Faithfulness

 The link for this week's live-streamed service is here.

The Crack in the Wall -- A St. Faithful's Story         by Tom Kennar

Our clerk of session loaned me a book last week. She thought I might enjoy it, but she should know by now that even the most casual suggestion is grist for the blog!

The author of the book is a priest of many years standing in the Church of England, currently vicar at the parish of Havant. In the fictional world he creates, the church, St. Faithful's, is in the parish of Havnot. 

The characters are the archetypes found in much fiction concerning churches. There is the organist who believes J.S. Bach is the only composer necessary, the sharp-tongued administrator, the ditsy youth leader (always covered in glitter), the gloomy verger who is most concerned with the preservation and the winding of the tower clock, an overly enthusiastic flower arranger, and a newish curate trying to find her place in the faith, a "floppy-haired" guitarist, and an up-to-date church leader who has no room for doubt.

Finally, we meet the vicar, a kindly, wise man of faith struggling with loyalty to his congregation and "progress."

The story kicks off with a letter from the diocese directing St. Faithful's to hold a "Strategic Reshaping Conversation" with the neighbouring church, St. Paddy's.

Not surprisingly, angst follows. Will the vicar retire or move or stay, or be pushed out? Who will wind the clock? The organist and the guitarist battle over "improvisation" with key changes vs printed music that holds to the "rules" of Bach.

It is a dilemma familiar to mainstream churches everywhere, who struggle with declining attendance, budget deficits, and fewer able bodies. Amalgamation is often on the agenda.

At SPPC we are not about to receive a directive from the powers-that-be, but we would dearly love to expand our ministry in the neighbourhood. That is what the CML group is all about. You can read Pam's excellent post about it here.

One of their initiatives is the fifth Sunday worship format. There are only four a year so it seems like a good time to dial it up a bit on Sunday morning. We've already had one Sunday where "prayers of the people" were different.

This coming Sunday, Aug. 30 is another fifth Sunday and we're going to turn the worship hour into a musical hour. There will be prayers and a sermon (very short) but mostly we'll be singing favourite hymns of the congregation. If you love to sing, this is your week, and a chance to bring your singing friends too. I understand there will be hotdogs during the coffee hour. 

  

I won't tell you the end of the St. Faithful's story -- you can ask Janet to borrow her book, or get your own from a bookstore, but there are some statements worth quoting.

Our story is not that we are perfect, or modern, or ancient. Our story is that we belong to one another.

We do not worship wood, or music, or methods. We worship the God who became flesh.

St. Faithful's … had not silenced disagreement It had chosen to love louder. 

At this [Communion] table there is room

Ed. Note: The author made the point that an "altar" is for sacrifice. A table is where people are fed. 

There are several books in the St. Faithful's series as well as a facebook page for Canon Tom Kennar, if you want to explore his ideas more fully.

Happy reading. See you next Sunday, with your voices ready to sing to the Lord.

More Claim to Fame

 The link to this week's live-streamed service is here.

Dr. Erik Routley

Last week's post was about the writer of the text for "Work for the Night is Coming." This week we delve into the life and SPPC connection of composer and arranger, Dr. Erik Routley.

The maiden name of our Clerk of Session was Routley, and her mother maintained that they were related to the hymn writer. Although he has not been definitively placed on the family tree, we'll opt for "Mom said," and claim him as a connection of SPPC.

Dr. Erik Routley was a famous British Congregational minister, composer, and scholar of church music. We know him best at SPPC as the man who harmonized "Slane," the Irish tune we use for  "Be Thou My Vision," a perennial favourite with Presbyterians in Canada. 

Slane is an old Irish folk tune that became a hymn tune when it was arranged by David Evans, and used in the Church Hymnary published in 1927. The tune is named for a hill in County Meath, Ireland, where St. Patrick lit an Easter fire, in defiance of the fifth century pagan king, Leogaire. Following this act of faithful witness, St. Patrick received unlimited freedom to preach the gospel in Ireland. Four hundred years later, the name of the hill, Slane, became a beloved hymn tune in a Protestant church.

