With the return of Favorite Hymns Summer on June 16, I thought a fun theme for my three summer Tidings articles might be to write about each of the three hymns I have entered as favorites this time: 

1. “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending” - #435;
   
2.  “The God of Abraham Praise” - #831; and
   
3. “O Christ, What Can It Mean for Us” - #431

These three picks are unabashed “hymn nerd” choices! I picked the first two because they are good old hymns that we do not sing very often, pairing rich texts with great tunes that are not used anywhere else in the hymnal. My third selection for this year features a thought-provoking newer text (published in 2001) with a good older tune.

With that, then, I will start at the top of this year’s list. “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending” comes to us from the early days of the Methodist tradition. The text began as an early version written in 1750 by John Cennick but was later completely rewritten in 1758 by Cennick’s friend, Charles Wesley, brother of Methodist movement founder John Wesley. I feel relatively safe in saying that Charles Wesley is the most prolific hymnwriter that Christianity has ever known, as he wrote texts for more than 6,000 hymns! Ten of his hymns have made it across denominational lines as well as two and a half centuries to be included in the red Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal we use at Trinity, the most famous being the Christmas classic “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing“.

The tune for “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending”, named HELMSLEY, is credited (1763) to Thomas Olivers, another early Methodist. would very much like to write a new text someday to go along with this tune because it is one of many that deserve to be used more often than they currently are. Below is the version of the text that we have in our hymnal, which includes (with slight alterations) verses 1, 4, and 5 of Wesley’s text:

1. Lo, he comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain;
thousand thousand saints attending join to sing the glad refrain:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! Christ the Lord returns to reign.

2. Now redemption, long expected, comes in solemn splendor near;
all the saints this world rejected thrill the trumpet sound to hear:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! See the day of God appear!

3. Yea, amen, let all adore thee, high on thine eternal throne;
Savior, take the pow'r and glory, claim the kingdom as thine own.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! Thou shalt reign, and thou alone!

You too can join in the fun of Favorite Hymns Summer by entering your favorites! I invite you to submit your selections any time through June 9th, even if you turned in picks back in 2017 when we first did this during the summer--I would like us to refresh the list every couple years as people join the congregation. Simply fill out a Favorite Hymns Summer card on the small table in the Fireside Room and drop it in the box to enter your favorites, or you can enter them on the Favorite Hymns Summer page of the site. I look forward to singing everyone’s favorites this summer!
 

I write these words to you just a few days before little Rosalind’s baptism (to take place on the first Sunday of this month, May 5th). On that morning, her new life in Christ will unfold in the same way as her mother’s and her father’s and many others in the Lutheran Christian tradition: by being baptized as an infant and sent out from that event with family members, godparents, and a local congregation to continue forming her in faith.

Rosalind’s path to Christian life has been the norm for Lutherans in our more than 500 years of history, something we inherited from our Roman Catholic roots (Martin Luther ended up being pushed out of that church body as a result of his Ninety-Five Theses and other writings from the year 1517 onward). It has been the norm for Lutherans because Lutheran Christianity has existed only during the Christendom period, wherein Christianity has been a state-sanctioned and/or majority religion in many Western nations. Simply put, people were born into Christian families and then grew up to build Christian families of their own.

While that system of passing down Christian faith through successive generations has been very effective over the centuries, population trends today give us a powerful reminder that Rosalind’s path is not (and cannot) be the only pattern in which the Holy Spirit works to form faith in people. A couple years ago, the Pew Research Center did a study on the religious landscape of the United States. Their findings provide some interesting information. Christianity is the nation’s majority religion, at 70.6% of the population. Lutherans of any denomination are 3.5%, and just 1.4% of the United States is specifically ELCA Lutheran.

Those numbers are minor and probably unsurprising facts. However, the Pew study did find some other information that is more surprising. According to the study, the fastest growing religious group is the “nones”--people who are not affiliated with any organized religious group at all--which is now up to 22.8%. A quick bit of math, and we discover that there are over 16 times as many “nones” in the United States as there are ELCA Lutherans!

These sorts of numbers may seem troubling to you. They might drive up your anxiety or push your mind into dark places. How is a congregation like Trinity to continue doing vital ministry for our next 129 years without the steady generational supply of Lutherans that existed for     our first 129 years?

