We just finished a month of congregational singing, and I would like to share some of the new songs here so they do not just die after this month. I also want to show what we did, why we did it, and a little about how it came about, and at the end I am going to share the final product of our weekly bulletins. Hi, church. I am hoping this video helps you bring the Bible home through psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. If you are new here, my name is Pastor Ryan Rench. I am the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and we do weekly videos here on YouTube to help our church bring the Bible home. If they are a help to you, I am so glad for that, but mainly I am focusing on our little Baptist church in California and trying to help us with topics where we are as a church. Congregational singing is something we have been emphasizing recently, so I am going to talk to our church about that.
What We Did
First of all, what was this past month for us? We have done this since, I think, the first year, 2022: we take a Sabbath rest. I appreciated the rest we got during COVID. I felt there was so much busyness that when things shut down, as a family it was nice to have a little breather. You almost feel bad for taking breathers, but I thought, well, that is what a Sabbath is all about. It is a time of rest and a bit of a reset. For our music ministry, I did not want the choir and the special music to feel so locked in that they never have a break. We take some breaks around Christmastime, but we wanted to take a break in the summertime to focus on congregational singing. So we have no choir practices and no special music practices, and the only music at our church is congregational singing. There is an extra focus, extra teaching and preaching, on congregational singing and the purpose of music in our church. We took a couple of Sundays for that this past month, and I thought it was really, really helpful for us. A couple of other weeks we had some staff preaching and some missionaries preaching, so two of these past four weeks were focused on music, trying to help our church with some of the things we will go over in a little bit.
Why We Did It
But why do we do it? The reason I feel we need to focus on congregational singing is that, man, the bulk of our time in our Sunday services is given to singing. The largest time slot is given to preaching, but the second-largest slot of any given week is the music service, and the bulk of that is congregational singing. It is very easy to get into a routine, just show up, and sing mindlessly. I want us to have a reason for singing. I want us as a church to know why we are singing. Our reason for singing the hymns can sometimes be as shallow as what we accuse the contemporary crowd of. Some people will say, “I like that church because they sing hymns. I grew up singing hymns, and I like the hymns the most.” That is the very accusation we lob against the contemporary crowd. Sometimes we say, “Oh, you just want music that your flesh likes.” But if we are doing the same thing with the hymns, uh-oh. I want to know why we are singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. I want to take psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and edify our congregation, and show our congregation why we love these songs best, why we believe they are so edifying and helpful for us. Through our congregational singing emphasis, I have enjoyed finding several old songs. They are new to us, but they are theologically specific and precise. I love that they were more often written by classically educated theologians and literary students than by musicians, and generally speaking there is a richness of the Word of God in them that I appreciate so much. Our church is involved in the Navigators ministry at Camp Pendleton, and I will grant that there is a broad appeal to many modern songs these days, but I am just not convinced that secular appeal is a good metric for music that should be sung unto the Lord. That is why we want to help our church understand what type of singing we want. What is the bulk of our music going to be? What appetites do we want to create in our church? We want to be worshipers, not consumers. We want our church music to reflect God more than the culture. There is a lot that goes into that.
How It Came About
How we planned our congregational singing month was a long process. I have worked on this for a couple of years with our associate pastor, Brother Zach Roberts. I am constantly trying to train him, to help him think like me, giving him frameworks for choosing new songs. If I say yes to certain songs he proposes, I want to show why I am saying yes, and if I say no to others, I want to show why I am saying no. So he chose a few songs, and I chose a few. For years I have had a vision of a hymnal much more robust than what we currently have at our church. Leading up to this month, my sister, who is our piano player, learned MuseScore and shared a file with me, and I was going through it and going, “Man, that is what I want to be able to do.” So I learned MuseScore very basically and showed Brother Zach how to do it too, and we started recreating a lot of these old, powerful songs, sometimes pairing them with new tunes and other times leaving the tunes as they were. We printed our own songs every Sunday and every Wednesday through the month of July. Over the next few days we are going to release some extra videos of the songs we sang, congregational singing videos pulled from our livestream with the lyrics up on the screen. As a way to continue with the songs throughout the week, I think this video series will be a blessing and a help to our church.
