10 Worship Songs We Should Stop Singing

6. Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)

Once upon a time, there was a man named John Newton who wrote a hymn. Along the way, someone else added a final stanza that doesn’t quite fit (“When we’ve been there ten-thousand years…”), but it stuck. 200 years later, another guy wrote a refrain that doesn’t fit at all with the text. And though there is a long history of adding a refrain to an existing hymn (“Marching to Zion,” for one), Chris Tomlin’s obscures the continuity of the original hymn, serves only to give it a commercially marketable emotional and melodic peak (“and like a flood, His mercy rains” [Do floods rain? No. They rise.]), and portrays God as a white knight, romantic leading man, an alpha male.