But what if there were a way to see those numbers not as a threat but rather as an opportunity? After all, knowing that there are 16 times more people around us to reach with the good news of Jesus Christ than we have people to send out means that God has lots of fruitful work for us to do! I say this not simply as a cheerleader for the Lord’s servants here--I say it because it is exactly the perspective of the early church, as we learn in the Book of Acts.

In the first years following Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the apostles faced long odds and hostile environments for spreading the gospel; yet, the Holy Spirit worked through them to drive thousands of people to the emerging Christian movement. We will share stories of their work from the Book of Acts all through the Easter season, and I will be preaching a series on those weekly readings with an eye toward the topics of conversion and evangelism--things that are vital to making disciples out of “nones” and building a congregation that excels in welcoming people to share in the joy, sufferings, and salvation that come along with life in Christ!

As the waning Lenten season prepares to yield to the powerful drama of Holy Week and the pure joy of Easter, something struck me about the readings we have heard this season. I noticed recurring themes of repentance and new life in Christ across many of the lectionary selections:

• But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. (Philippians 3:20-21, Lent 2)
• Warnings to Repent & Parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Luke 13:1-9, Lent 3)
• If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17, Lent 4)
• Parable of the Ridiculously Gracious Father/Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32, Lent 4)
• Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. (Philippians 3:7-9, Lent 5)

All this talk of new life is quite inspiring and uplifting. It’s the stuff that great sermons, hymns, and books are made of. As encouraging as these passages are, however, the road between the old life we are used to and the new life God has for us in Christ can be long and difficult.

The observation that that road can be long and difficult is not a new idea, nor is it an original one. Like many matters of faith, though, it is an idea that Andrea and I have come to more fully appreciate in light of our recent journey to new life as parents. When we discovered last year that we were expecting, we had no idea of the curves, obstacles, and potholes we would encounter. Some of these were completely expected, including sleep deprivation in baby Rosalind’s first weeks and the process of adopting and adapting rhythms for family life. Even some of the medical challenges were anticipated, especially the need to diligently watch Andrea’s thyroid medication levels because the medicine provided all the thyroid hormone that she and Rosalind had to work with during the early period of Rosalind’s neurological development.

We expected those things and had at least some idea as to what we were getting into. We did not, however, expect such broad-ranging medical complications as Andrea’s preeclampsia and persistent (and still ongoing) battle with shingles or Rosalind’s need to spend ten days in the NICU at the Children’s Hospital of Illinois before getting to come home with us. The new life we ended up with is wonderfully full of joy, but the road to get there was far more involved than we had ever imagined.
As we continue in these final weeks of Lent, then, let us embrace whatever hard work and/or deep reflection and/or change in our ways that God sets before us on the road to the new way of life God has for us in Christ. The specifics will look different for each of us, and the journey continues beyond the Lenten season--indeed, through our entire lives. But in this special time of the church year when we remember Christ’s triumph over sin in hanging on a cross on Good Friday and his final victory over death by rising again at Easter, let us give thanks for the God who makes such new life possible for us and reminds us daily of that good news through Holy Baptism. In the words of our forefather Martin Luther:

• What then is the significance of such a baptism with water? It signifies that the old person in us with all sins and evil desires is to be drowned through daily sorrow for sin and repentance, and that daily a new person is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.  (Small Catechism: Holy Baptism)

After a brief mountain trip for the festival of the Transfiguration of Our Lord on the 3rd, the month of March puts us in the “fast” lane with the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, the 6th. Fasting--that is, observing food restrictions at certain times--is a component of many world religions, including all of the “Big 5” religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism). Each religion has its own particular attitudes and practices toward fasting, and Christianity reflects the great diversity of opinions on fasting even within the same religion since each group of Christians takes a different approach. Many of you may be familiar with the Roman Catholic practice, for example, of refraining from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. Eastern Orthodox Christians observe longer and more frequent fasting periods than that, while many Protestant denominations pay little or no attention to fasting.

