Worship that is Transcendent and Contextual : Introducing the Hymnal

Incarnation's "Small Ya'll Choir" leading us in worship under the conducting of Grant Sung

As I have written before, the goal of Incarnation’s music program is to ensure that we “preach the gospel” through congregational singing. We come to church in order to encounter Jesus and be strengthened by him through the preaching of the Word and through receiving the sacraments. By doing this, we remember the story of God’s salvation in Jesus: the One who “has died” and “is risen” and ultimately “will come again.” This is the ultimate story which brings meaning to all of our stories, just as the Rev. TJ Ono recently preached in his sermon.

However, this story does not come to us in a vacuum. As we read the Bible and seek to understand the gospel story, our context collides with the Bible’s context, and we encounter the living Jesus through the pages of history. To paraphrase one of my professors from undergrad, faithful Bible reading (and by default, a faithful understanding of the gospel) requires that we “bridge the gap” between the world of the Bible and our world. The Lord Jesus, who lived as a male, Jewish carpenter under the occupation of Rome two-thousand years ago, is the same Jesus we encounter in our church: the eight year old Anglican parish that is located outside the capital of the United States, a Western country which is only two-hundred and fifty years young. In the music we sing, we seek to highlight the transcendence of the gospel story within the particular context of our worshipping community.

Week after week, our music leaders prayerfully select songs that highlight this story. We read the Sunday’s scripture readings or the Collect of the Day. We ask for the input of the pastors or whoever might be scheduled to preach that Sunday. We listen to the words of scripture and to the words of our present moment, seeking to hear what God might be saying to us and to our parish. We do not select songs simply because they are our favorites to sing or because they happen to be a hit on Christian radio stations. Rather, in the words of church musician Phillip Magness, we seek to be stewards of “the Lord’s Song” offering our praise back to the One who “exults over us with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:16-18).

As you can imagine, this can be surprisingly difficult work for our lead musicians. But it is good work. And in a very real way, it is work that we are all called to do. Not everyone may be called to lead congregational music or preach sermons, but we are all called to live in the tension of proclaiming the divine transcendence of the gospel within the particular contexts of our lives. We are all called to follow Jesus and to seek the ways that his kingdom is breaking into the places where we live, work, and play.

We all wrestle with the tension of proclaiming the gospel’s transcendence within the particularities of our lives. The church’s debates over music or liturgical styles (aka "the worship wars") all reflect this tension. These debates throughout the church's history are all various attempts at trying to answer this question: how do we proclaim the unchanging, transcendent nature of the gospel in a way that people will understand?

This question has indirectly shaped the particular culture of music at our church. This music culture, developed over time by various and musicians, has grown into something beautiful and fruitful. And so for the past few years, the music leaders of Incarnation have sought to create a resource that would strengthen the musicianship within our church, encourage more robust congregational singing, and disciple us more deeply into the truth of the gospel. We wanted to create a resource that would benefit everyone in our congregation, especially those who play an instrument and would like to learn the songs that we sing.

So we created a hymnal.

We have our very own hymnal! Behold its beautiful and glorious cover!

If you are interested in owning the digital version of the hymnal, you can email me at russell@incarnationanglican.org, and I will send it to you as a .pdf. We will have physical copies available in the narthex; because our initial print run was small, we ask that you please only take one per household to ensure that we can share this resource widely.

It is a joy and a privilege to serve as the Worship Pastor for Incarnation. I pray that this resource will be a blessing to you and to our congregation as we proclaim the gospel in our singing.

Your fellow worshipper,

Russell Vick