Okay, the article that keeps going around and around on Facebook about the importance of the hymnal is about to drive me crazy! I love hymns, but they stand independent from any book that you might hold in your hands. I pray that everyone agrees the goal is to get people engaged in singing our worship and praise to God. Can we agree on that? How that happens SHOULD NOT MATTER. Yes, I’ve attended worship where I had no idea what notes to sing, and was frustrated, but the solution cannot be to go find a 15 year old book and put it in the hands of the congregation and limit them only to the hymns that can be found in that book. How, in this age of electronic information, do we come to the conclusion that the best answer is still found in a limited book? As a child I remember only having the 10 year old set of encyclopedias to find information for school. Today, we get most of our information on line. Why would I limit myself to a 10 year old book, when I can find thousands and thousands of hymns and songs on line? I’m neither anti-hymnal or anti-projection. Let’s use whatever we can find to engage people in worshipping through song! Where I serve, we worship in a 100 year old sanctuary. We don’t that money for high tech equipment, and it wouldn’t work in our space anyway. My solution is to print (musical notation, including parts) EVERYTHING we sing in our worship program. We initially just printed the music to new songs and hymns and let the congregation pick up the existing hymnal for everything else, but it just wasn’t practical and it caused our musical worship time to be disjointed. I am now able to use the breadth of music throughout church history, and we do. We use many songs from CCLI and SongSelect (with a band), as well as traditional hymns (many that are no longer in any hymnal!) It works… Our people love it… All ages are joining in to share in the gospel story together, just like a family. I call it Converging Worship.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 14:10:47 +0000
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