Idolatry On Sunday Mornings

I just ran across this series of articles by Bob Kauflin. I can't recommend it highly enough, both for those involved in leading and conducting worship and for those sitting in the pews. Bob Kauflin is a songwriter and worship leader that works out of the Sovereign Grace network of churches. I have very much appreciated his work in songwriting, and we use several of Sovereign Grace Music's songs at our church.

Kauflin asserts that there are several idols that are being worshiped in American churches on Sunday morning - often ignorantly - along with the worship of the one true God. These idols aren't carved images or statues, but rather tend to be other elements of American worship. Kauflin identifies music, tradition, creativity, experience, liturgy, biblical knowledge, biblical ignorance, musical excellence, results, reputation, and relevance as potential idols that can draw our worship away from God. Kauflin confesses that he is guilty of worshiping each of these things before God at one point or another, and I must admit the same.

My Son "Reads" Psalm 23

It took Ferg about a week to get this down.

Getting This Going Again

I guess it's time I start keeping up with this blog again. There are a few links here and there to this blog, and it looks pretty bad if my last post was from 10 months ago. Plus, it's pretty bad that all of the information on my profile was out of date. It didn't even have the birth of my daughter 8 months ago! According to my profile, I only have one kid. So the profile has been updated, and I'm off again.

Attention: Theology / Church History / Music Nerds

Check out this site. It contains recordings of all 150 Psalms from the Genevan Psalter. If you're not familiar with the Genevan Psalter, allow me to explain. It's a collection of paraphrases of the Psalms, compiled by John Calvin and first published in 1543.

At the time Calvin only allowed the members of his congregation to sing the Psalms during corporate worship. And, for reasons that I won't get into here, did not allow the psalms to be accompanied by any instruments or vocal harmonies. In other words, the whole congregation sang the same melody line unaccompanied - something that's completely unheard of in modern church music.

The website listed above has mp3 recordings of each of the 150 Psalms, all re-arranged in English available for download. But the original melodies from the Genevan Psalter are used, which is kind of neat. Except melodies from the 1500's are pretty weird. They're extremely hard to follow. It seems almost impossible to predict where the melody is going. Also, the recordings on this site are done a capella, which Calvin surely would have appreciated.

Each Psalm begins with a single voice singing the melody for the first verse, and then other voices join in and harmonize the following verses, which Calvin would probably disapprove of. You can also download pdf files of the sheet music for each Psalm. I can't imagine singing these with a congregation, but it would be fun to try.

The recordings sound great. I'm going to download as many as I can. They're kind of neat when you get to listening to them, and they're very powerful. Even though the language is a tad weird, you can't beat God's word set to music.

Something I Want To Remember

Every night Betsy and / or I usually read Jamie a story or two before he goes to bed. Jamie's favorite book is an Elmo counting book that counts different animals. He likes to make the sounds of the animals as he sees them in the book.

We were visiting with some out of town friends tonight, so we got home late - later than Jamie's usual bedtime - so Betsy just grabbed the first book she saw, which was NOT the Elmo book. The plan was to read a quick story and get him off to bed. After the book was done, Jamie sat up in Betsy's lap, looked at us and said, "I want Elmo," in about the most pathetic, cutest voice he could muster. It was impossible to say "no." So Betsy went and found the Elmo book, and everything was hunky dory.