As for us Lutherans, well...the situation is a bit more complicated. Martin Luther was steeped in the Roman Catholic tradition, so he was very well acquainted with the practice and its surrounding theology--namely, that depriving oneself of things you enjoy can draw you into closer relationship with God. He understood the intent behind the practice and had no problem with it, but he objected to the self-righteous use of fasting, which is the notion that fasting is a good work of faith that people can do to get into a more favorable state with God. The verdict, then, is that fasting is a proper part of life for Lutheran Christians, but we have to take a guarded approach to it so that we do not make it an end in itself.

We take that approach when we realize that fasting, while an unusual thing, is simply one of several physical faith practices that help to engage our bodies in religion, which could otherwise be pigeonholed as an activity solely for the mind. This puts fasting right alongside other things we do regularly, like sitting and standing during worship, making the sign of the cross, or processing down the center aisle during festival services. These sorts of faith practices remind us that our whole selves--even our bodies--belong to God and have been created for the purpose of glorifying God.

With that in mind, then, I invite you this year to the Lenten fast with new and broader definition of fasting, one that is not limited to just food. This year, let us think of fasting as stepping outside of our automatic behavior into purposeful spiritual adventures. Things change when we stop living any aspect of life on autopilot and devote the necessary attention to alter a particular behavior in order to more fully glorify God in what we do. Perhaps that altered behavior is a healthier eating pattern, to care for the body God has given you. Maybe it is spending more time interacting with people than with your phone, to better appreciate God’s wonderful gift of human community. Or, you might just take a classic approach and give up time spent doing literally anything else and divert it toward prayer or reading the Bible.

Whatever your Lenten fast looks like this year, I pray that your purposeful spiritual adventure is meaningful and eye-opening. Fasting is not simply prescribed food restrictions--it is a step outside the usual and into a space where only God knows what will happen!

During a recent Confirmation class, we got into a discussion about how God sometimes seems to act in noticeably different ways in Old Testament stories compared to New Testament stories. We all agreed that God is the same through both portions of the Bible, but we were grasping at straws for some greater understanding as to why God might act differently in these different situations. Grasping at straws, that is, until one student said something to this effect: “Well, you know how they say that having a kid changes you? Maybe having Jesus his Son in the world changed stuff for God.”

I am still puzzling that back and forth in my head and working out the theological nuances. Might be fodder for a future Tidings article. What I can say for certain, though, is that a new child entering one’s life is a catalyst for change--or at least it has been for me. Many of these changes will be ones that I can only identify someday with the help of years and years worth of hindsight. However, some of the changes occur rapidly and are easier to describe. For me, one such change is a fresh encounter with a Bible character to whom I previously gave only passing attention: Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist in the first chapter of Luke. I was plenty familiar with Zechariah’s story thanks to its common use during the season of Advent. I knew that Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth, became parents at an advanced (well beyond childbearing) age, a callback to the stories of Abraham and Sarah in the Book of Genesis. I laughed along with many hearers of the story when Zechariah, questioning God’s promise given through the angel Gabriel, is made mute--unable to speak--until after the birth and naming of John.


During this past Advent season in November and December, though, familiarity with and knowledge about Zechariah’s story was transformed by the Holy Spirit into experiencing and living his story.

1. While Andrea and I are definitely younger than Zechariah and Elizabeth, respectively (Luke 1:7), we also know that we will probably be significantly older than most of the parents of Rosalind’s eventual classmates and friends. Older first-time dad…check.
   
2. Zechariah is a priest on duty in the Temple, offering incense to God in the sanctuary (understood in Temple-period Judaism as the very home of God), when the angel Gabriel appears with the message of John’s impending birth (Luke 1:8-17). Though he is standing in the one place on earth where God’s presence is understood to be an absolute guarantee, Zechariah doubts Gabriel’s message and brings upon himself the hilarity of having to “eat his own words” (Luke 1:18-20). Flawed clergyman who sometimes puts his foot in his mouth…check.
   
3. After John is born, Zechariah follows through with Gabriel’s naming instructions and his tongue is free again (Luke 1:59-66), and he launches into a hymn of praise (Luke 1:68-79) that is known as the Benedictus because of its Latin translation. Hymn nerd who finds his way to praise God...check.
   

While points #2 and #3 above are things I could perhaps have noticed before, it took point #1 to open my eyes to the rest.
My situation as a new parent was an opening for the Holy Spirit to help me see my own life reflected in a Bible story I never thought about very much; however, having a new baby at home is not the only life change that drives us to find new meaning in old scripture. I invite you to get out your own Bible and to listen intently to the readings as we worship God each week--you just never know when the Spirit will give you an old story that brings new perspective to your life!

