Christopher Chelpka

Prof. Kate Klonick teaches her students about privacy with a “creepy assignment”.

She has them go to public places and then learn what they can about a person by watching, listening, and googling. What her students learn is that our privacy is protected in public partly by being unknown to others. But, with the power and accesibility of the internet and its tools, it’s like we’re all living in a small town. Which is why Prof. Klonick advises us to

“Treat every place as if it were a small town, and give everyone the privacy that you would give to your neighbor — and that you would want your neighbor to give to you.”

That’s excellent advice. Let me suggest three ways to do that.

First, when possible, move private converastions to private places. This applies to both viritual spaces and physical ones.

Second, keep your voice down. Just because that guy over there is wearing headphones or holding a book, it doesn’t mean he’s not listening. And if you’re sharing secrets, you can guarantee he is listening.

Third, start noticing how some public and semi-public places work well for private conversations and some don’t. As a pastor who does disciples people over a large metro area, I keep a list handy of the places I find that offer privacy. Here are some examples from my list:

• “Wide, open park with paved paths. Not much decision making necessary for choosing which direction to go. Easy to see who is around you.”
• “Free. Quiet garden. Take the path on the left and find the bench by the back wall.”
• “Burgers. Loud music and kitchen noise. Open floor plan with lots of space between tables.”

Hymnary.org is a fantastic tool for researching church music and for finding songs to sing in worship. I focus this article on finding songs for worship, and I’ll start by explaining how this works at my church.

Picking Hymns At Covenant

At Covenant, we use the Trinity Psalter Hymnal for our corporate worship. The Trinity Psalter Hymnal has about 700 songs to choose from, which is great but potentially overwhelming. Especially since our aim at Covenant is to match each hymn to its particular place in worship and to a main theme in the sermon. And there are other factors too.

So, for example, if a prominent theme in the sermon is the spread of the gospel, and we need a song to follow our confession of sin and assurance of pardon, then Psalm 51 might be a good choice. First, because Psalm 51 is a song about the grace of repentance. And second, because it includes the line: “Then I’ll teach your ways to sinners; rebels will return to you. From the guilt of blood, O free me, God, my God and Savior true.”

Without Hymnary.org, finding an appropriate match will depend on your memory of the hymnal and the usefulness of the indices.

As you might guess, sometimes it’s hard to find what you are looking for. In a pinch, you can pick a standard like Holy, Holy, Holy or Be Thou My Vision and move on. But now that the metadata and texts of the songs in the Trinity Psalter Hymnal are online and searchable at Hymnary.org, you have a better option.

Case Study: Baptism Songs

Imagine you are preaching a short sermon series on baptism, and you want to sing hymns that match this theme. If this were my church, and I planned on a five-week series, I would need about 18 hymns, less than that if we repeated some of the songs. So let’s say you are looking for 13 hymns related to baptism.

You might begin by looking up “baptism” in the topic index of the hymnal. There you would find that the index directs you to the seven hymns in the baptism section (189–195). Assuming you’re happy with them all, that’s only about half of what you need. And there’s another problem: about five of the seven are directly related infant baptism. Nothing wrong with infant baptism, but you’re probably only going to use some of these in a sermon series that focuses on baptism more generally.

So, not having enough songs yet, you think to look up “water” in the index. Good move! Under WATER OF LIFE you’ll find four more hymns, and these are all real winners:

• Come to the Waters
• Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken
• Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah
• I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say

So now you have, at the most, eleven hymns. Which means you’re still short. Also, it would be nice to have more options to choose from, especially some psalms, since you have none on your list so far.

Full-Text Searching

Now watch this.

1. Go to the advanced search of Hymnary.org.
2. Under Texts, type water in the field called “Full Text”
3. Under Hymnals, type TPH2018 in the field called “Hymnal, Number”
4. Under Result Type select Instances¹

This is how you search the text of every hymn in the Trinity Psalter Hymnal for the word “water”. Click search and you get 51 results!

Not all 51 are relevant but many are. For example, you’d find these songs you hadn’t found before:

• O Day of Rest and Gladness, which reminds us that holy worship is the place where “gospel light is glowing with pure and radiant beams, and living water flowing with soul-refreshing streams.”
• The Church’s One Foundation, which begins “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord; she is his new creation by water and the Word”
• Psalm 46, which includes: “God’s city is forever blest with living water welling; since God is there, she stands unmoved ‘mid tumults round her swelling. God speaks and all is peace, from war the nations cease; the Lord of hosts is nigh. Our father’s God Most High is our eternal dwelling.”

Things are looking good. You might have a list now of 13 songs related to baptism, but there are other things to consider as you make your choices: familiarity, musical factors, order of worship, etc. And so it would be helpful to have a few more options.

No problem. If you expand your search to other relevant words, like “wash” or “cleanse”, you’ll find songs like Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder, which has talks about being washed with Christ’s blood in all five verses, and Psalm 51 —again!—which prays “wash me, make pure within, cleanse, O cleanse me from my sin”. And there are several other hymns that will make your search worthwhile.

