Category: Congregational Songs

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Church Congregational Songs

Hosanna in the Highest

Update 3/16/22: Sheet music for this song is now available at gregscheer.com.

Starting to do your Palm Sunday planning? Think about using this song I wrote for last year’s Palm Sunday service. The tune is the Jewish tune associated with  “The King of Glory Comes,” but the text is brand new.

I kept wanting to use “The King of Glory Comes” on Palm Sunday, because the mood is right and it’s in the ballpark thematically. However, the verses of Jabusch’s text don’t fit. What I really needed was something I could use during our Palm Sunday procession. So I wrote one that captured the “Hosanna in the highest!” of the crowd in the refrain, and some of the associated Old Testament scriptures (Ps 24, Is 40) and narrative subtext in the verses.

You can almost imagine Jesus coming closer as the song progresses: The verses begin with prophecies of the Messiah with which the crowd would have been familiar. Everything is pomp and circumstance until Jesus comes into view, at which point there’s some head scratching–what kind of King rides a donkey? Verse 5 includes what is missing from many Palm Sunday songs–a foreshadowing of what was to come. By verse 6, the crowd does what crowds do, and the people are back to their festivities.

Here is the MP3. If you ask nicely I can send you string parts, and perhaps by the end of the week some brass parts.

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Congregational Songs Psalms

From the Dust You Shall Raise Us Up

Update 2/8/22: Sheet music for this blog is now available at gregscheer.com.

Christina Mandang

I had an unfortunate opportunity to reflect on mortality this summer when my friend Christina Mandang was hit by a car. Her sudden and senseless death at the age of 38 reminded me once again how fleeting our lives are. It is truly ashes to ashes and dust to dust, with precious little time in between. The good news is that the God who breathed life into dust to create Adam and who resurrected Jesus from the grave, is the same God who has promised to raise us from death to eternal life. Now that’s Good News!

Frank Diehl

When Christina died I was reflecting on all this and a short refrain came to me, “from the dust you shall raise us up.” I sang it to myself as I mourned her death, wrote it down, and it has remained in my idea folder ever since. Ash Wednesday gave me another chance to consider all these life and death issues, and I revisited that short refrain. I decided to pair it with the words of Psalm 103 in which God, the loving Father, “remembers we are dust.” This was an especially appropriate image, because my friend Janice had just lost her father, Frank Diehl.

Here is my sung prayer of thanksgiving for Christina and Frank, and my sung prayer of hope for the rest of us: From the Dust, You Shall Raise Us Up.

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Art Music Choir Church Congregational Songs Finale demo

The God of Abraham Praise

In December I blogged about an arrangement of mine that we used in this year’s Lessons & Carols service at Church of the Servant. The hymn “The God of Abraham Praise” fits beautifully with the reading about the calling of Abraham, so I arranged it for string orchestra, oboe and flute. It worked so well that I convinced Robert Nordling to commission a full arrangement for the Calvin College Orchestra. It will premiere Saturday, March 5 at 8pm in the Covenant Fine Arts Center. I hope to see you there. In the meantime, you can listen to Finalified MP3.

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Congregational Songs Psalms

All People that on Earth Do Dwell (Psalm 100)

I don’t make a habit of posting other people’s music at my blog, but in this case I thought I’d make an exception. You can read the story and hear a recording of Zac Hick’s “All People that on Earth Do Dwell” at the COS website, and you can download my piano and SATB arrangement here. Rock on, Zac!

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Congregational Songs Psalms

Psalm 133: How Good It Is

Last week I met with my Nepali friends Peter and Prasad to work on a on a song. Since the song was for a combined service of Basic English Service attendees and our main congregation, we decided to write a song based on Psalm 133 with verses in Nepalese and refrain in English. The process of co-writing in two languages was fun and the result (if I may say so myself) was very successful. Take a look at the PDF or listen to the MP3.

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Colin Congregational Songs

A Child Is Born

This is the time of year when I catch up on all the projects I’ve put off while preparing for Christmas services. Now that the services are basically planned and ready to go I give myself the Christmas present of sitting at the piano for long hours doing creative work. Here is the first to be completed: A Child Is Born (MP3, PDF), written with Colin Gordon-Farleigh. It’s a melodic Christmas song that makes a nice follow up to our Emmanuel Now.

