 ABOUT
There is a rich heritage of songs written by Christians, our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, that have gone before us. Singing hymns corporately is a great reminder of this fact: that God has been working and saving people for many hundreds and thousands of years! But unfortunately hymns are not used in many churches anymore, for a variety of reasons. They are often seen as the songs that are not cool!!! The reality is that many (but not all!) hymns are very cool! Many have great tunes, but even more importantly, express great things about and to our great God and Saviour! It's very much possible to sing passionate praise to God while singing hymns! But why is this often not the reality? Unfortunately, most hymn book arrangements are not suitable for todays church band! They are doomed to fail! The tunes are often written too high for the majority of the congregation to sing! They often leave poor, genuine, servant hearted guitarists, in a very difficult position with no guitar chords! Or if there are guitar chords, they often don't seem to have been chosen with guitarists in mind. Drummers are another poor modern church band member who can be very lost with what drum beat to play. Another common problem is choosing a correct speed. It can be tempting to think, 'ok, let's make sure people like this, let's play it upbeat' but unfortunately the hymn is played too fast to sing, and probably not fitting the mood of the lyrics. Another problem is that yes, there are some antiquated words, and phrases, in otherwise great lyrics! This can leave church members, at times, wondering what they're singing about! Perhaps a more subtle and more serious issue, might be chronological snobbery! We are often tempted to think that new is always better, but by this we are missing out on a great heritage of songs, and may even need to repent of arrogance! If this is you, then fly to the Saviour, who offers full and free forgiveness to all those who trust in His precious sacrifice of His perfect life for theirs upon the cross! The aim of this website and these arrangements is to try to solve these issues. There are many other very good arrangements of hymns out there, but many have gone down the track of being very creative, and very jazzy, trying to be really cool with the music ... unfortunately, these are not accessible for the majority of church bands to play! So the goal of this website is to be very practical, to help any church band be able to access the great heritage of hymn words and music to glorify God! It
is my hope and prayer that using these arrangements will help you and your local
church to see that God has been at work saving people for His glory for
many years!
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