Vive les hymnes!

JENNY LIND SCHMITT, CORRESPONDENT: It’s an early Friday evening at La Prairie Church in Montbeliard, France. In the middle of sound checks and instrument tuning, Sebastian Demrey and Jimmy Lahaie take a break to talk to a host from the local Christian radio station, Radio Omega.

RADIO OMEGA: Bonsoir à tous, on est quasiment en direct…Bonsoir, Jean-Philippe…Bonsoir.

Demrey and Lahaie call themselves Heritage Music. They give new life to classic hymns in French and introduce them to a new generation. While that’s a growing trend in English churches, it is still relatively new in French congregations. And there are many fewer artists doing this work.

As the back-stage interview draws to a close, Demrey invites listeners to the concert.

DEMREY: Moi je vous invite à venir ce soir. On va passer un très bon moment. Si vous aimez l’accent canadien, ça va être génial aussi.

Demrey and Lahaie are from Quebec, but most of their French-speaking audience lives outside Canada. This is their first foreign tour since 2020. As the concert begins, there is palpable joy on both sides, as artists and listeners find each other again in the same room.

SONG: CROWN HIM…

But what about that long hiatus? Not only did it affect their careers, like so many other performers, it also affected how they lived and thought about their faith. Was it strong enough to survive when they couldn’t worship in person? Sebastien Demrey says the lockdown and subsequent period have been revealing.

DEMREY: I know for a fact that for a lot of people when churches reopened, a lot of people didn’t come back to church physically, they were just okay with the online. And sometimes they didn’t even watch the online. So we can see the importance of being rooted in the faith. Even If the building’s closed, if the internet’s closed, well, how deep is our faith?

Demrey and his wife worshiped at home with their family during the lockdown. It took adjustment, but his kids loved it, and the experience fostered new depth in his relationship with them. Even as churches reopen, he hopes Christians can rebuild roots in their faith to make sure they’ll be ready the next time a crisis arrives.

The hymns Demrey and Lahaie sing were written in past centuries, when mortality rates were higher and life seemed more tenuous. That has been particularly meaningful during the pandemic.

SONG: PLUS PRES DE TOI…

Many of the hymns are translated from English originals. At times, the depth and meaning comes across richer in translation. One example is Plus Pres de Toi, –Nearer, My God to Thee:

“Nearer to you, Lord, nearer to you,

Hold me in my pain, Lord, nearer to you.

Even as my suffering does its work in silence,

Ever nearer you, Lord, hold me nearer to you”

DEMREY: When a song travels through centuries, it’s because the person that wrote it went through something and by faith decided to write. A lot of hymns were written out of tragedies and hard circumstances. They chose to keep the faith and to write songs about it and poems.

Demrey says we should be careful of what he calls “fast food” music in the church: Music that’s released, then vanishes quickly to make room for the next big song. He adds that whether old or modern, the church needs songs that are biblically and theologically strong—songs that exemplify the Apostle Paul’s exhortations to feed on the meat of Scripture.

DEMREY: So we just have to be careful that our music, what we sing in the church makes us reflect about salvation, about preaching the gospel, about being deeply rooted in the faith, and about when trials are going to come, how are we going to face those trials.

The duo originally started the Heritage collaboration for their own sake. In 2010 the friends realized they shared a love for the old hymns that their parents and grandparents sang. For fun, they decided to record an album of those songs before returning to other musical projects.

AUDIO: [Concert]

But their music struck a chord with the French-speaking world. Now they’ve made hymns the focus of their careers.

Lahaie explains the creative process of breathing life into these beloved songs:

LAHAIE: We’re revisiting the hymns without changing the melodies most of the time. So we change the chords and the rhythm. We keep the tableau, the old painting on the wall, we just change the color and the background.

SONG: GOLGATHA…

Lahaie and Demrey say their individual tastes and preferences rub off on each other. Lahaie is guitar and folk oriented. Demrey more piano and strings. Together their style ranges from pop to folk to jazz, with influence from their travels. Before the pandemic, they toured Madagascar and Reunion Island, and rhythms from those travels showed up in their next album.

DEMREY: We’re very much inspired by a lot of different styles of music. We just don’t want lyrics and poor music. We want both forms of art: Lyrics, poetry, singing, great musicianship.

SONG: BLESSED ASSURANCE…

Demrey hints that Heritage Music has some contemporary music projects in the works for the future. But even if they do, they’ll keep singing the old classics. Songs that remind everyone in the audience where their real treasure is.

DEMREY: We have a hope that is way beyond the physical world. We have a soul, and we know where our soul is heading after death. We have a bigger hope in Jesus than anything else.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Lind Schmitt in Montbeliard, France.

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