God was kind to allow me the opportunity to present a seminar on hymns during the most recent STAND conference. I previously shared on the STAND website some of the reasons why I did this seminar.
If you’re interested in listening to it, here’s thelink to the recording, here are the notes, and here’s the slides that went with it:
Personally I think it went OK, though I typically don’t speak well in settings when I’m nervous, and I also wish as follow-up everyone who attended just listen to the more detailed and helpful lecture series by Kevin Twit. I hope more practice in future will help me to be a clearer and more helpful speaker.
But I had a patient and understanding audience who asked good questions, both during and after the seminar. I’m especially thankful that people were genuinely interested and there was a good group of young adults present and challenged to consider what hymns really are, why they’re worth passing on to the next generation, and some ways we could do that.
For example, I chatted with someone from a Reformed Church (she said they sing both psalms and hymns psalms only) who commented how helpful it was to discuss this topic. In addition, I heard afterwards that it gave a few young adults good food for thought on using and singing hymns, so I thank God for that.
As usual I prepared too much to say in too little time. If I could do it over again, other things worth mentioning would be:
- More specific ways of using hymns in personal and family worship
- How to use tunes we know to sing hymn texts we don’t know (this can be really fun and rewarding to do)
- some good examples of hymns that have been set to more accessible music
Anyways, where to from here? Probably just keep on learning and passing hymns to the next generation… like this…
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