The Bulletins
So here are the songs straight from our bulletin each week. They have a bit of explanation, and I will give some insight into why we designed them the way we did and why things are laid out exactly like that. Now, do not judge us if you are a designer. They are not the most beautiful thing. I would love to get your thoughts on how to make musical notation beautiful. I want this to be beautiful, but the way I designed it was kind of rushed, and I could not quite figure out how to make musical notation beautiful. But it has been a fun process, I have enjoyed it so much, and I hope these are a blessing to you. This is the front cover of the bulletins we used throughout July. Normally our bulletin is the little 8½-by-11 sheet, but this time I went with 7 by 10, and our secretary cut it down to full bleed every week. Just a beautiful design. The front cover says, “Today we gather with family to worship our Father, saturated with God’s Word.” That is what we have on the front cover of our bulletin every week, with the theme verse, Psalm 29:2: “Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.” That is what we want to give to God. Glory is the only thing we can give to God. He asks for it, and we want to try to give it.
The next page of our bulletin was “What to Expect.” That is in our bulletin all the time; I have another video where I went phrase by phrase through our bulletin and showed exactly what we included and why. Then there was a welcome note setting up the month of congregational singing emphasis and introducing some new songs to our congregation. Then there was a framework from some of the sermons I preached on congregational singing, in three sections: first, prepare your heart; second, engage your mind; third, use your voice. The first week I preached on preparing your heart. Sing unto the Lord. Singing is first about preparing your heart. Why should we sing? Because we sing to the Lord and to each other. We sing truth. To prepare your heart, you should pray before you sing, and you should mean what you sing. We really wanted to help our congregation come into every congregational singing time with a purposeful mentality: “I am coming to worship God. I am coming with a heart full of worship for the almighty God.” That also requires some work on our part. It is a heart preparation, but it is a mind preparation as well. So we encouraged our church to engage your mind. Think about the lyrics as you go through them. Read the hymn story; there is great background information on many of our hymns. Connect the lyrics to Scripture. Think about why we are singing this line of this song. And then continue with them; meditate on them throughout the week. This was a beautiful design that we gave every member as their songbook as they walked in, and some members said, “I felt bad throwing that away.” I said, “Keep it. That is okay.” Next was use your voice. Make a loud noise, Psalm 98:4: “Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” Sing boldly and clearly. That is encouraging to the people around you, and you teach by example, as a man leads his family to sing to the Lord, as Christians gather together and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. That is participation by the entire congregation, and that is the focus of our congregational singing. I just love it. I absolutely love that we can gather together and sing.
Every week there is a little worship guide here, just the songs we are going to sing that day. This particular month we did everything backwards. Instead of starting with a choir opener, we started with Scripture, a kind of call to worship, and then a couple of hymns leading into the sermon, and then a couple of hymns after the sermon. After preaching on singing, we wanted a way to be doers of the Word and not hearers only, so that we are not deceiving our own selves more and more. So after preaching on congregational singing, I would lead a couple more congregational songs, and they would have a chance to sing those from their hearts. In the evening service we would focus again on the same new songs we had been learning. Then there is “Worshiping in Spirit and in Truth,” a worship focus we have in our bulletin every single week, with the offertory lyrics as the piano player plays the offering. We put the lyrics up on the screen and also include them in the bulletin so people can follow along with the truth of the song, not just the beauty of the instrumentalist, but the actual content the piano player is playing. So that was that page, and then there are the regular bulletin announcements and a highlight of that week’s YouTube video.
Approach, My Soul, the Mercy Seat
But this also served as our congregational singing songbook throughout the month, so every week had this starting page. The very first song we learned was “Approach, My Soul, the Mercy Seat.” Again, this design ended up kind of busy, I realize, but I was looking for a way to include a beautiful title, the songwriter, and the composer of the music. I forget which hymnal it was; I think it was the Melody Publications Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs hymnal. I had always wanted to do this, and then I saw that they did it: right next to the notation, verses that go with every line of the song. I wanted Scriptures that were not just one general verse applying to the whole song. In many of my past hymnals I would be singing along and think, “Where did that line come from? What is that phrase from?” You would look at the top of the hymnal, and there might be one verse of Scripture across the top, a general praise Scripture that does not apply to that line of the song. What I really appreciated about that hymnal was that every single line of each stanza had a Scripture to go with it. We wanted to use the Scriptures as the basis of the truth we are singing, so we included the Scripture references there, and where we had room each week, we included the Scriptures down below as well. This one has a little background information on the songwriter, and a couple of extra verses, verses 5 and 6, laid out in poetry format so you can see the poetry of the song at a glance. This one was written by John Newton, the same man who wrote “Amazing Grace,” and it is a beautiful song about prayer, “Approach, My Soul, the Mercy Seat.” We wrote out the verses along with the Scriptures that go with each of them. I love this song. Beautiful tune. If you see a YouTube video out there from Hymns of Grace, or I forget, Songs of Grace, I think they sing it much slower than we do, so there are a couple of different versions out there.
