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Yet another painful experience of modern Evangelical “worship,” once the fury and chagrin has drained away, awakens in my mind this scene from my boyhood: It is a summer Sunday evening service in a little Baptist church in rural Michigan, hard by the fields and woods. Everyone who plays an instrument (all “acoustic” in those days), young or old, skilled or not, has been invited to accompany the congregational singing, for that is what is done on Sunday evenings, when the service is less formal. The minister stops the music near the end of the hymn, taps the pulpit, and...

ROME (CNS) -- Catholics, Anglicans and Methodists filled Rome's Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls with some of the most famous hymns written by Charles Wesley at a service marking the 300th anniversary of the Methodist reformer's birth. The songs, featured in hymnals across denominational lines, were the focal point of the Dec. 3 ecumenical evening prayer service in the Catholic basilica. The Rev. John Barrett, president of the World Methodist Council said, "It was mind-blowing really" to celebrate Wesley and sing his hymns "in Rome with an ecumenical gathering." "I think Charles Wesley would be thrilled. He did...

Vote at the Holy Observer.

According to EWTN (I didn't watch the proceedings), there are two pieces of news on the the proposed music document that had been scheduled to be considered at the Fall USCCB meeting: 1) it has been downgraded from particular law to advisory, which means that it will not have the same binding status and will not require Rome's approval, and 2) it has been otherwise withdrawn because there were 100 pages of proposed changes and there was no way it could be tackled at the USCCB meeting. Very interesting.  This document was supposed to be a response to Liturgiam Authenticam...

I'm having some problems with music in Catholic America. Part of it is my problem. I spent fifteen years in the Anglican Church with the New English Hymnal--which is probably the finest hymnbook ever published in the English language. Musically and liturgically it was the best that traditional Anglicanism had to offer. Catholic music in England--well we won't even go there. Apart from a few islands of decent church music the Catholic church in England was a wasteland. I am discovering that in the USA it is not much better. My problem is that I am actually unfamiliar with most...

I've recently been strapping on the swamp boots to wade through something called Glory and Praise, perhaps the most commonly used Roman Catholic hymnal in the United States and Canada. Oh, it is sloppy and noisome work, logging the bathos, stupidity, banality, heresy, and textual vandalism. I've concluded, though, that there is one factor that touches every problem, something that helps explain these apparently disparate acts of mischief: -- the neutering of old masculine language about mankind and even God -- the heedless fouling up of the old poetry, to update a "thou" and a "thee" -- the seizing of...

Preacher Dan Smith turned a rap song about babes with booty into a spoof Internet hit, and used it to help create a new church for people who hate church. Dan Smith thinks Christians take themselves too seriously. Pastor Dan Smith's 'Baby Got Book' video, a big hit online, helped him start his Momentum Church. "We can be dorks," he says after Sunday service in suburban Cleveland. "We can be Ned Flanders and basically speak jargon that nobody understands." The 33-year-old pastor has made it his mission to turn the notion of earnest, boring, humorless Christianity on its head —...

God of our Fathers (National Hymn) Daniel C. Roberts, the 35 year-old rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, a small rural church in Brandon, Vermont, wanted a new hymn for his congregation to celebrate the American Centennial in 1876. He wrote "God of Our Fathers" and his congregation sang it to the tune Russian Hymn. In 1892, he anonymously sent the hymn to the General Convention for consideration by the commission formed to revise the Episcopal hymnal. If approved, he promised to send his name. The commission approved it, printing it anonymously in its report. Rev. Dr. Tucker, who was...

The Church Impotent by Leon Podles Despite constant feminist complaints about the patriarchal tendencies of Christianity, men are largely absent from the Christian churches of the modern Western world. Lay men often attend church activities because a wife, mother, or girlfriend has pressured them. As, Tom Forrest, a priest active in international evangelization, points out, only twenty-five percent of the participants in Catholic gatherings he has attended are men, and "when men do come, they are often brought along with some resistance by their wives." While men still run most churches, women outnumber them in the pews in Europe, in...

"'When Life's Troubles Rise to Meet Me’: Sifted in Satan's Sieve"(Sermon series on "The Hymns of Paul Gerhardt")Tonight marks the third in our series of midweek services on “The Hymns of Paul Gerhardt.” We are using the life and the hymns of this great Lutheran pastor and poet as an aid for our Lenten devotion. We began two weeks ago by seeing Gerhardt’s life as an example of how to live as a baptized child of God within your vocation. Last week we heard how Gerhardt’s hymns warm the believer’s heart by pointing us to God’s great love all around...

Lutheranism’s Sweetest Voice Turns 400Paul Gerhardt’s beloved hymns were a product of sufferingMalcolm Muggeridge once called suffering the only method by which we have ever learned anything. Nothing corroborates this British author’s insight more profoundly than the poetry of Paul Gerhardt, who was born exactly four centuries ago, on March 12, 1607, in Gräfenhainichen near Wittenberg. For most of his childhood, youth and maturity, this Saxon pastor experienced one of the worst calamities that ever afflicted Central Europe – the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). Yet “the religious song of Germany found its purest and sweetest expression in the hymns of...

