Canticles, charisma and chat (Religion thread number 2)

[BaroqueAroundTheClock]

the first one is nearly full.

Anyone welcome, it's basically a "what happened in church/spiritual life/anything else you want to chat about that's vaguely related (or not) to churchy stuff.

actually, the language reading is relevant here!

what we're really talking about in all these hymns (and they're derived from passages such as B quotes), is that our faith and our love of God and our belief in Jesus is our armour.
it's what makes us strong, and it's what gives us the strength and courage to live our lives the way he taught us.

so it's not a war with non-christians, it's a war against evil, it's a war against sin and the devil.

that's it exactly nickel. There are references throughout the bible \link{http://www.acts17-11.com/armor.html\see here} about the "battle" (obviously the OT ones are a bit more literal than the NT ones - but they were a rather unruly lot in the OT )

And lets not forget that part of the armour of God is the Gospel of peace

yay - glad your Ave Verum has saved properly this time

I'm hoping that starting a new project for my Boing video will sort it out and that it just turns out to be a corrupted file for the other one..........(I shall scream and shout and wail if it doesn't )

i've also downloaded a patch from cyberlink website. don't know what it's done yet cos i did the re-save before i downloaded it

I took a couple of the transitions out and put them in again.

Grrr... typed a reply and then lost it again.

I know that the warfare imagery in those other hymns is just a metaphor (as opposed to an actual incitement to violence). I was just comparing it to the imagery in 'Fight the Good Fight' which is not overtly to do with warfare (and could be about the struggle to get out of bed in the morning, iyswim). But the hymn book is clearly inconsistent, which is just silly (and I agree about messing with the words of hymns which are so well-known, which is bound to just lead to an incoherent jumble).

Personally, I still find the imagery of war quite hard to swallow. Not so much the armour of faith, which is about protection, but the more triumphalistic stuff about vanquishing foes and so on. I know it goes back a long way, though (think of the idea of the Church Militant) and I understand how, in a time of persecutions it might have seemed like an appropriate message, but it just doesn't seem to me to be in keeping with the humility of the imagery which Christ himself used. [Waits to be disabused with an example I've forgotten... I'm arguing way beyond my level of understanding here, really.]

I'm a bit worried that I'm coming across like the Thought Police . I'm really not like that (though I'll admit to the charge of woolly liberalism!). I was just trying to think about why 'Hideous' might have wanted to change those particular hymns and how it chimed with me to some extent, even though it seems not to have been very successful in the execution.

the hymn book is inconsistent because it wanted to avoid certain copyright issues from varous places........and in others tried to be all hip and modern - nothing more to it than that - it's an utterly shite poor hymn book. It changed lots of other totally innocuous hymns as well.

The Armou of faith is about "fighting" as well as protection though it's all there - the full "Soldier" for Christ - protected from harm and able to fight the enemy (Satan/The Devil)

LOL... rushing, but just had to pop back to tell you that you have made me totally undermine my own argument, because I now have 'Soldiers of Christ Arise' on the brain and shall be singing it for the rest of the day! You win!

and you will go forward with yout armour - and will be protected from spiritual harm and have the ability to fight any spiritual battles that come your way too

Hello. Heck you lot do witter on Haven't got on this morning yet as been out, but glad to see discussions centred on the Hideous Book, where would we be without it?

I'm totally with you re the soldiers/fighting analogy thingys - we are in a battle, after all!

Excited this morning as my nephew was born yesterday, all well :)

Apologies for a Baptist question: what hymnbook are we talking about?

hello DO

lol @ Baptist question. We're talking about the \link{http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=complete+anglican+hymns+old+and+new&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=1170674492916682509&sa=X&ei=E55rTZ-jNYiShAekhqXyDg&ved=0CEAQ8wIwAw#\Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New}

Ah yes, that does look very messy abouty.

it is - it's terrible - I just wish I'd arrived at our church a year earlier to stop them buying it.....

It is even worse than Mission Praise. And that's saying something.

