Project Update 2

Producing Music

It is with great excitement that I announce some of the work my wife (Hannah) and I have been doing lately. We have been greatly encouraged by your feedback and your support, and we hope to serve you even more fully here in the near future.

Our first and most exciting announcement, placed here at the top so there’s no chance you’ll miss it, is that my wife and I are recording Psalms and hymns to four part harmonies and publishing some of them to YouTube. Find our first song here:

worshipreformation.com

We now have a website up and running! You can find it at worshipreformation.com. All of the articles I’ve been writing here are also available there, but I’ll keep posting future articles in both locations to make things more accessible. You can also find more information about our family, our goals with the website, and many more pictures.

Additionally, you will find our podcast in the navigation, and all the latest episodes will be displayed there. I’m using Spotify as the distributor, and I know that the podcast will show up on the Overcast and Apple podcast apps. If you use something else and can’t find Worship Reformation in your search, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

The scope of the podcast is currently transforming the articles I’ve written into podcast form—I don’t read them to the microphone, but I do use them as my notes. So it still sounds podcastly and conversational, and occasionally I’ll throw in some extra explanations or skip portions I deem not worth the time. Soon there will be short form snippets of thoughts I have on random subjects which don’t fit well into articles, and I also hope to eventually interview guests so that I don’t have to be the sole occupant. So there will eventually be some content there which is beyond the scope of these SubStack articles. Take a look at the episodes I’ve got published thus far and be sure to subscribe!

With all this talk about striving for good music in corporate worship, and with how much my wife and I enjoy visiting churches with the traditional style, we thought it would be fitting and enjoyable to begin recording ourselves singing hymns and Psalms to four part harmony—with a piano accompaniment to help drown out our mistakes and make things sound nicer. We are not professional singers, recorders, or audio editors, but it is our goal to provide two things: high quality, accessible music albums which will actually be pleasing to listen to, and albums with the parts split up so that you can, for example, download an album full of Psalms and hymns sung with the alto or tenor or bass parts amplified. In this way, you could learn how to sing the part you best fit into with your vocal range.

One of the main reasons we are setting out on this journey is because I have often found myself building YouTube playlists of various Psalms and hymns sung by churches so that I can enjoy listening to them while I paint artwork. The problem is that the audio quality is poor, it’s on YouTube, and there are ads which play every so often (I know, I could pay to get that fixed). My alternative is to go to iTunes, where I find Lutheran choirs singing to a blaring organ—an even more muddled and obnoxious cacophony of noise. Nobody seems to be offering Psalms and hymns which are unmodified from the psalter or hymnal they came from—iTunes artists are constantly adding silly frills and extra bits which I’m not a fan of. I just want someone to display the simple (or rather, complex) beauty of a hymn or Psalm sung straight out of the book. And while you might say one could do this raw sort of thing without a piano, I’ve found that I enjoy listening with some sort of musical accompaniment to help carry the voices through the gaps while the singer takes a breath. Instruments help smooth things out and offer depth, but they have to be very carefully applied.

Are others doing this? I haven’t found ones that I like—the reasonable hymns I find on iTunes are all the typical, common ones written in the late 1800s. On the other hand, Brian Sauve’s versions of “My Soul Thy Great Creator Praise” and “The Day is Past and Gone” are basically exactly what I’m going for. You can find these on YouTube as well. But he’s a busy guy, and it’s understandably not his main focus. And my wife and I will have a lot of fun doing this.

For our first album, we have a selected list of 10 Psalms and Hymns that our family has learned and enjoyed over the years. For the newer ones, I have contacted the authors to obtain copyright permissions and have thankfully received all of them. Since my wife and I do not play piano that well, we are recruiting my sister to help us out. Our main shortcomings currently come in the form of not knowing how to mix audio—we’re winging it, but I’d like to get a lot better at it. If you have experience in this area and are interested in helping us out with this, please let me know!

Mexico

Another large announcement that we’ve been distributing recently is that my wife and I intend to join her father’s ministry in Mexico. While this is a big decision with a lot of weighty implications, we feel called to help continue the legacy of our families, and we seem to possess a skillset more acutely needed by her side of the family. Having grown up there, Hannah will be welcomed back by a bunch of very happy people, as will I since I’m naturally part of the family anyway. Since she knows Spanish, English, a little Tarahumara, the culture, the people, and how a small farm works, she will be an immense help to our family’s work.

For myself, I am a pilot. I fly airplanes for a FedEx feeder company, and I have over 3,000 hours of flight time in smallish airplanes. And Hannah’s family spends a lot of time traveling on dangerous mountain roads which are easily bypassed with an airplane. While mountain flying is a completely different animal from what I’ve been doing, I have access to mentors, instructors, and people who have offered to help us with the logistics of operating an aircraft deep in the wild Sierra Madres in Mexico. Through my father-in-law, I will also have the support of quite a few political allies in the area, all of which will help me in keeping my nose out of trouble. While we have many hurdles to clear, God has been facilitating our planning in an encouraging way. All that remains is 1) raising money for and building our aircraft, and 2) I need to learn Spanish.

In Mexico, I will still fly, paint artwork, write articles, record songs with my wife, and teach people how to sing. If I learn the language well enough, I might even write translations of Psalms and hymns into Spanish. One of the unfortunate aspects of Christianity in Mexico is the rampant feminism, brought about by Catholicism, American culture, and pagan roots. When missionaries from the states bring in more feminism, contemporary styles of worship, bad theology, poor translations of poetry, and atrocious meters in the Psalms and hymns, is it any wonder why the church is struggling. What’s exciting is that they essentially haven’t had a protestant reformation yet—a significant feature of which was congregational singing.

Spanish hymns are plagued with emotive, feministic theology, and psalters are under-developed. I have found the Genevan Psalter translated into Spanish, but there’s one problem—no attempt has been made to match the meter of the words to the music. One has to rush through a bunch of syllables in one half of the verse and slow down in the second half. Again, if anyone here knows of a Spanish hymnal with good lyrics or a psalter that I’m missing, please let me know.

Book

And finally, I am still developing my thoughts in these articles. Someday I still hope to write a book on the subject. I’m currently writing through a short series of articles on modern delusions the church has about corporate worship—the next article is coming out very soon and I’m looking forward to publishing it. It needs some criticism from my wife first. As always, feel free to send me mail on aspects of worship theology on which you disagree with me. I am grateful for any and all feedback before I permanently publish my wild ideas on paper.

Thank you all again for your support. Many exciting things to come.