If Dr. Routley had written nothing else, he would have had a place on our "famous relatives" chart as SPPC, but his body of work is immense. He was the leading hymnologist of the 20th century. He produced more than forty books on the history, theology and music of hymns and carols. He wrote more than a hundred hymn tunes, numerous texts and edited or co-edited fifteen hymnals. In our Book of Praise, his name appears beside eight hymns either as composer or arranger.

He was a prominent player in the Dunblane consultations, credited with setting off the "hymn explosion" of the 1960's. He also edited the Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for 27 years. 

Born in Brighton, England, where his father was mayor, Routley delighted in the significance of his Hallowe'en birthdate in 1917. It was exactly 400 years (give or take given adjustments to the calendar) to the day from when Martin Luther nailed his 40 theses to the church door at Wittenburg. Despite his many degrees and honours, Routley was most proud of that connection to the Reformation. 

He credited his parents, Nonconformists, for sending him to Anglican boarding schools where liturgy took precedence over sermons. He wrote that he enjoyed "the kind of worship in which youngsters could really participate, and by the age of fourteen I had become an Anglican snob. I was enjoying the aesthetics of the church more than its dogma. The Anglicans were winning.”

Despite his affinity for Anglican liturgy and his dislike of the long, Nonconformist sermons of his youth, -- particularly the "peculiar sounds" the ministers made when praying in public. “They had one voice for talking to God and another for talking to me. I was thankful that I wasn’t God” -- he became a leading member in the Congregational Church in England and Wales.

He moved to Princeton, New Jersey in 1975 as Professor of Church Music, carrying on with the work he had begun so many years before in England. One of his biographers credits him with "halting the dreary practice of singing "Amen" at the end of each hymn sung in American Churches."

Dr. Routley died in 1982 but his work and influence remain significant factors in church music today. He loved his work and he loved the Lord. The opening line of his 1972 hymn provides a fitting epitaph. "new songs of celebration render to him who has great wonders done."

Thanks to Janet for sharing her connection to Dr. Routley with SPPC.

Famous Friends

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Pursuing my love of hymnody, I learned recently that one of our newer congregants has a famous, hymn-writing relative. 

Anna Louisa Walker is the author of that old gospel hymn, "Work for the Night is Coming." She is also the great, great aunt of Grace, fellow-worshipper at SPPC. 

Walker was born on 23 June 1836 in Staffordshire, England. Around 1853 the family moved to Pointe-Lévy, (Quebec) in what was then Lower Canada. In 1858, the family relocated to Sarnia, Canada West, (present day Ontario.) Soon after their arrival in Sarnia, Anna Louisa founded a private girl's school with her sisters Frances and Isabella. Sadly, the school only operated for a few years before it closed upon the deaths of Frances

and Isabella. 

When she was still a teenager, Anna Louisa wrote poetry, published in local newspapers and then as a collection, "Leaves from the Backwoods" printed in Montreal by John Lovel in 1861. She returned to England with her parents in 1864. 

Shortly afterward, her parents died and she joined the household of her cousin, Margaret Oliphant, as a housekeeper-companion. Oliphant was a writer and recommended Anna Louisa's work to her own publishers. 

In 1873, Walker's debut novel, A Canadian Heroine, was published, followed by four more novels and a collection of Plays for Children. 

In 1884, Walker married Harry Coghill and settled in Staffordshire. She continued to write adding another novel to her opus, and a volume of poetry titled Oak and Maple: English and Canadian verses, published under her married name, Mrs. H. Coghill.

"The Night Cometh," was taken from "Leaves from the Backwoods" and set to music by Ira D. Sankey, and published as the hymn, "Work for the Night is Coming." As the poems had been published anonymously, Anna Louisa received no accreditation, the lyrics being wrongly attributed to Sidney Dyer. Upon hearing the hymn sung at a Temperance meeting, she recognized it as her own work and tracked down the source. Thereafter, printings of the hymn rightly recognized her as the author.

By happy coincidence I learned of Grace's connection to the author of "Work for the Night is Coming," in the same season as Dr. Cecil Kirk recommended this hymn. To be precise, in his unpublished  work on hymns he chose Aug. 8 as the appropriate day for this song.

