Crew Will Be Memorizing Hymns

Recently, I discovered that Covenant Life Church started memorizing hymns as a church on Sunday mornings. The reasons they give are:

• Memorizing hymns is one of the ways we can obey Scripture’s command to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16)

• We’re doing this project because we want to benefit not only from the songs written in our lifetime, but also from hymns that have served the people of God for generations and will endure long after we’re gone. They are time-tested and true. They speak to every circumstance of life and point us to the wisdom, love and power of our gracious God and Savior.

This completely fits with our philosophy of corporate worship. One of the surprising things that folks discover when worshipping with Crew is our commitment to Christ’s work throughout church history. We intentionally use ancient songs that add depth of theology and style to our time together. We badly want to be connected to our past even as we add our present contribution to the body of Christ.
So starting this Sunday morning we’ll be adopting this project for ourselves at Crew. The hymn we’ve chosen for November is When I Survey The Wondrous Cross by Isaac Watts. To make this project most meaningful and Christ centered, here are a few things to serve you in this project:

• We’ll be singing the hymn for that particular month on each Sunday in November. On the last Sunday of the month (Nov.29), we’ll sing the hymn completely by memory, without projecting them on our screen.
• We’ll post the story behind the song as a blog post in order to give us a fuller appreciation of the context in which it was written and the greatness of God that it points to.
• Sean will be creating an audio file of the song that we’ll make available for you to download in order to facilitate memorization through the week.

Enjoy.