Holy, Holy, Holy
This is another great hymn that has been arranged in many ways. As is the case with many hymns whose most popular harmonization is for SATB, the harmonic pace can be too swift for a band to play without the arrangement sounding choppy and disjointed. I tried to slow the harmony down in this arrangement by simplifying some of the changes and harmonies to work with more of a guitar feel. Personally, I love and probably prefer to sing this hymn with standard 4-part arrangement, but this feel adds some variety to a classic hymn. As is my custom, I added an interlude based on the melodic material of the 4th stanza. I recommend doing the interlude at the beginning, ending, and in between verses 2 and 3.
Heard You Were A King (Come Thou Long Expected Jesus)
This song appears on our EP “In Wilderness and Glory.”
Download the entire EP for free here.
This is a re-imagining of the Hymn, Come Thou Long Expected Jesus that I wrote for Advent, 2007. The musical form uses a repetitive ground bass figure in the piano that gives a sense of stasis that is apt for a song and season of waiting for Christ to come. When it reaches the section with the lyrics, “heard you were a king” this pattern and the rhythm of the songs comes to an abrupt break.
In the midst of our waiting, we hear the news of a coming king whose presence will change the things in our life that we so desperately need changed—the violence outside of us in the streets and more profoundly, the violence within our own hearts.
In a culture that refuses to wait for anything, even Christmas as we feast on the season nearly before thanksgiving, and in a culture that substitutes the presence of things—like material gifts and presents—for the presents of people—our families, friends, and God—Jesus’ coming is a reminder that we need his advent in our hearts and lives every day of the year. God with us in the person of Jesus, our Immanuel, is the true gift that has the power to change.
Come Thou Fount
This is another one of those hymns that has such a timeless melody and contour along with painfully honest lyrics that it has been arranged effectively in a number of different ways in a number of different traditions. Like my arrangement for Be Thou My Vision, I constructed a melodic interlude to add some extra space between the strophic verses. I took the first phrase of the third stanza and then transposed down a sixth to echo the original. When I lead this, I give each phrase to a different instrument to emphasize the parallelism in different colors. My favorite combination is an electric guitar with some reverb and delay on the first line in a higher register and then piano in octaves on the second line.
I also altered the harmonic structured, putting it in the relative minor and giving it a really repetitive ground bass that has a minimalist sort of feel. This lets the band create a really thick and ambient groove that allows the melody to soar above the arrangement.
Also similar to the Be Thou My Vision arrangement, I’ve added some more space in a bridge section that repeats, “Here’s my heart Lord.” For me, this is the central thought of this song; that the life of faith is one of constant confession that we are not strong enough on our own. We admit that we are prone to wander, not just in our salvation, but in our sanctification as well. We confess that despite our love for God, we do what we don’t want to do (Rom 7) and turn our backs like the prodigal son and leave the father. The journey of faith is a continual giving of ourselves back to God, for it is only him that can put his seal upon us—the seal of our baptism into the father son and holy spirit. This is such a baptismal hymn for me. The fount is one of living water that cleanses and restores.
At the end of the bridge, the arrangement transitions to a reharminization of the first verse with a pedal on D. Our response to God’s forgiveness and incorpartion into his body in baptism is always praise. It is God who seals us and it is He who teaches us to sing. It is the beginning and end of a song about wandering. We do not end without hope, but in the joy of the fount, drowning in the forgiveness and redeeming love of a God we—though we wander—sees us afar off and runs to us to receive us back.
Every Tongue and Tribe and Nation
This past Spring (2009) one of my classes at Northern Seminary was with Sam Hamstra (author of Principled Worship and an upcoming book on multicultural worship) on the topic of multicultural worship. For the class we read Justo Gonzalez’ book, For the Healing of the Nations. In typical Gonzalez fashion, I was challenged to grapple with my latent and often unbiblical assumptions. I was often shocked and startled—in the best way possible—at his reading of Acts and Revelation Scripture.
