I Have Decided to Follow Jesus
Sea of Galilee
This is an arrangement of a popular hymn that Bonnie and I wrote for an offertory during Epiphany, 2010 (click here for the sermon that it followed). I didn’t know beforehand, but the melody is a Hindustani folk tune from India. The passage for the Sunday was Luke 5 where Jesus calls his disciples to follow him.
We added a verse in the relative minor to echo Jesus’ words in verse 4, “Put out into the deep…”Just as the Lord called Peter into the deep to catch fish, he sends his church today into the world to bring others to him. May we, like Peter, leave everything to follow him and may the catch be astonishing!
We played it on guitar with kind of a folky back-beat feel. Our friend Robb Robins played it with us on accordion to add some sustain chords and also tag the melody lick in between things.
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.
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