Playing "Lean on Me (Everlasting Arms)" in Church
A secular song and a hymn that fit perfectly together
One week at summer camp when I was 8-years-old, the counselors sat us all down in a pavilion by the pool to teach us the words and choreography of a song. Because it was the late 90s, they had a boombox and I don’t remember if it was a tape or a CD, but they played the song for us and that was my first time hearing these iconic words:
Sometimes in our lives,
we all have pain;
we all have sorrow.
But if we are wise,
we know that there’s
always tomorrow.
It’s been so long that I couldn’t tell you if the point of teaching us the song and choreography was for a performance or not, but we must’ve spent at least a week playing that song and practicing the hand motions over and over and over again.
Good thing Bill Withers made this song a timeless classic.
Even as a kid, the song hit me deep in my emotions. It still does. The combination of the hopeful words with Withers’ soulful delivery that carries a sense of longing feels primal to the human experience. The truth is we all suffer and we all crave community. This song’s message of mutual support and care for one another only becomes more necessary with time.
Eight-year-old me couldn’t have imagined playing this song in church–back then, I barely went to church at all–and yet, decades later, it happened.
Well, what actually happened is we played an arrangement that combines “Lean on Me” with the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
My church’s music director found this arrangement and wanted the band and full choir to do it together. This would be our second time combining the band and choir. The first was when we covered “Everyday People,” mixing Joan Jett and Sly Stone’s versions. Typically, the band and the choir are separate even though there’s crossover between the two groups and both are part of every service.
My church’s music ministry as of my writing this consists of the music director (organ, piano, and choir director), a bass player, a drummer/percussionist, a 6-7 piece choir (including me and sometimes the bass player), and me on guitar. We definitely changed this arrangement to fit what our choir and musicians could do well:
added an introduction that only had the vocals and piano before the rest of the band came in
lengthened the instrumental intro that you hear at the beginning of the recording
cut the transition into the key change and jumped right into it instead
added a third verse and made the “You just call on me brother” breakdown a bit closer to Bill Withers’ version
cut the vocal solos, but since we’re planning on playing this song again, we might be able to add them back in
The music director carried the main chords and melody on the piano as she usually does. The bass player kept it simple following the chord changes and the drummer stuck pretty close to the recording as far as I can tell (I’m not a drummer. I just know the drummer played a beat that worked lol). As for me, I added more guitar than what’s in the recording because of course I did. I played higher voicings of the chords on my Fender telecaster through my Big Sky + Katana amp with some light crunch.
This is a clip from a cell phone recording. At the moment, we aren’t a high-production value church, so this is the best capture we can manage. You can easily see the blend of musicianship styles we’re currently working with–the choir members reading their music from their folders, the bass and piano players reading from music, and the drummer and I playing from memory. Vibrant movement accompanying an upbeat song like this isn’t the starting point of my church’s culture. Even I look stiffer than I actually felt while playing. My church is quite introverted and stoic, so for us, this song is genre-expansive because it’s trying to stretch us outside of our comfort zone. It’s more gospel than what we’re used to, but it isn’t so gospel that we couldn’t pull off a decent version of it with where we are right now.
Yet people in my congregation have told me that they love more joy and more upbeat music. It’s good for us to do songs like this to start encouraging worship that loosens us up a little bit. It’s good that we are willing to stretch ourselves into new (to the church) genres and it will only get better the more we do it. Because “Lean on Me” in particular is a familiar song to most people, playing it in church can encourage congregational participation. That’s another benefit of using secular music in church, especially in a denomination like the UCC which often attracts people who otherwise wouldn’t go to church at all. An element of familiarity can make someone new to a space feel like this is a community they could be part of.
Not only is this song fun to play, but the idea of it highlights how flimsly the line between “secular” and “sacred” really is. Strict divisions like this in church music no longer serve us, and so much “secular” music can be very edifying for the church. “Lean on Me” is about taking care of those around you, knowing that one day you’ll need someone else’s support, too. “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” is about relying on and fellowship with God. Together, these songs reflect a theology you find often in progressive churches: because of God’s love for us, we are able to be as Christ to others. Salvation is not exclusively an individual’s experience of faith–it’s also the healing and restoration of community that God calls us to.