There's another hymn with a fighty type verse they've fluffed around with and made into something so wussy, winds up dh no end. Trying to recall what it is...will be back

at our church, the vicar who was there at the time had his heart set on it.
they used to use AMR, 100 hmyns for today and more hymns for today, and SoF together (the original SoF), and the vicar wanted hymnbooks that had everything in one volume.
the money was bequeathed, and the vicar had the final say.
that was about 15 years ago, or whenever it was new, and we've been cursing the decision ever since.

the choir even bought themselves AM New standard at teh time, so that it had the 3 AM books altogether, and it would have made sooooo much more sense for the church to have done that for the congregation too, but noooo! of course not! we have to have something that professes to be modern and vibrant, whilst messing around with hymns taht people have known for their entire lives .

I really want to email these discussions to Kevin Mayhew and tell him what a prat his editorial team is.

I suspect the changes in harmonies were to do with not needing copyright, too.

(i appear to still be ranting....)

we've got so fed up with it, that we've agreed that any hymns that have been messed around with (harmonies we can get round, cos the organist plays from one of the other books with real harmonies in), we will type out a booklet for that service with the proper words in - also means we can use hymns that KM thinks are "irrelevant" to today's worship (like Christian dost thou hear them!! the best lenten hymn in the world ever!), and words that you know off by heart that they've changed just so us laaaydieees won't get upset.

(didn't realise the shocking mistake in last week's hymn until we did choir practice, and it was too late by then!)

you also temporarily killed the thread

I've not sung that for over 40 years:- Christian doest thou hear them - it is not a Baptist hymn.

We had baptist praise and worship which is awful and chose SoF because it had the older, original words in, but our new (well he's been there 3 years) minister will still put different words on the screen. Then the older brigade sing the old words and the younger brigade looks fed up and bored.
The one lady who would berate him about it has sadly died.

This might be a contraversial question, but do you need hymn books at all? In our church the words for the hymns / praise items etc are put up on a screen for everyone to read. If someone wanted to change the wording of a hymn it'd be really easy to do it as all the words are saved on a laptop. The flexibility means that you can use material from quite a wide range of sources, you just need to make sure the words are typed into the laptop. I think the system works pretty well. When it was first introduced paper copies of the words were produced too but they aren't handed out now, presumably because people didn't want them. I think people sing better too because they are looking up rather than mumbling into a hymnbook.

jaffa - that question has coem up time and time again - some churches do use screens, but where there is an aging congregation, screens are just no good.

Our church is quite large, anyway, and it's really hard to see the screens when you're further back.
Not only that, but there aren't very many places you can put screens in older buildings - in our church, the only place is bang smack in front of the lecturn, which means not only would you need to crank your neck to see the words (and powerful glasses...), but you would have to move the lecturn, and therefore the reader, the microphones and everything else that's put there, and you wouldn't be able to see or hear the choir properly (we use the lecturn microphone often to boost our sound - and we can't afford additional microphones)

also, for some services, when there isn't a choir, the congregation sits in the choir stalls - you'd need the hymn book then, as you couldn't get a screen in that area.

Even though the Hideous book is hideous, it's a better solution than screens in most cases - screens just aren't as flexible.
(or as easy to use)

oh, and also, from my own POV, i can't stand reading hymn words off a screen - i can't concentrate properly, i feel like i've nothing to do with my hands, and that distracts me and makes me feel like a knob.
I also get uncomfortable having to have my head in a particular direction for most of the time. I get a sore and stiff neck.

and jaffa - DutchOma has just made a good point about ministers changing the words to pelase themselves!

and how many times have i looked at ascreen in someone else's church to cringe "that's not how you spell such-and-such" or "where's the possessive apostrophe?????????"
at least with the book, the grammar and spelling (exceptions discussed earlier....) are going to be correct...

Yes - some churches do still need hymn books. For starters some churches (especially smaller ones) can't afford the licence fees that you need to be to be able to reproduce the words on the screen,

Not all of our services are in the same part of the church, the chance is used for some of them (sideways facing), and the ladychapel for others (can' see the main body of the church at all from there).

A properly set up screen system should mean you don't hae to keep your head in the same place and it should be comfortable to read from anywhere (may churches have smaller screens on the side.

There are all sorts of fancy set-ups that can be used in old and new churches.

I LOVED the set-up in purpleturtles church in Liverpool - absolutely amazing. At the end of the service I attended the screen magically disappeared upwards,, and from what appeared to be black walls/windows stained glass and sunlight as the curtains to stop the glare opened.

Some of the issues which nickel has mentined can actually be worked around if you get someone in to set up the screen system that knows what they're doing (we ended up with a ridiculous system that is really hard to put up and down when it's not needed).