His basic premise is that St. John was calling the church in revelation to live not only out of its past, but out of its future (103), that Revelation is essentially “A poem to god’s future and our future with God” (viii). The picture of worship around the throne in Revelation 7:9-12 becomes the end goal of God’s redemptive process—the joining of peoples of every culture in worship of the lamb. He reads through Acts as the story of the Spirit’s expanding mission to take the gospel to every peoples. He challenges the church today to begin preparing for and to live in the reality of the future kingdom that we are praying will come (105) .
For Gonzalez, the purpose of embracing a multicultural worship now is not simply so that others who are different than us feel at home among us, but so that we feel at home among God’s future. Our worship is a prophetic, eschatological participation in and rehearsal for our future when every tribe and tongue and nation will worship God (109). Whether we individually and personally believe this is possible here and now or feel called to multicultural churches now, I find the vision of a church of every tongue and tribe and nation to be an extremely compelling one. I hope that I can grow in my understanding of what it means to live and worship out of a Revelation 7 vision of the church’s future.
I wrote this hymn for Pentecost, 2009, to focus on how the word of Jesus that is the Gospel comes to us all through the Spirit in our own language to redeems us as persons and as peoples, and to bring us together around the throne of God to worship him. It sets sections of Acts 2, Ephesians 4, Isaiah 53, Revelation 7, and Revelation 22.
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Isaiah 51 (I, Even I Am He Who Comforts You)
In May of 2008, John Fawcett, the longtime worship leader and one of the key shapers of the worship culture of Resurrection passed from this life into God’s presence after a several year battle with cancer. John was the worship leader when Bonnie and I first began attending and then leading worship at Resurrection. He was a colleague of Robert Webber’s at Wheaton College and actually practiced on a weekly basis the blended worship and ancient future worship that Webber wrote about. John was a charismatic (in every sense of the word) leader who’s larger than life personality always faded into the background as he led in worship that ushered the congregation into the very presence of God.
John was also a leader in the healing prayer movement and was particularly adept at leading worship in the free flowing, Spirit led context of healing services. John also wrote many of the settings for liturgical songs that we use in our worship service. Bonnie and I learned a lot about worship leading directly from John in the few years we knew him and we’ve continued to learn and be blessed by the legacy he has left at Resurrection in the worship culture he helped form and in the people who knew him and were touched by him.
When Bonnie and I were asked to lead worship at our first healing conference last fall, we immediately asked ourselves, “what would John do?” I remember sitting with John in between sessions at the last PCM healing conference he did in the summer of 2007 as John flipped through four large, red binders with hundreds of worship songs in them as he said out loud, “well Lord, what do you want us to sing?” So Bonnie and I loaded up all of our music into large binders and tried the same approach!
After John passed, his widow Margie passed along an old manuscript book to our worship pastor, Steve, who showed it to me. On one page there was a set list of songs for a healing service, one of which was an original song, and on the next page was John’s sketches of that unfinished song in somewhat messy shorthand. It was a verse and a chorus of music, and a chorus and about three quarters of the lyrics for one verse. I studied the score and did my best to interpret it. Along the way I discovered that he was setting a portion of Isaiah 51. The chorus was from verses 12-13a, and the verse was from verse 13b. Using his framework, I finished the first verse and wrote two more verses based on the scripture verses following to the end of the section.
Below is the final piece. I post it as a thank you to John and his ministry and as a celebration that John’s gift of worship leading lives on in the many young worship leaders who have learned so much from him.
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Lamb of God
In our liturgy, we add the Lamb of God during the two penitential seasons of Advent and Lent just after the acclamation, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast!” It is found in the Gospel of John 1:29, when John the Baptist sees Jesus and is the first to name him as the anointed one. He also predicts Jesus’ death as the sacrificial lamb, the one who was born to die.
This setting repeats the phrase the traditional three times. It does differ in that it ends with another statement of the text “Lamb of God.” As I wrote this, I was so filled with gratitude for what Jesus has done for us, that I just wanted the last thing to be sung to be this beautiful name of Jesus, “Lamb of God.”
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