With All of the Saints

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All Saints is a major feast of the church that is celebrated in early November (for more on the feast, click here). It celebrates the communion of saints—both those Christians who have gone before and who are now alive that we join with when we worship Jesus.

Immanuel’s Land

When I was in high school, a colleague of my Pastor’s passed away and left behind an enormous library—something like 10,000 volumes. My Pastor enlisted the help of a few of the guys in the youth group to help him transport the books from the widow’s house to Master’s Seminary where they would become part of their collection.

Incidentally, the Dean of Master’s Seminary, John MacArthur sent a semi-truck on loan from one of his parishioners, a high up mucky-muck in the Hershey chocolate company. For hours we loaded books onto this truck while smelling the sweet aromas of our favorite chocolate bars. Anyway, in thanks for our help, we were each allowed to keep one book. My choice? A little black, leather-bound edition of The Christian Book of Mystic Verse compiled by A.W. Tozer. Inside the pages of this collection, along with many other deeply formative texts, I discovered Ann Cousin’s Immanuel’s Land. It contains nineteen stanzas and is truly a worthwhile journey to read them all.

I set several of the poems in this little black bound book that still sits on my shelf and whose cover is now barely hanging on. This continues to be one of the favorite melodies I have ever written. The recording is from our album Sleep Easy which you can purchase here.

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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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Be Thou My Vision

Slane; the name of Be Thou My Visions' tune and an Irish castle!

This 8th century Irish song gets my vote for best melody of all time. Its contour is perfectly shaped and it has just the right amount of repetition and new material. It is even more amazing to me that the text goes back to—as far as we know—just as early as the music. And this of course makes sense, because the lyric is so wedded with the melody that we could never imagine one without the other. This strength of melody and lyric allows many worship leaders to translate this hymn into a variety of feels and genres. This is my attempt at an arrangement.

I was looking to add some space between the stanzas to really contemplate the depth of meaning in the text, so I took the melodic material of the first and last phrases, varied it, and created and instrumental interlude. I also added a bridge that repeats the lyrics “Still be my vision.” Adding this space allows the congregation to meditate on the text, giving us the opportunity to really invite God’s vision to rule our hearts and lives and giving the Spirit a chance to minister.

The recording is live from a Resurrection sunday worship service featuring Alec Smith on Guitar, Jenn Swank Shuffle on Soprano, Bonnie McMaken on Alto, me on Tenor and Piano, Adam Babarik on Bass, Trae Mcmaken on Violin, and Zach Taylor on Drums.

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