I sent this email to our worship leaders and I thought others might be interested in it. <\/p>\n
\nWhy do we try to incorporate a hymn each week into worship?<\/p>\n
The shortest answer I can give is to quote C. S. Lewis on old books: \u201cEvery age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook\u2013even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. None of us can escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.\u201d (from his introduction to Athanasius\u2019 On The Incarnation).<\/p>\n
The same thing is true of songs. There are some great worship songs out today and I want the majority of our worship to feature them. But I don\u2019t want us to just feature them. They have notable weaknesses<\/a> (pdf link) and so I want the \u201csea breeze of the centuries\u201d to blow through our worship and keep us rooted.<\/p>\n
Having said that, traditional hymn music doesn\u2019t really connect with today\u2019s students. That\u2019s why I urge you to seek out or make up (yes, you are allowed to do that) contemporary arrangements for the hymns that we do sing.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve found a few that illustrate what I\u2019m talking about. Check out http:\/\/igracemusic.com\/igracemusic\/hymnbook\/hymns.html<\/a><\/p>\n
Each one has a sample mp3, lead sheets, tab sheets, and other resources available for worship teams.<\/p>\n
Another excellent example is the Dave Crowder band\u2019s recording of \u201cAll Creatures Of Our God And King.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anyway, I\u2019ve been meaning to explain myself on that for a while but I\u2019ve never actually gotten around to it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I sent this email to our worship leaders and I thought others might be interested in it. Why do we try to incorporate a hymn each week into worship? The shortest answer I can give is to quote C. S. Lewis on old books: \u201cEvery age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing \u2026 Continue reading \u201cHymnody\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants-opinions-and-general-contrariness","category-resources-reviews","category-stanfordministry-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6Ded-hymnody","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}