life, so the dry branches are bearing fruit again and the bones are coming into flesh again.
Tell me about the themes of this album. I read that you wanted to focus on themes that were no longer being taught in the church. Tell me about those themes.
One reason we came to Watts is that his stuff has an aggressive tone. What I mean by aggressive is that he goes straight after challenging topics like sin, the devil and death. These are topics which are rich and constant throughout scripture but not necessarily part of the dialog in modern worship circles. I have a lot of respect for the modern worship movement but I think they have done a pretty poor job at getting people to look face to face with their sin, to confess their sin, to lament their sin and to lament the sin of the world around them. Often times the modern worship movement gives us a gospel of hope without a clear picture of the cross. I am really convicted that all of the hope we should celebrate as a church and all the things we should be excited about as God’s church is because God has reconciled us to himself through the blood of his Son. Watts makes that stuff so clear. He is constantly showing us Jesus dead, buried and resurrected in one form or another. He laments the conditions of the world around him. In the song text “How Long,” Watts recognizes we are people who deserve God’s wrath and God is perfectly just to be wrathful. He is just to carry out judgement because He is our God and Creator, and so songs like “Reveal your Love” and “Warrior” give us a picture of a God who is perfectly holy but also perfectly just in having a wrath and carrying out His judgement. Watts’ ability to beautifully and lyrically communicate the power of the cross and the power of the gospel in songs like “Alas and Did my Savior Bleed” and “Over Death” is amazing. His version of Psalm 511, which one of the great confessional Psalms of the Bible, that text is spectacular. He took a Psalm and made it about the Cross of Christ being our only hope for reconciliation and forgiveness.
What do you want your listeners to take away from your album?
I hope that as much as anything else that from our records and from our worship services people will hear the words and hear the Glory of Christ. I hope the newness of the sounds and the oldness of the words will help people experience God in a whole new way.
