The hymn If Thou But Suffer God To Guide Thee, written by Georg Neumark in the 17thcentury, expresses resolve that the Lord will provide His people with the strength to endure any circumstance, even “the evil days.” Neumark was well-acquainted with evil days: his entire early life was spent amid the Thirty Years War, a conflict […]
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The use of narrative passages of Scripture in a worship service can pose some difficulties for a music director. If the choice of music is governed by how best to support the preaching of the Word, as I believe it should be, you want the hymns or psalms you choose to relate to the passage
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The simple text, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy,” each repeated three times, has been used in the worship of the Christian church since at least the 2ndcentury A.D. Loosely based on the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18:13 (“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”), it was so widely
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Outside of music, one of my great passions is history. Most evenings, after my children are asleep, you can usually find me in my library or on my back porch, engrossed in some bygone era. While reading in British historian John Keegan’s The American Civil War, I was struck by a passage that touched on my
“Jesus, Lover of my Soul” Read More »