As a farm kid I am very familiar with the urgency to bring in a crop before a storm hits, so work for the night is coming just seems like regular life, but the poem is actually a long metaphor. As Dr. Kirk explained, "the Christian is a workman who must be engaged in the heavenly Father's business. We are sent out like labourers into the harvest field and we are required to work for Him, rather we are given the privilege of working for Him. . . .Our life is compared to a day's work as we toil on the Master's service.

". . . The time will come when we are no longer able to work. . .  Darkness comes on and the time for labour is ended.  There is always the temptation, as we grow older, to believe that that time has come much earlier than it really has. No matter how old we may be, there is still some service we can render the Lord. Anna Louisa knew personally a lady over one hundred years old, who still carried on a valuable telephone ministry . . . in her congregation."

We often learn things at funerals that we wish we'd known while the deceased still walked among us. I'm really glad to learn about Grace's connection of "Work for the Night is Coming," while she can still answer questions about her famous relative.

Psalms of Childhood

 The link for this week's live-streamed service is here.

One of my favourite Youtube channels is The Salisbury Organist. I stumbled upon it by accident when watching something else and the sidebar listed "The most beautiful hymn tune ever written." Of course, I had to click the link. Now I'm a total fan of Ben Maton, the Salisbury Organist.

Recently, he posted a video featuring some hymns from his school days. He remarked that, upon leaving school, we soon forget many of the facts that allowed us to pass an exam, yet "the hymns, the tunes, the words, the melodies which we sang so joyfully at school remain in our hearts and in our minds forever." 

Listen to him rock "This Little Light of Mine" near the end of the video and you'll hear that joy.

Given Rev. Irwin's summer sermon series on the Psalms of Ascent, Ben's assertion resonated with me. Rev. Irwin explained that these fifteen songs (Psalms 120-134) were meant to be memorized. Ack! Most of us have a hard enough time memorizing one psalm, let alone fifteen -- and these are not the most popular ones in our readings. 

But, if I were a Jewish child at the time of King David, I would have learned these songs, with their words and melodies as part of my "school days." So, perhaps memorization isn't so impossible.

I had a look at the hymnbook my church used during my childhood. It has a whole section of hymns "For Little Children." I took a walk down memory lane and discovered that I did recall those words and tunes effortlessly, and the exercise did evoke feelings of joy. 

The hymns I learned way back then followed a few themes as listed below:

Praise and Thanksgiving.

• All things bright and beautiful                                       
• Birds are singing, woods are ringing -- We, Thy children, join the chorus, Merrily, Cheerily, gladly praise Thee, 
• Praise him, praise Him, all ye little children. He is love, He is love. 
• This is my Father's world. . . He speaks to me everywhere.

God's Care and Providence

• God sees the little sparrow fall, . . . Because He loves the little things, I know He loves me too.
• God who made the earth . . .careth for me.
•  Jesus loves me

Christian Life

• The wise may bring their learning . . .We'll bring Him hearts that love Him. . . We'll try our best to please Him, at home, at school at play.
• Father lead me day by day . . .show me what I ought to do!
• Can a little child like me thank the Father fittingly . . be good and true, faithful, kind in all you do.
• Jesus bids us shine. . . for Him . . for all around.

Life of Jesus --Christian History

• Tell me the stories of Jesus,  
• When mothers of Salem
• Children of Jerusalem Sang the praises of Jesus' Name. Children too of modern days Join to sing the Saviour's praise. Hark, hark, hark, while infant voices sing.  Loud hosannas to our King.     [I remember how much fun it was to sing hark, hark, hark! 😇]

The themes from my hymns of childhood can be found throughout the Book of Psalms, even if not so plainly in the Psalms of Ascent. Still, those messages of God's grace, His providence, His faithfulness, and the joy of gathered worship are there in my old Sunday School songs.

One of my favourite passages of Scripture is Philippians 4:8, but I have a heck of a time memorizing it. I keep mixing up the order. Does "just" come before "pure" or is "virtue" first? I wish someone would set that to music -- I'm sure I could memorize it then!

Lately, Rev. Irwin has included "homework" in the bulletin, based on the sermon. When you've finished that, I challenge you to create a playlist of your favourite Sunday School songs. You can drop your list in the comments section below.