10 Reasons Why We Should Sing the Psalms

Uri Brito on Psalm singing:

Many of us grew up in theological backgrounds where the psalms were known, but not sung. These theological backgrounds are anomalies throughout the history of the Church. E.F. Harrison observed that “Psalmody was a part of the synagogue service that naturally passed over into the life of the church.” Calvin Stapert speaks of the fathers’ “enthusiastic promotion of psalm-singing” which he says, “reached an unprecedented peak in the fourth century.” James McKinnon speaks of “an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm” for the psalms in the second half of the fourth century. Hughes Oliphint Old argued that Calvin appealed to the church historians (e.g. Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen) as well as the church fathers (e.g. Augustine, Basil, Chrysostom) for the singing of psalms. While the Reformers did not advocate the exclusive singing of Psalms they did express “a partiality for Psalms and hymns drawn from Scripture.”

The Reformer Martin Luther urged that Psalms be sung by congregations so that “the Word of God may be among the people also in the form of music.” By the end of the 19th century, however, most hymnals produced had limited psalms to a couple of well-known pieces like Old One-Hundredth. Beyond that, scriptural references had all but disappeared. Terry Johnson summarized the state of psalmlessness:

This eclipse of psalmody in the late nineteenth century is quite unprecedented. The psalms, as we have seen, have been the dominant form of church song beginning with the Church Fathers, all through the Middle Ages, during the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, and into the modern era. By the beginning of the twentieth century the church had lost the voice through which it had expressed its sung praise for more than 1800 years.

Though the last hundred years were not psalm-friendly, we have seen in the last 30 years a kind of revival of psalmody in the modern church, especially in the Reformed tradition. New hymnals, like the Cantus Christi, and many others are including old and new psalms (metrical and chants).

So why should we sing the psalms? Aren’t the 19th century hymns and contemporary songs sufficient to fulfill the worship demands of the modern congregation?

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7 Alternatives to Sunday Morning Announcements

Rich Birch on managing your announcements:

Ministry leaders think if they just get their event or program “promoted from the stage” people will flood into it. Church communications people are peppered with requests all the time for people wanting to get “their deal” in the announcements. The urgency from those leaders leans towards desperate. However, the more you talk about on a Sunday morning the less effective the messaging for everything is. You need some solid ways to say “no” to other ministry leaders by providing alternative communication channels.

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Top 10 Rudest Things People Do in Church

J. Lee Grady compiled a list:

1. Talking during a service.

2. Texting or surfing the web during a service. (One person mentioned seeing people playing video games on their phones.)

3. Sleeping—or snoring!—during a sermon.

4. Clipping fingernails during church. (I was amazed at how many people listed this offense. One person said his church’s sound technician clipped his nails routinely during the sermon, and it was amplified over the loud speaker.)

5. Answering a ringing phone in church.

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Church Music Director Takes Heat for Wife’s Column

Bill Thomas, the minister of music and associate pastor of First Baptist Church in Madisonville, Ky., might be resigning from his position following a recent uproar over his wife’s commentary about the Southern Baptist Convention’s approval of a resolution that expresses the denomination’s “opposition to and disappointment in the decision of the Boy Scouts of America to change its membership policy” to allow openly-homosexual members.

Thomas’ wife, who’s a humor columnist for the Messenger newspaper in Madisonville, told Savannah Oglesby, a staff writer for the publication that she had no inclination that her comments would jeopardize her husband’s position at the church.

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Seven Steps for Cleaning Up Your Music Mix

Mixing tips from Chris Huff:

Saturday, I was conducting an audio training session and I was given the opportunity to work on their mix with the worship band. The mix was pretty good so instead of re-building their full mix, I focused on cleaning up the mix.

There are seven areas to consider when cleaning up a mix. Mind you, like I said, this assumes you have a pretty good mix to start. For the sake of this article, let’s say you’re in the middle of your sound check, you like the mix, but you think it could be better. This is a great time to focus on cleaning up the mix.

1. Check your volume balancing.
Go through each channel and use this process; mute the channel, listen to your mix, then un-mute the channel. If the instrument or vocal seems to jump way out in your mix (too far out), then you need to pull the volume back a little. If the muting didn’t make a difference, then you didn’t have it loud enough.

2. Did you cut before boosting?
This is an easy mistake to make, especially on an analog mixer. What is that old commercial for BASF? Something along the lines of, “We don’t make baseball helmets. We make them better.” It’s better to have the best from the beginning.

Regarding the situation I was in, cleaning up the mix, I thought something with a singer’s vocal didn’t sound right. It was close, but not where I thought it should be. They had a boost in the vocalist’s mid-range. Maybe in the 6K range, I don’t remember. Using the sweeping mid, I moved the sweep frequency way down around the 800 Hz mark and did about a 4dB cut. This really warmed up their vocals and gave their voice a great tone.

The first part of creating a mix should be cutting out the offending frequencies. Once you do that, then you can consider boosting when it’s necessary. Remember, boost wide, cut narrow when you have control over the frequency range with a Q control.

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Kids Leaving the Church: What You Can Do to Turn the Tide

Jon Nielson provides insightful and practical tips:

“What do we do about our kids?” The group of parents sat together in my office, wiping their eyes. I’m a high school pastor, but for once, they weren’t talking about 16-year-olds drinking and partying. Each had a story to tell about a “good Christian” child, raised in their home and in our church, who had walked away from the faith during the college years. These children had come through our church’s youth program, gone on short-term mission trips, and served in several different ministries during their teenage years. Now they didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. And, somehow, these mothers’ ideas for our church to send college students “care packages” during their freshman year to help them feel connected to the church didn’t strike me as a solution with quite enough depth.

The daunting statistics about churchgoing youth keep rolling in. Panic ensues. What are we doing wrong in our churches? In our youth ministries?

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Preacher Video Goes Viral

Oklahoma Baptist Preacher Jim Standridge isn’t sorry for hopping off his pulpit and calling out members of his congregation for bad posture, poor attendance, and skimping on the collection plate.

“I’m a man of order, and we owe no one an answer for that,” Standridge, 76, told the Huffington Post earlier this week. “What concern is it of me what a carnal world thinks of this?”

The pastor’s May 19 meltdown at the Skiatook Immanuel Baptist Church was caught on tape and now has nearly 400,000 views on Youtube.

“I know I’m right, and I know I haven’t done anything wrong,” Standridge told the Barnsdall Times. “I don’t want to offend. That’s not my intention.”

The video, which went viral in late June, begins with Standridge calling out a churchgoer who allegedly laid his head back during the sermon. “I’m important. I’m somebody,” he says as hops down from the pulpit and goes into the audience to confront the young man.

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Archaeologists: We Found Shilo Tabernacle

In the Bible during the Hebrews’ 40 year trek in the wilderness, the Tabernacle was described as a movable tent which housed the Ark of the Covenant and accompanied the Israelites as they made their way to the Promised Land.

Now, archaeologists in Israel say they think they’ve discovered one place where the Tabernacle – also known as the Tent of Meeting – was parked, a discovery that has political significance today.

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