“Our Grandparents bought it, our parents threw it out, and now we’re buying it back.” So says RUF pastor Kevin Twit when explaining why many young adults are turning back to hymns and away from praise choruses. The Indelible Grace mission statement says “Our hope is to help the church recover the tradition of putting old hymns to new music for each generation, and to enrich our worship with a huge view of God and His indelible grace.”.
As a part of this effort, I have been working on helping to write out piano accompaniments to the songs on the Indelible Grace CDs to make it easier for them to be used by others. So far, I’ve finished “O Come and Mourn”, “Jesus, Cast a Look on Me”, “Jesus, I Come”, “Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder”, and “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven”. You can download this music for free at their website. Their CD’s are also available for purchase from their website, www.igracemusic.com, featuring singers like Matthew Perryman Jones, Andrew Osenga, Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, and Dan Haseltine.
From the IG website:
Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) is proud to be able to share with the church at large, some of the rich music that has developed within our various chapters over the last 25 years. We desire to teach our students about the songs of the church and to value the wonderful heritage we have in the hymns. But we also want to encourage our students to build on the tradition. We have been thrilled to see a movement gaining momentum – a movement to help the church recover the tradition of putting old hymns to new music for each generation, and to enrich our worship with a huge view of God and His indelible grace. We have found through years of ministering to college students that there is a real hunger to connect with something real and solid, something that is ancient, yet full of passion. Putting old hymns to new music allows us to hear afresh the rich theology and emotion that fill these hymns.
I love that we’re getting back to the old hymns. On the other hand, I think sometimes some of the new tunes that RUF puts them too are just too perky for the wording. Just my own personal opinion, but much as I love the tune for “From the depths of woe,” it doesn’t quite fit the depths of woe.