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Choir Church Congregational Songs

Incarnation

Christmas is a time of incarnation. Of course, the most important incarnation is the Incarnation in which God took on flesh in the form of Jesus. The most negative aspect of Christmas incarnation is when we step on the scale at the end of the season and see the results of all those holiday parties, Christmas cookies, and festive meals: too often we have incarnated in the sense that we have “taken on flesh.”

But this blogpost is about a different kind of incarnation. Two of my compositions went from being ideas in my head, to being notes on paper, and have finally “taken on flesh” in the form of performances and recordings. “A Mark of Grace” began it’s life last year around this time as a hymn of response for Neal Plantinga’s sermon and Cain and Abel at the 2010 Calvin Worship Symposium. “The God of Abraham Praise” is newly written, and was spurred on in part because of Adoro Music’s new series of instrumental arrangements for congregation singing, Everything that Has Breath.

These latest incarnations of my work took place at last Sunday’s Lessons & Carols service at Church of the Servant.

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Congregational Songs

The God of Abraham Praise

Church of the Servant’s Lessons & Carols service is this Sunday at 6pm. I usually try to write something special for the occasion, and this time it’s an arrangement of the hymn “The God of Abraham Praise” which is paired with the scripture reading about God’s promise to Abraham. I’ve been working like a crazy person trying to finish it in time for tomorrow’s rehearsal. Now I’m done and the strings get to work like crazy people practicing it for Sunday. For their, and your, edification is Maestro Finale conducting the Synthetic Orchestra in a rousing rendition of The God of Abraham Praise.

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Congregational Songs

Rejoice!

On January 18, 2005, while giving Theo a bath, I had an idea for a song. It was a bouncy, happy affair* with a refrain** that proclaimed “Rejoice in the Lord always.” That little idea has been languishing on the Island of Misfit Song Ideas until recently, when Calvin College’s focus on Philippians*** brought it to mind again. I decided to finish it up in the hopes that it would be useful to some of the people who are studying the book and planning worship services around its themes.

Like the book of Philippians, the song is an exhortation to live faithfully and joyfully, even in suffering. I use the “through many dangers” verse of Amazing Grace as a bridge, because it sums up the themes so well. The bridge, by the way, is the recording debut of my fellow COS staff members Rebecca Jordan-Heys and Jan DeVos. You never know what you’ll get roped into when you show up to COS early on a Monday morning!

Take a listen to the MP3 demo or read the words below. As always, comments are welcome.

V1
The power of resurrection
Is sometimes bound in chains.
Give your living and your dying
To the glory of Christ’s name.

So keep on pressing forward
With confidence and faith.
Whatever lies before you
[I know] the way will be paved with grace

CHORUS
Rejoice in the Lord always.
Again I say
Rejoice in the Lord always
Again I say, rejoice!

V2
Rejoice! Do not be anxious.
Rejoice, and do not fear.
Take comfort that he hears you
The Lord is always near

And Jesus Christ our Savior
Will fill your hearts with peace.
The one who began this good work
Will make your joy complete.

CHORUS

BRIDGE
Through many dangers, toils and snares
we have already come.
T’was Grace that brought us safe thus far…
and Grace will lead us home.

CHORUS

*(as bath time songs often are)

**(on the minor V for those who care about such things)

***If you ever play charades on books of the Bible and you get “Philippians,” you can act out “flipping pans” and it should work like a charm.

Categories
Congregational Songs Production music

OCD?

I’m beginning to think I have OCD: Obsessive Compositional Disorder. I just can’t say no to a compositional challenge. Take this one that arrived in my email inbox Friday night:

DEADLINE: ASAP
TV series needs CHILDREN’S CHOIR religious and “early to rise” theme music.
1) Songs such as “Jesus Loves me” but very unpolished sounding, sung by a children’s choir. It’s supposed to sound like a small group of kids are singing this – impromptu – in the background of an auditorium.
2) We are also looking for more children’s choir hymns. Any religious songs you have sung by children are welcome. They really want a song about “early to rise..” or “getting up in the morning”  or “morning prayer”.  Any kind of rise and shine theme’s.

I knew I could come up with something for that, so I set to work and had a song finished by the end of the evening. Saturday morning I spent a few hours recording some basic tracks and I prepped them for mixing later that night. The next morning I got up early and laid down some bass tracks before church, and today I finished a rough mix. Wednesday night I’ll add the COS Youth Choir, and who knows? Maybe we’ll end up on a TV show!

But if you can’t wait until then, you can listen to an MP3 of the rough mix.