Hymns

 
Choral: Away in a Manger

This is a choral arrangement I did for our church a while back. We performed it again this year in our Christmas program, and Jenna recorded this video. Like most live recordings it has a bit of background noise, but I suppose of all the pieces I’ve written, this one goes best with various interjections from [...]

 
New Creation #5: Nailed to the Cross

Fifth in a series featuring songs from my CD New Creation. For more information, read this link. The Song Behind the Song Carrie Elizabeth Ellis Breck (1855-1934) was a natural poet. Although she claimed she had no sense of pitch, she wrote more than 2,000 devotional lyrics while holding down the full-time job of homemaker and mother to [...]

 
The Things We Want to Sing About

This is my contribution to Rachel Held Evans' Rally to Restore Unity. Read about it at the link. Augustus Toplady was, frankly, a bit of a jerk. He was an evangelical Anglican clergyman with a strong Calvinist bent. If he lived today he'd certainly be one of those Calvinists, the kind who write annoyingly combative blogs ranting [...]

 
Pop Goes the Worship War

(Or, How to Start Your Own Worship War With 7 Simple Tools You Probably Have Around Your Home If They Haven’t Burned It Down Yet) – A response to “Pop Goes The Worship” -  Why do people quarrel and fight and split hairs and churches over something as seemingly petty as “traditional vs. contemporary music”? In [...]

 
The Problem With "Worship"

I'm hoping to start blogging more about worship and church music in the near future. Meanwhile, enjoy this from a while back. A while back on Internet Monk's website, there was a fascinating conversation on worship–you could do worse than to check it out–prefaced by this zinger: (The theological term for this, if I recall from my [...]

 
Recommended Reading (mostly on Words and Music)

It's Recommended Reading time again. Here are seven links that, if you're interested in this site, you'll most likely be interested in as well: 1. Chaplain Mike at iMonk lets loose A Rant from a Loser in the Worship Wars. (For a rant, it's very well-reasoned and generally charitable, as we've come to expect from the good [...]

 
New Creation #4: Alas, And Did My Savior Bleed?

The Song Behind the Song Isaac Watts (1647-1748) is known as the “Father of English Hymnody” for very good reason. If he wasn’t the very first to ever write a hymn in English, he was the one who showed the rest of us how it was done. A precocious youngster with an inborn knack for rhyme, [...]

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