"'Oh, May Thy Love Possess Me Whole': A Heart Warmed with Love"(Sermon series on "The Hymns of Paul Gerhardt")During these midweek Lenten services we are using the hymns of Paul Gerhardt as our window to gain insight into the life of Christian devotion. Gerhardt’s hymns are rich resources for doing that. Generations of Christians have treasured these hymns and made them their own. But what is it about Gerhardt’s hymns that makes them so beloved? I think it is this: They speak to the heart of the Christian believer by expressing what is in the believer’s heart. We can identify...

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 7, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Internet users can live Lent with Benedict XVI this year. The Vatican Web site is offering a compilation of the Holy Father's teachings and other tools for celebrating the liturgical season. The site's Focus section offers five tabs: Words of the Holy Father, Lenten Stations, Lenten Music, Calendar of Celebrations, and Live. The first, Words of the Holy Father, is updated with Benedict XVI's teachings during this liturgical season, beginning with his message for Lent. The site will include all his addresses during Holy Week ceremonies. Under the Lenten Stations tab is a list...

"'Hymns That Adore Him': The Baptized Life within Your Vocation"(Sermon series on "The Hymns of Paul Gerhardt")On March 12, 1607, in a little village near Wittenberg, Germany, Paul Gerhardt was born. As we approach the 400th anniversary of his birth in less than two weeks, and throughout this year, celebrations are being held in his honor literally around the world: a concert in St. Louis; a conference in St. Catharines, Ontario; the list goes on and on. In Germany, the Gerhardt jubilee is a very big deal. But this is nothing new over there. For many years there have been...

Have we forgotten the words? As we approach this Thanksgiving holiday, please take time to enjoy the verses of two traditional American songs, the Thanksgiving Hymn and the Thanksgiving Prayer. They affirm the gratitude of a people for their God. The copies we are sharing here did not come from a church hymnal. They were transcribed from a songbook distributed in our public school systems in the year 1945. This book was in every literate home in the United States at that time, and was called I Hear America Singing, or more formally Twice 55 Community Songbook. The assertion that...

WASHINGTON (October 18, 2006) — The U.S. bishops will vote to establish norms for hymns at Mass during their annual November meeting in Baltimore, November 13-16. The new norms, which will require a two-thirds vote by the bishops and subsequent recognitio by the Holy See, are to ensure that liturgical songs will be doctrinally correct, based in the scriptural and liturgical texts and relatively fixed. The norms are part of a new “Directory for Music and the Liturgy for Use in the Dioceses in the United States of America.” The directory responds to a recommendation of Liturgiam authenticam, the fifth...

I love hymns. I love singing them and I love listening to them. Hearing the robust Cardiff Festival Choir belt out the stirring hymns of Ralph Vaughan Williams at what my wife regards as an intolerable volume is, for me, a terrific audio experience. It was only when I got to know certain Lutherans, though, that I began to think about hymns theologically. For classic Lutheran theology, hymns are a theological "source:" not up there with Scripture, of course, but ranking not-so-far below Luther's "Small Catechism." Hymns, in this tradition, are not liturgical filler. Hymns are distinct forms of...

I picked up a CD by Alan Jackson at a Christian bookstore. I saw he was doing some of the old hymns and Gospel songs. I expected he was going to play in the Alan Jackson "country style". Instead it was a simple, pure versions of these songs using an acoustic guitar, piano, and organ. His family joined in on some of the songs. I learned on Amazon from a review that the songs were originally intended for his mother but he allows us to in a sense sit quietly in the room for this special moment. Anyway, for those...

About 270,000 people on Friday attended a Mass by Pope Benedict XVI in the same Warsaw square where his predecessor had inspired Poland's Solidarity movement against communist rule a quarter-century before.The faithful filled the rain-drenched Pilsudski Square, standing resolutely in ponchos and under umbrellas. Church bells pealed as the pope was driven to the square through streets lined with cheering, waving people. An aide held an umbrella as Benedict ascended a high Mass platform topped by a 82-foot metal cross.In his sermon, Benedict challenged moral relativism, or the view that there are no absolute values.In remarks read in Polish by...

CHILDREN’S definitions of church are always fascinating. One of my favourites is that of the child who said that a church was “a place where people sing a lot of hymns and walk about in patterns”. For those contemporary expressions of church which owe more to the conversational idiom of the television chat show and where worship takes place in bland settings more analogous to lecture rooms than sacred space (with a corresponding loss of those essential elements of worship — awe, reverence and mystery), it is a description that may seem outdated. Nonetheless, what processions and hymns represent is...