Liturgy, Part 1: Against Liturgy-Bashing

24 August 2008

The first of several planned papers on liturgical matters, “Against Liturgy-Bashing” attempts to clear away the nonsense that plagues our thinking in many American churches. To bring it closer to home: our local church is in desperate need of liturgical reform, and we cannot even begin to build a God-honoring liturgy until we have cleared away the underbrush of the pagan ideas that harden our necks and soften our heads. To that end, this paper addresses several common objections to liturgical worship. Two excerpts:

Does the leading of the Spirit require spontaneity rather than planning? Again, we can return to the commands to sing in order to see the fallacy here. Imagine if we all just got together, and on the count of three, all began to sing whatever words happened to pop into our heads, set to Read the rest of this entry »

Comments Off on Liturgy, Part 1: Against Liturgy-Bashing | liturgy, Meditations, News | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Cantus Christi: Psalm-Singing for the Masses

27 July 2008

For my birthday, my darling wife bought me three presents: Cantus Christi, the accompanying CD set, and a 4-sermon series titled The Worship of the Saints. I’m going to review the first two here. The sermon series is definitely worth reviewing, but I’m still recovering from my shock. I’ll have to get to it later.

Cantus is a serious effort to recover psalm-singing in the church, as the proportion of the book devoted to the psalms demonstrates (196 out of 440 pages).

The single biggest challenge in psalm-singing is that while God gives us the words, He has not been pleased to preserve the original music. A saint who would sing psalms — as we are all commanded to do (Eph. 5:19, Col. 3:16, Jam.5:13) — must somehow come up with the music by which to sing them. Happily, this does not mean we have to write all the music ourselves.

Over the centuries, many saints have encountered this same challenge, and have written or adapted music for the psalms. Accordingly, Cantus is also a serious attempt to mine the wealth of the Western Church’s musical tradition. The music for the psalms relies heavily on the Genevan Psalter and other early Reformation musical sources, and the hymn tunes go back as far as A.D. 800. Psalm tunes include metrical songs (hymns that ordinary folks can sing without Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | How To, liturgy, music, Reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Next Entries »