We have just come through our busiest and most exciting month of the year, loaded with joyful activities focused on the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. We helped local people have a great Christmas by adopting a girl through the Salvation Army Angel Tree and supporting Courtyard Estates’ “Santa for a Senior” program. We delighted in the different perspectives of the four Gospel authors through the “Christmas in Four-Part Harmony” presentation on Youth Advent Sunday. We shared Christmas joy with our homebound brothers and sisters and local senior community residents in our annual evening of Christmas caroling. We shared the good news of Jesus in song and spoken word in the Christmas Eve Service of Seven Lessons and Carols.

But the calendar has now turned over to a new year, and all of those joyful events have come and gone. Yes, the twelve days of Christmas are ongoing as this month begins, concluding with our Epiphany service on January 6; however, things certainly feel different once the Christmas season is on the downswing. We emerge from that moving, engaging, and peculiarly special season into the bleak midwinter period of regular routines disrupted perhaps only by inclement weather. December’s “ho-ho-ho” yields all too quickly to January’s ho-hum, and the Christmas season of wonder ends with us feeling bored and wondering what to do next.

It is in this transition to boring, predictable, and routine, though, that the we have pause to consider the meaning of all that we have just celebrated, to consider what it means for us and for the world on an everyday basis that Christ, the Savior, is born. The seasons of Advent and Christmas fill us with joy in the truth and reality of Jesus, but then God sends us out the rest of the year to show people the difference it makes that the good news of Jesus is real and true. God sends us out to give people a foretaste of eternal redemption through Christ by improving their lives in the here and now. God sends us out to model a community lifestyle of equality and fellowship, as all of us stand before God as equals due to the human sinfulness we share in common (and, along with that, our need for God’s saving grace in Christ). God sends us out to share the peace and connectedness of our congregation with people who are in need of just those sorts of things.

We have two upcoming opportunities to share in this work to which the Christmas message inspires us:

• Friday, Jan. 18 (2pm-4pm, SIU/Graham Learning Lab in former Coleman Clinic building, 175 S. Main): Poverty Simulation - The University of Illinois Extension and Southern Illinois University School of Medicine are leading this event to help our community develop creative ideas for addressing the challenge of poverty in our area. The event is free and will be very powerful, especially if you have never lived in poverty yourself.
  
• Monday, Jan. 28 (5pm-7pm): Snapper Villas Meal by TLC - We will share homestyle food and fellowship with the Spoon River College students who live in the new Snapper Villas dormitory! Stay tuned for more information about this project as the month continues (though you can let me know if you are interested in cooking or serving)!
  

Though the Christmas lights and decorations will be coming down on January 6 after worship, let us go out to reveal Christ to the people around us. Even when the joyful events of Christmas have come and gone, we servants of the Lord rejoice because it is now that the work of Christmas has begun, as our choir sang in their postlude on Christmas Eve:
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, to heal the broken,
To feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations; to bring peace among brothers,
To make music from the heart.

The peace of the Lord be with you as we join together in this work!
Pastor Micah

To be honest with you, I thought a little while ago that I had this month’s article made in the shade, that everything was aligning for me to be in perfect condition to speak about the season of Advent as it begins in December. I would have written (at least I hope) a touching and inspiring piece on the theme of expecting as my bullet train to impending parenthood with a due date of December 7. I would have mused about Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem and marveled at its difficulty in comparison to the 30-mile drive we would be making to Peoria with the comforts of heat and cruise control. I would have made comparisons between the uniqueness of Mary’s divinely-established pregnancy and the unique pregnancy I had watched Andrea go through over many months (including such medical curiosities as a mother who no longer had her thyroid, a persistent case of shingles, and some preeclampsia to boot).

However, things have changed--quite significantly--since I first dreamed up that grand plan for my December Tidings article, as unto us (Andrea and me, anyhow) a child is born! Our daughter, Rosalind Vivienne Garnett, was born at 10:03pm on November 15 at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, measuring 18½ inches and weighing 6 pounds even. We had not expected our little “Ros” to be born in November like her daddy rather than in December like her mommy. We also had not expected to have a premature baby, but that was what turned out to be the case since Andrea’s preeclampsia necessitated Rosalind’s birth a mere 117 minutes short of her being considered full-term (37 weeks gestation).