Searching Across Indices

Dianne Shapiro, the content manager at Hymnary.org, told me about another popular way to get more results: Use the indices of other hymnals to find songs in a particular hymnal. In other words, suppose a certain song is not included under the topic of baptism in the Trinity Psalter Hymnal, but it has been indexed under baptism in a different hymnal. By following some simple instructions, Hymnary.org can discover those connnections for you.

First, login and add the Trinity Psalter Hymnal under “My Hymnals". This way an icon will appear next to any results that are found in the TPH after any search.

Second, in an advanced search type “baptism” in the Topic field, without specifying the hymnal you’re searching for. Select “texts” under Result Types. Now when you search, all the hymns in every hymnal tagged with “baptism” will appear. And any result that is found in the TPH will have a special icon next to it, even if the TPH did not itself tag that hymn with “baptism.” So clever!

For a topic search on “baptism”, you’ll get over 1,000 results. But you don’t have too dig through all of those because many appear on the first page that are found in the TPH. In fact, the first one found in the TPH is Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which, amazingly, has not come up under any of our other searches thus far—it’s a real gem. And it’s not the only one.

Conclusion

All this writing may make searching seem difficult. But just give it a try. It’ll take you less than ten minutes to figure out, especially if you follow my examples.

And, of course, it’s possible to fuss too much with this. But if you don’t have the hymnal memorized yet and are regularly looking for hymns, then learning how to use the basic search features on Hymnary.org is worth the time. The website will help you find better hymns and find them faster.

The following guidelines help us choose our songs for worship each Sunday at Covenant Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

• Choose songs from the Trinity Psalter Hymnal
• Choose each song based on its place in the order of worship. Each song should respond to what comes before it. Let the first song in the morning respond to our confession of faith, the second to God’s pardon of our sins, the third to his word in the sermon, the fourth to communion. Follow the same pattern for the evening service.
• Choose songs that foreshadow or reflect sermon themes.
• Give shorter songs preference over longer songs when the Lord’s Supper is served.
• Include at least one psalm (1-150). Use the index in the TPH to find psalms by theme. You can also use this table.
• In the evenings we sing the psalm that is read. If there are a couple tune options we pick from those. Otherwise we just sing what’s in the book
• Choose familiar songs and tunes. Repeating a song in the same month is fine, even preferable.
• Never choose songs that share the same tune in the same service.
• Aim for musical variety. A weaker selection of songs would have all the singing in the same meter or mode. A stronger selection would vary these.
• Be sensitive to significant aspects of our current congregational life, i.e. season of the year, shared trials or celebrations.
• Add #409 after the reception of a new member.
• Conclude with the Doxology in the morning and the Gloria Patri in the evening.
• Use your memory, the table of contents, indices, and advanced search at Hymnary.org to help you find hymns. Also the digital versions of the Trinity Psalter Hymnal are useful.

I asked my students taking New Testament Survey to read half of one of the gospels, then write at least one paragraph answering this question: “According to what you read, who is Jesus and what is his mission?”

I loved reading these micro-papers about Jesus. There was nothing fancy about them. They were mostly simple recitiations of how the gospel writers themselves directly answer this question. But the plain truth about Jesus is so beautiful and encouraging! It brought me joy to see that truth affirmed in each summary I read.

Here’s what they found:

• Jesus is God.
• Jesus is human.
• Jesus is so good!
• Jesus fulfills the Old Testament prophesies.
• Reactions to Jesus are strong.
• Jesus forgives sins.
• Jesus helps people in big ways: healing, exorcism, raising from the dead!
• Jesus has great authority in his teaching.
• In his words, in his actions, and in the testimony of others—God the Father, John the Baptist, angels, and even demons—who Jesus is and what his mission is is very clear.

For next week, I asked my students to read the rest of the gospel they started, and think about the various ways people react to Jesus in the gospels.

When’s the last time you read one of the gospels from beginning to end?

Reformed preachers study the writings of our church fathers for many reasons.

One reason is that new heresies are just the old ones, brought again by Satan to harm the church.

This is why the great Puritan, William Perkins, admonished preachers to “get help from orthodox Christian writers, not only from modern times but also from the ancient church.”

Reading our church fathers reminds us that no error is new under the sun, and it readies us to handle these pernicious problems.

“We do not need to look for any novel way of rejecting and refuting heresies;” Perkins wrote, “the ancient ones found in the Councils and the Fathers are well-tested and still reliable.”

See William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying, 24 for these quotes and for a list of ancient heresies matched with the ones Perkins was facing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Sometime preachers are told, “Preach to the children.” The idea is that if you speak in a way children can understand then everyone will understand.

This is good advice, but I’d like to add something. What if we didn’t only preach to the children but we also preached like a child?

This is the advice Samuel Miller gave his students at old Princeton. He thought that if you wanted to find “the most perfect specimen” of preaching style, you should look to children.

