Among the myriad of issues arising from my and subsequent generations’ addictions to television, iPods, and media in general is that many of us have become consumers, not creators. This plays out in many different ways, church sanctuaries notwithstanding. My denomination, which has traditionally thrived on four-part, a cappella hymn singing, is becoming just like any other where passionate praise bands appear to worship cool PowerPoint presentations floating up from LCD projectors.

This change is not happening without reason. Parents who have grown up with hymn singing are worried that young people will turn away from the church because of the old music. Young people want to contribute their musical skills of piano playing, guitar strumming, drum beating, and microphone crooning to their churches. Evangelistic tendencies require reaching out to and including the unchurched and musically nontraditional.

While none of these motivations lacks validity, four-part, a cappella hymn singing cannot be simply left behind as old fashioned, out of touch, or irrelevant. Indeed, closing hymnbooks and opening guitar cases is not as much choosing a more contemporary style as it is neglecting a key component of the true value of church.

To a great extent, joining church is about craving and contributing to something that is greater than the sum of its parts. To hymn singing each participant brings with a unique tone, voice range, and understanding of why they sing. But when they add their voices to the musical fray, they are giving, receiving, belonging—and relying on themselves and each other without external or even technological intervention.

This intense experience of community has not been lost on younger generations. When I was in college, friends and I borrowed hymnals from the campus auditorium and sang out our hearts in a dorm stairwell—for fun. Consistent during the same period was the marked increase in fervor and attendance at every chapel service hymn sing. Just this past weekend, my uncle told me about his middle school boys’ a cappella choir where the boys are awed by the sound that together they alone can create.

Beyond traditional venues, I recall my year of voluntary service in an arts program for prisoners and the intense excitement sweeping through inmates when they were joined by group of really good singers recruited to shape musical rehabilitation. The inmates were incorporated into something beautiful and found themselves contributing and belonging to something seemingly otherworldly.

I’m guessing that if rising generations and even unchurched newcomers are taught to sing four-part, a cappella hymns, many of them will—and quite eagerly at that. They will be inspired by both old and new songs and new ways of singing old songs that reflect our continually evolving theology, ever-broadening community of believers, and increasingly pragmatic hopes.

We’ll need hymnals—and every last person’s voice.

A few times M, N, and I have visited a Saturday evening church in town that reaches out to the homeless, the down and out, the addicted. Not that we’re homeless, or even down on our luck right now, or addicted to anything other than life’s simple pleasures, but the unpredictable services in an unconventional meeting place aren’t without a certain luster absent in some of the more staid services we’ve attended where a gilded Bible is raised above bowed heads and a gilded cross precedes robed priests while a pipe organ blasts hymns of processional glory.

One night before Christmas found us on the ragged carpet of the “sanctuary,” late-arrival gleanings from the pre-service supper of burnt soup and crackers on our plates, people sitting about on pulled-up chairs, and kids lounging on a big beanbag in the center of the floor. The crude podium at the front presided from behind a candle stub deposit box filled with sand for later in the service.

At least once a frisky cat, frantically exploring everything from the piano player’s shoes to the idling computer on the cluttered desk in the corner, required ousting from the sand, which it was preparing to use with complete disregard for the riveted congregation’s gaze.

This may sound dismal (and in a way it was), but what enlivened the emotional momentum of the Christmas story retellings was one person in particular. He’d been watching the playing children earlier and laughing loudly in a slightly intoxicated manner, and so I and probably every other parent in the room had had my eye on him all evening.

I’m guessing he’d never heard the Christmas story before. At least it appeared he’d never heard the lyrics of “What Child Is This,” because when we sang “where ox and ass are feeding,” he let out such a guffaw–he laughed and laughed and laughed–that although I knew the tenor line well I couldn’t bear to move my eyes from my hymn book for fear of losing composure.

But what is composure worth, anyway? I’m reading Gone with the Wind, now, for my personal edification, and so far it sounds like an all-American Portrait of a Lady, what with propriety and composure worshiped to absurdity. Most refreshing in that book so far (I’m only into chapter 10) is Rhett Butler, the blockade runner who improperly initiates and then wins a bid to dance with the widowed Scarlett. He tells her, “What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one,” scandalous words indeed in that Atlanta hospital for combat-wounded fundraising ball.

To be sure, Mr. Butler is the epitome of self-assured composure, but he scoffs at his fellow dancers’ Southern pride and aristocratic propriety—actually, he riddles it with his contempt. The much-believed-in and celebrated cause he has supported with his excessively high bid for the dance with Scarlett is the very effort he mocks and knows ultimately will fall—the Confederacy.

Gallant, self-confident composure would not last long for those Southern gentlefolk, maybe just as won’t the rituals and sacred habits shrouding some church services, for the truth of the crèche rests with its discomposures. The slimy, messy emergence must have been dismal, the horrific conditions made less tolerable by an onslaught of crude and dirty men most likely steeped in barnyard humor, all there engulfed in the sickly sweet smells of cattle butts and asses. It is perhaps best remembered as a disarrayed scene of desperate making-do where composure’s only value was its diversion of panic.

Indeed, if the manger scene’s human misery were not so palpable, the first Noel would have been laughably ridiculous.