Given all these developments, then, our time of expecting has apparently ended, and it seems that I have to find another lens through which to view this Advent season. God has given us a good gift beyond anything we could have imagined--a wonderful baby daughter who is healthy despite all that could have gone wrong. I thought: such a gift has been given to us that we could not possibly be expecting anything else, right?

And with that one meandering thought, the season of Advent took on a new and richer meaning for me to share with you. Perhaps Advent brings us to realize that even though God has, in Jesus Christ, given such a great gift and fulfilled God’s own promises from all the ages, the human sense of “expecting” does not end with Mary’s unique experience in a stable’s “labor and delivery ward.” As easily as we can see God ultimately fulfilling all at the manger, maybe the point of that first Christmas moment is to remind us that every day for us is to be lived with that “expecting” outlook of Advent--to be an exercise in watching for whatever new gifts God gives each day...and trusting that there are always more good gifts to come.

The Gospel writers understood this all too well, as we will discover in our “Christmas in Four-Part Harmony” youth service on December 16. That morning the Sunday School, Confirmation class, and Youth Group will help us explore the different views of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John regarding the origins of Jesus. The stories are all shorter than we might imagine considering the importance of the Christmas event, but that in itself is the point--God always has new blessings and gifts to reveal to humanity. Through all four of their Gospels, they tell of God revealing gifts of grace, health, social equality, courage, humility, and so much more as Jesus lives as one of us, dies a human death, and rises on the third day to forever destroy the power of death. Furthermore, even Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were not enough for God, who also gave us the Holy Spirit to guide us each and every day.

Even though the anticipation and excitement of impending parenthood in my home have given way to the sleep-deprived realities of deciphering newborn sounds and mastering swaddling techniques, our sense of expecting remains after all. We invite you to join us this Advent in a life of expecting even more from the God who has already given us all things!

I’ll begin this month with some words of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer: “In fact, God’s good and gracious will comes about without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come about in and among us.”

In that little sentence, Luther points out the obvious: that our infinitely good and powerful God can do whatever our infinitely good and powerful God wants to do. However, he also points out something much more bold about the intent of our praying the Lord’s prayer: that what God wants to do may be accomplished through human hands. In other words, God doesn’t need or require us or our effort to effect what God wants for the world...yet, God nonetheless pulls us into the mix anyway, using our imperfect human hands for holy work.

This surprising action of God--engaging human hands to effect God’s will in the world--is what we call God’s mission, and that is a frequent topic among us. As this month progresses, though, we will take September’s Mission Sundays a step further. Now that we have reflected on what the mission is to which God has called us, we can turn our attention to how God’s mission catches fire among us.

The fire of God’s mission is ignited by God’s own self--by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who moved over the waters of creation of the world (Genesis 1:2) and the divine spark of inspiration through all the ages. This spark finds kindling in the life of Holy Baptism as we each receive the Holy Spirit and discover the unique child of God we have been created to become, filled with gifts of the Spirit--raw materials for God to use and refine every day of our lives. Individually, then, we are embers of God’s work, smoldering in our own little spheres of influence.

Embers are indeed a good start, but there is one more ingredient needed for a full-fledged fire: fuel. Fuel helps God’s mission to catch fire among us and in the world, and it is the assortment of things we give to and employ in God’s work on earth--time, money, skills, goods, energy, possessions. All of these fuel sources make the fire of God’s mission shine brightly to the people around us through community service ministries, worship, Christian care ministry, education, and fellowship.

