Why do we usually end our church services with a song?

Scriptural example would be a good place to start.

Matt. 26:30 - “And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives.”

It’s a really good question, and Olinger hits on something I’ve been contemplating as well; that the poetic word, or the sung word, seems to stay with us in a way that the prose/spoken word does not. Given that until a couple of centuries ago, the printed/hand-written word was rare and expensive, it therefore makes sense that so much of Scripture was given to us in lyric form, and that God tells us (Psalms 149 and 150, Colossians 3:16, etc..) to sing His Word for the same reason.

It might also be some very good guidance regarding precisely which songs we ought to sing—that if a big part of the point is to communicate God’s Word to God’s people in lyric form, then we ought to be at least somewhat particular about the form those lyrics take.

(and on a light note, I’ve got an “Air Supply” test for music in the church….if I can change less than a dozen words in a song and have it be, apart from a lack of musicality usually seen in CCM, plausibly singable by Air Supply, it fails)

I just finished reading, Tremper Longman’s book “How to Read the Psalms”. In it he states, “Poems appeal to the whole person in a way that prose does not” (91). He compares Exodus 14 and 15. One is prose and one is poetry. Exodus 15 elicits more emotion and more detail than the narrative in chapter 14. He states, “poetry appeals more directly to the whole peron than prose does. It stimulates our imaginations, arouses our emotions, feeds our intellects and addresses our wills. Perhaps, this is why poetry is the preferred mode of communication of the prophets, whose purpose depends on capturing the attention of their listener and persuading them their message is urgent (92). 27% of the Hebrew Bible is poetry and only like 6 or 7 books don’t have any poetry in them.