The singing presidents

Hymns and songs make connections. Connections with what we believe and connections with other people.

That’s why both the current Youth President of the Methodist Church, Thelma Commey, and her successor from this autumn, Phoebe Parkin, included singing in their pitches to take up the role.

At 3Generate, the Methodist Children and Youth Assembly, held in Southport in 2018, Thelma (right) turned to an old, familiar hymn to express something of her testimony – “Jesus loves me, this I know”. She hastens to add that she “sang it in an upbeat version”, but says the song not only encapsulated her chosen theme for the year, Jesus Loves All; it also spoke of her personal journey “to a real life understanding of Jesus’s love”.

So, too, for Phoebe Parkin, a church member in the Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury District, who set out to build a connection with her 2019 3Generate audience (pictured below). “I wanted them to know what sort of person I am” before presenting her campaign. She drew on a rather different musical style by adapting the lyrics of the uplifting Bruno Mars hit, “Count on me”. “I wanted to introduce myself quickly to those who were listening,” and in this way she, like Thelma, was singing her faith.

Phoebe likes the title for the Methodist hymn book – “Singing the Faith”. She believes music and lyrics are a really good way of helping us connect with our faith, even when the tunes are not yet familiar. “You can listen, you can read verses as prayers, and certain hymns can bring back memories and feelings, and evoke all sorts of things.”

This was also an early lesson for Thelma, who grew up in Ghana and only encountered the hymn tradition of British Methodism when she moved to the UK and started worshipping in a Methodist church just four years before becoming Youth President. When she first encountered congregations singing “five times in one service!”, she wondered what all these songs were. Because they were all new to her, she would focus on the words and found that the messages they carried made a powerful impact on her.

It was natural for Thelma to teach a hymn like “Jesus loves me” to the young children she met as she travelled around the country pre-Covid, to help them tap into her presidential theme. Phoebe also names a well-established hymn that expresses the emphasis she has identified for her own presidential year: the environment.

O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
consider all the work thy hand hath made. (StF 82)

Young people do like older hymns, Phoebe insists. They combine it with a movement towards writing their own music. Hymn singing is not “fuddy duddy”, she believes – it’s about making “connections”.

That word again. Youth Presidents are not only figureheads for young people but their voice within the Methodist Church and beyond. They reach out to young people, listen to their stories and convey what they hear to wider audiences. They are “connectors” – and hymns, for both the presidents themselves as well as those they represent, provide one way of putting their understanding into words.