While we are the ones putting the fuel onto the Welcome, Nurture, Serve fire of God’s mission that is burning Trinity Lutheran Church, though, that fuel doesn’t belong to us. It is all given to us by God, as Martin Luther reminds us in the Small Catechism (Creed, First Article): “God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property—along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life...and all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all! For all of this I owe it to God to thank and praise, serve and obey him.” God gives us all that we have, and we give it back to God as fuel for God’s mission...and we do so with joy because we delight in the eternal life God has secured for us through the most selfless gift of all--Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

We will share more about this throughout the fall season in our Mission Fuel-Up campaign that begins Oct. 21 with celebrating the Holy Baptism of Cara Elizabeth Timmons, granddaughter of Kent and Donna Charlesworth. We also will be introducing online giving through the new ELCA partner organization Tithe.ly this fall and offering a Thrivent Legacy & Estate Planning Workshop on Nov. 4 through our local Thrivent agent, Alex Lamprecht. I will also be throwing a new hymn into the mix this season that reflects on stewardship not as a fancy word for fundraising but rather as fueling the fire of God’s mission. If that sounds familiar, that’s great--writing this article for you helped me make sense of what I had been grasping at for the hymn!

Peace to you all as we work together to fuel God’s Welcome, Nurture, Serve mission for Trinity!​

By now, many of you have probably noticed that I write quite a few new hymns. I have been a hymn nerd since was five or six years old, and have been writing my own hymns for about ten years now; however, it is just within the last three years or so that I have begun to be consistently pleased with their quality. I truly appreciate the support you express for my acting upon this particular piece of my spirituality, and so, I thought I would use this article to give you a “view from inside the hymn writer’s workshop!”

Developing Subject Matter
I tend to prefer structured source material on which to base my hymn texts, as structured material helps me to make sure my hymns are really saying something rather than simply being heaps of empty phrases with no context. Like Martin Luther, I believe that singing hymns is even more effective for teaching tenets of the faith than reading or other strategies--essentially, I see it as preaching with music added. Some “structured” examples:

• “I Trust In God” - This hymn paraphrased Luther’s Small Catechism, Creed section.
• “Trinity Mission Hymn” - This hymn, written to sing for Mission Sundays each year, used the structure of our “Welcome, Nurture, Serve” mission statement.

In other cases, I am simply captivated by a particular verse or phrase in scripture or another written source:

• “Risen to Serve” - Inspired by the story of Jesus healing Peter’s mother (Mark 1:29-31).
• “Called, Gathered, and Enlightened” - This phrase from Luther’s Small Catechism, Creed section (3rd Article) became the refrain of this simple hymn.
• “Crumbs of Grace” - New for Sep. 9, based on Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman (Mark 7:24-30). 

Still other hymns arise out of necessity as I discover gaps in the church’s hymnody:

• “For All Mothers” and “A Thanksgiving for Fathers” - Mother’s Day and Father’s Day hymns, already few in number, often sugarcoat these holidays that can be emotionally complex for many people.
• I will be offering at least one more “gap-filler hymn” in October or November, as I am working with some other pastors to create hymns with an updated vision of stewardship that communicates better than our centuries-old  stewardship hymns that were written for agrarian societies.

Choosing Tunes
This piece of the process can be quite interesting. Sometimes, the tune choice provides an opportunity for me to connect to some detail that underlies the hymn’s origin or purpose, almost like an “in-joke” between friends that you can only understand if you know the story. Some examples:

• “Trinity Mission Hymn” - The choice of a Swedish tune recalls Trinity’s heritage in the Augustana Synod (the Swedish Lutheran church body in the United States)
• “Reforming God” - Because former Trinity pastor Maureen Stein suggested I write this hymn for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the tune is the Irish LONDONDERRY AIR, or “Danny Boy”--I selected this (in jest at first, but then loved it) because Pastor Maureen is of Irish descent.
• “For All Mothers” - I wrote this to sing with DIVINUM MYSTERIUM, the tune of the beautiful Christmas hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”, as a pun suggested by my wife, Andrea.

Other hymns go through several different tune possibilities before landing where the Holy Spirit wants them to be, as I sketch out stubs of possible verses to see which tune gets the words flowing more easily. I make worksheets for each hymn with lines labeled to help me remember how many syllables each block has and which blocks are supposed to rhyme--in the example of the Trinity Mission Hymn, the lines were labeled “7A, 6B, 7C, 6B, 7D, 6E, 7F, 6E.” Once I get this worksheet done, I put the music into the Finale music notation program on the computer, type in the lyrics, then fuss with the sheet music layout a bit to make it as readable as possible. That's it!

I hope this little trip to the workshop was interesting for you! Thanks again for the freedom you give me to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ using all the tools that God has given me!