Precious Bible, What a Treasure
The next song we learned was also by John Newton. This is a scan of his Bible, which is in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. This is Newton’s Bible, where he had this poem written out in the front cover, and you can tell he loved his Bible: “Precious Bible! what a treasure.” It was in the hymnal he produced for his church. There are the Scriptures that go with each verse, and across the page spread we had this incredible song, “Precious Bible! what a treasure does the word of God afford!” I love this song because I love the Bible. You can listen to the tune once we release it as a congregational song. The words are by John Newton and the music by Rob Smith, who also added this last line at the end, a little chorus-type repeat. I changed some of the words in his edition. Verse 2 has an unusual word in it. I do not exactly know where it is… oh, there it is, right there. Wherever there is a word that is hard to understand, I wanted a hymnal that would explain it, and this song is a great example: here is a strange word, and here is the explanation built right into the hymnal. That song, “Precious Bible, What a Treasure,” has become one of my favorites. I absolutely love it. We sang it at our youth camp this year, and many of the teens enjoyed learning it over the past week as well.
Not unto Us and It Is All of Grace
The next page was an attempt to get into singing the Psalms. I preached Psalm 115 in our church, and that night we sang this song: “Not to us be glory given.” It is a tune you would be familiar with: “Jesus! what a Friend for sinners!” is the tune to this “Not unto Us.” We took that tune and put to it these adapted words of Psalm 115 by Timothy Dudley-Smith, and we have been singing it throughout this month. We can sing the psalms congregationally, not verbatim straight from the psalter. I appreciate the thinking of, I believe it was Charles Wesley, who took a lot of the psalms and Christianized them, showing that there are Christian roots in the psalms that we can sing, and writing Christ into them. So that was a beautiful song we sang this month. Here is a bit of background on the hymn, as well as the psalm itself written out. The next song, “It Is All of Grace,” was another beautiful song we sang throughout the month, an incredible song by Isaac Watts about the fact that our faith, our salvation, is not of works. We can add nothing to the finished work of Jesus Christ. It is all of grace. And the day-to-day life we live is all of grace. This incredible song by Isaac Watts was set to an absolutely gorgeous tune that helped us focus on the actual grace of God as we sang it. It is a newer tune, by David Ward in 2004. There are a couple of long holds in the tune that catch you off guard the first time if you are not familiar with it, but it eventually flows very smoothly once you understand it. It is one of those tunes you will go away whistling, and you will enjoy finding yourself singing along with such a powerful song. It had a Calvinist tone in the original words, in this one word here: “We are saved by sovereign grace.” I changed that one word from Watts to “boundless grace.” That is the only change I believe I made. Some versions had updated the “thees” and “thous” into more modern English. I went all the way back to the original words of Isaac Watts and stuck with some of the more archaic words he used, just trying to encourage our congregation to think a little deeper about the songs, and I think it was well received, at least in our church. It was wonderful. Then the last page is just an announcements page.
I Hear the Words of Love and Majestic Sweetness
The next week we learned another new song, “I Hear the Words of Love,” by Horatius Bonar. We had learned a couple of songs from him. This was written in a season of his life when he was doubting his salvation. He was at a low point, wondering, “Man, is God even there? Is He with me?” And when he landed on the love of God, he wrote this song. It is a powerful song about the assurance of God’s love for us, our love for Him, and how we can respond to Him. It is just a beautiful, beautiful song, and I have come to really enjoy it. I wrote out the Scriptures on this one as well, so that was the page design there. The next song… I am not zoomed out here. There we go. “Not unto Us,” the one we had sung earlier. “It Is All of Grace,” we repeated on the second week. And one we introduced to our church, which we have sung in years past but made a focus for our congregational singing emphasis month, was “Majestic Sweetness Sits Enthroned.” Two of our missionaries are the Beal brothers, and their dad, Brother Beal, was my teacher in high school. He would always sing this song and encourage us to roll our Rs and sing it with an Irish flair. So I have had a high-school love for this song for twenty or twenty-five years, and I appreciated the callback to that. Just think about the majesty of God and also the sweetness of God. This is not a new hymn by any means, but it was new to many people in our church and a great focus for us as we sang it through a couple of times this month. This page gives a little background information on that hymn as well.
