“Forward, Foster’s Children!”

“Forward, Foster’s Children!” is a hymn performed at a Church of the New Revelation service, where its calls to strike down enemies make worship sound like a march to battle. The song matters not only for what it says but for what it does: as the congregation chants, Mike feels their collective force and understands the experience as growing closer, even before he considers the lyrics’ meaning.

Performance and Words

The young man leading the service introduces the hymn as an old favorite and directs the congregation to sing together. Its title announces forward motion, while the first verse couples faith with weapons: “Faith our Shield and Ar-mar! Strike them down by rows-!” The next verse sharpens the command, urging the singers to make no peace with sin and insisting that God is on their side. Rather than offering a quiet devotional pause, the hymn gives the service a militant, rallying cadence.

The wording is presented as a collective performance, not a private statement of belief. The leader cues the verses, and the congregation answers in unison. That form matters: the song’s commands become sounds carried by a crowd, binding its participants together through repetition and shared rhythm. Its religious assurance and its language of force occupy the same lines, so the hymn makes combativeness feel like an expression of communal faith.

Mike’s Experience of the Congregation

The hymn occurs within a service already organized around bodily and collective movement. The congregation has been chanting and marching in a snake dance; the song starts the dance moving again, with marchers and choir joining those who are too feeble to march. The hymn therefore extends an existing communal rhythm rather than interrupting it. Singing, marching, and chanting become overlapping ways of participating in the same gathering.

Mike is so joyful that he does not pause to translate and weigh the words in the usual way. He understands that the lyrics are not the essential part of the experience: what matters is the growing-closer they produce. His response separates verbal meaning from communal effect. The hymn’s militant language remains audible, but for Mike the crowd’s shared participation carries a more immediate significance than a reasoned interpretation of each phrase.

Collective Intensity and Meaning

The song’s force lies in a tension between its explicit calls to strike enemies and the closeness Mike feels among the people singing it. That tension does not erase the lyrics’ aggression; rather, it shows how a shared ritual can bind participants through sound and coordinated action even when the words themselves are not what one listener attends to. In the service, the hymn functions at once as a declaration of religious solidarity and as a cue for renewed movement.

For Mike, the moment also reveals a way of joining human worship that does not depend on first mastering its verbal content. He does not translate the hymn before responding to it; he experiences the congregation’s sound and participation as a whole, and recognizes that as growing closer. The episode thus makes the title’s forward movement literal in the renewed march while giving the song a second significance in Mike’s understanding of collective religious experience.