In a book about Miller’s pastoral theology, James M. Garretson gives us this quote by Miller that explains the thought:

“If we could suppose a little child sufficiently intelligent and forcible, to get up and tell his story, with all the unaffected ease and gracefulness of children; without a thought of himself, but supremely intent on making himself understood, and pouring out the matter which he had to deliver with his whole heart, without any flourish or effort, we should have, as to this point, the most perfect specimen.”

The advice that says preach to the children wants the preacher to be more clear. Samuel Miller’s advice to preach like a child includes clarity but goes further. It goes deeper too since it asks the preacher to pay attention not only to his words but also to his heart.

Of course, we don’t want childish preaching or preachers. And kids have plenty of speaking faults: too much detail, a lack of clear distinctions, a heart too easily deceived.

But, as Garretson summarizes, what children have, which “adults must apply themselves to attain”, is simplicity that is unpretentious and eloquence that is unaffected.

That’s what it means to preach like a child.

For more of Samuel Miller’s pastoral theology, read An Able and Faithful Ministry: Samuel Miller and the Pastoral Office by James M. Garretson.

We think about time a lot, but not always in the best ways. Seth Godin explains.

Two of our kids attend Veritas Academy of Tucson, which they love. But we need help paying their tuition. It’s is $4,812 per student.

👉 Here’s what’s amazing. You can help pay for their education with no cost to you.

1. Make a donation to Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization.
2. Write Chelpka Family in the recommendation field.
3. Use the donation as a dollar-for-dollar tax credit on your state taxes.

It’s that easy. And it would mean the world to us.

For 2018 taxes, married couples filing jointly can claim up to $2,213 of their total taxes owed, single taxpayers up to $1,107. To donate click here.

Thanks so much!

Christopher and Della

P. S. Please don’t wait, the school year is over half done and we need Veritas to be fully funded. They do a great job for our kids! If you can, make your donation ASAP.

When I was growing up in Phoenix, I used to buy classical music CDs from the Tower Records on 40th Street and Thomas. Inside the store, there was a special room just for classical music. The walls and door were made of soundproof glass so that as soon as the door closed you could only hear the clacking of CD cases as you looked through the shelves, and maybe the sound of Yo-Yo Ma’s cello or Christopher Parkening’s guitar playing through the speakers. But perhaps the best part was that in that room you could find anything you wanted. You could find new things too. This was because the collection was huge and because it was organized by humans who knew what they were doing.

While each store was unique, Tower Records had a reputation for devoting special attention to the way it sold classical music. In San Francisco, there was a classical annex across the street from its main building. In New York, the Tower Records at Lincoln Center was a hot spot for buying classical records and meeting the artists who made them. Somehow, Tower Records realized that classical music had to be treated differently from the rest of their catalog.

Perhaps they saw how information-rich classical recordings are. One album might have multiple composers, arrangers, soloists, orchestras, and maybe even conductors. There may be multiple works, each broken into parts, and spread over a few CDs in a set. Add to this the liner notes, which were often as good or better than any well-researched encyclopedia or journal article you might read.

All this information makes the experience of listening more enjoyable and opens up new listening possibilities. But it also makes cataloging and database management a pain. And, sadly, since Tower Records closed, I’ve rarely seen the information management side of classical music done well, in brick-and-mortar stores or on the new streaming services.

Our streaming services don’t know how to deal with the thousands of pieces called “Adagio”, or how to treat a movement not like a symphony. They often don’t even display full titles. And there are other problems.

Mitchel Broussard, for example, points out how Apple Music

• treats classical music too narrowly as a genre,
• mishandles and strips the rich information that accompanies classical music recordings,
• breaks up tracks,
• and more.

But happily, this can be fixed. As Broussard points out, there are many practical steps Apple Music can take. For example, they can “build better composer pages and offer more categories”. He also suggests, hiring human curators and companies that know what they’re doing. Perhaps, there are some Tower Records people hanging around somewhere?

After I moved away from home, music became easily available over the internet; first, through illegitimate services like Napster and Limewire, then later through paid subscriptions like Spotify and Apple Music. These changes improved our access to classical music. And that’s great. But somehow, with the exception perhaps of NPR deejays, no one seems to know how to deliver that music in an organized way.

For an executive at Apple Music looking to make their mark, this project is being served on a silver platter. Let’s hope someone is listening.

Have you ever overpromised on some work you were doing for someone else?

Augustine did that when he promised to preach 1 John in a certain amount of time. Things probably started fine, but as he was going along he realized his plan was no good. So at the end of sermon number six of what would become a ten-part series, he tells his listeners, “I am afraid the epistle itself will not be finished during these days as I promised, but as the Lord will, it is better to reserve the remainder, than to overload your hearts with too much food”.

Everyone makes planning mistakes, even Augustine. When you do, follow his example.

Instead of barreling forward, be humble. Keep your priorities straight, readjust as necessary, and let everyone know what’s going on.