THESE DAYS THEY limit entry to our local church for the midnight carol service on Christmas Eve by issuing tickets. So popular has it become that they have to line the aisles with extra chairs, turn away people at the door, and rig up loudspeakers for latecomers who stand about in the cold to listen. Since three quarters of those who come will hardly have been inside the building since this time last year, it is intriguing to know what brings them there. Duty? Guilt? A lingering residue of religious belief? Or just the chance to belt out a few familiar tunes before the rigours of Christmas Day?

The Church’s own surveys suggest that the latter ranks high. But it worries about what we are singing. Is this the kind of language for a modern, inclusive, all-embracing faith? What is the point of packing them in, if baffled congregations find themselves mouthing archaic and mawkish verses written by sentimental Victorians more anxious about finding a rhyme for cherubim than worrying about whether we understand what abhorring a Virgin’s womb actually means?

Halfway through that much-loved carol It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, there is a line that runs: “Still through the cloven skies they come, with peaceful wings unfurled.” What about the one that goes: “Say, shall we yield him in costly devotion, odours of Edom and offerings divine”? And can one honestly be confident that “veiled in flesh the Godhead see” is entirely suitable for the children? As the Vicar of Dibley might remark: “You what?”

In no other form would we tolerate this remarkable effusion of 19th-century vernacular. The staying power of stalwarts like Christina Rossetti, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, to say nothing of Cecil Frances Alexander (Once in Royal David’s City) Phillips Brooks (O Little Town of Bethlehem) and Reginald Heber (Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning) is a phenomenon of popular culture unequalled in any other medium. But now there is evidence that they face serious competition.

When the BBC’s Songs of Praise asked its viewers to list their favourite hymns, they voted a 20th-century Swedish composition top of the pops. How Great Thou Art is about the power of God’s universe (“I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder . . .”) and has a touch of the evangelical about it. The tune is catchy, but the language is wholly unmemorable. Five traditional hymns hang on in the top ten, but the others are all modern, and similarly lacking in poetry. Christ Alone, which has become something of a modern anthem, pares language down to its minimum — “No guilt in life, no fear in death/ This is the power of Christ in Me/ From Life’s first cry to final death/ Jesus commands my destiny.” Shine, Jesus, Shine, which is almost as popular, urges us to “set our hearts on fire”.

The new Church of Scotland hymnary, published earlier this year, includes quite a lot of this stuff. One of their modern contributors, Graham Kendrick, has lines like: “God is good, we sing and shout it,/God is good we celebrate./ God is good no more we doubt it,/ God is good we know it’s true.” The collection favours gender-neutral language that turns Good Christian Men Rejoice into Good Christians All Rejoice, and drains the imagery from one of the greatest of all hymns, Holy, Holy Holy: the line that runs “though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see” becomes “though the sinful human eye thy glory may not see”, turning a powerful verse into a milksop ballad.

It may be that the combination of simple lyrics and a hummable tune has some attraction, but if this is all the Church has to offer, then its appeal is likely to be short-lived. If language lacks the power of poetry, then it sacrifices the ability to stimulate a deeper response. “Poverty of language equals poverty of thought,” was the way one Presbyterian minister put it to me. “People may think they have had a nice time in church, but is that all there is to it?”

Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, who has written a new introduction to the Canongate collection of the books of the Bible, confesses that, throughout his ministry, he preferred modern translations of the Bible, “because they give it the false gloss of factual discourse”. Now, however, he realises that resorting to simplistic language was an easy way out — a superficial form of communication with no lasting effect. The King James version would, in his view, have been a far more effective way of communicating the word of God, because it conveys “the dark beauty and tragic depth of ancient myth”.

Something of this is echoed by the Church of England’s new hero, and most modern of clerics, the Archbishop of York. In his inauguration sermon, Dr John Sentamu, who learnt his Christianity through the mission church in Uganda, emphasised a most unexpected aspect of his faith. “For me,” he said, “the vital issue facing the Church in England and the nation, is the loss of this country’s long tradition of Christian wisdom which brought to birth the English nation: the loss of wonder and amazement that Jesus Christ has authority over every aspect of our lives and our nation.”

Perhaps, in the end, it is something of that wonder and amazement that fills our churches at Christmas. Perhaps it explains too why we still prefer to hear the herald angels sing rather than listen to the speaking-clock banalities of the modern hymn.

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