All at Last and Why Do the Heathen Rage?
And another song. Note, we repeated several songs throughout this month. This one was new to me; it is a fairly new song, with a gorgeous tune. Our intern, Brother Alex, had preached on trials and trusting the Lord, and that very night was the night we introduced this song. I did not plan that. I believe in the sovereignty of God; He just works those kinds of things out. So there was the sermon, and following the sermon we had our congregational singing, and the very first time we sang it, it was a perfect dovetail of the message of the song with the message of the sermon. I love how God does that. So, this song, “All at Last.” Again, a beautiful one; if you are another church, you can bring in a new song to add to your repertoire, and for our congregation this is just a chance to continue with this song. An enjoyable one. Psalm 2 became kind of a meme among our teenagers. We sang it three or four times throughout the month. At camp, the juniors and seniors were asking some deep questions on the bus ride and at the campfire with the camp preacher that night, asking about dating and God’s will and the call to preach, a whole series of great questions. Then all of a sudden one of our guys raises his hand and says, “I have got a question. Why do the nations rage?” Because of this song from Psalm 2 that we had been singing all month, “Why do the heathen rage?” was the driving theological question of the week. Our church had a good laugh at that on the Sunday night after camp, because it even made it into the picture slideshow as the closing scene: “Why do the nations rage?” Again, this is a Christian adaptation of Psalm 2, a beautiful arrangement, to a tune you would be familiar with as well.
Not What My Hands Have Done
Then the final week, I believe; I cannot remember. “I Hear the Words of Love,” “All at Last” as well, and then this song, “Not What My Hands Have Done.” Here is that second song by Horatius Bonar, whom I mentioned earlier; this is from 1861. This is also a tune you might be familiar with, but it was new to many people in our church. “Not what my hands have done can save my guilty soul; not what my toiling flesh has borne can make my spirit whole. Not what I feel or do can give me peace with God; not all my prayers and sighs and tears can bear my awful load.” Throughout this song is a beautiful picture: man, this is all about God. I love the message of this song. Just a powerful, powerful song, and it would be worth learning, for you and for our church. It would be worth continuing with, listening to, and trying to get these words deep into your spirit.
We will have our own versions of these songs coming out in these videos. This is one Brother Alex put together. It is just our congregation singing it, with the song leader’s voice prominent but the whole congregation involved, and the lyrics on the screen over a nature scene. We will also do one for “Not What My Hands Have Done.” The one I just showed you can see on YouTube; that is how I discovered this song and fell in love with it. “All at Last” as well; that is the one Brother Zach found and presented to me, and I really enjoyed it. “I Hear the Words of Love”: the Hymns of Grace channel has introduced several good hymns, and this is the one we introduced this year, along with “Approach, My Soul,” by John Newton. They sing an arrangement of that as well. Like I said, we will have our versions coming out very soon.
A New Devotional
Also, just as a little pitch as we close our video this morning, we are working on a new devotional, actually two devotionals. My wife finished the Joy devotional in 2024 and the Ezekiel devotional in 2025. Each time she did a four-week series of lessons, and after each lesson she would send the ladies home with a handout they could work through during the week before coming back the next week for the next lesson. At the end of the handout was a list of several Bible passages each week relating to that week’s lesson, passages on joy, for instance. So I took those extra Bible passages and expanded them into a couple of pages of devotional for each day. I took her handout and split it into day one and day two of every week, and then took the five additional Scriptures she gave and made each one a different journal entry for a day. So those five plus the two lesson days give seven days, a full week of daily devotional study through selected passages from Ezekiel, and for the joy study, several different passages, Philippians being just one of them. In the meantime, enjoy the series of videos coming out this week on congregational singing, and I encourage you to keep growing in the Lord, seeking the Lord, and edifying one another through these psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. God bless you. We will see you in the next video.
