This week’s Friday Prepare for Worship thoughts are written by Mark Lautenschlager, Director of Communications and one of Rio’s elders.
If you’re anything like me…then you’re old and well, I’m sorry. We understand how each other’s joints feel, am I right? But in addition to that, we are used to church music that was written for another time and a different audience.
I grew up Lutheran (and not some fake Lutheran, but the real deal Missouri Synod Lutherans, where we had bilingual services in English and GERMAN) and that means I grew up singing hymns. Not the good hymns with tunes you could follow, but ones where you thought they must have been poorly translated from another language. We sang them anyway, because we were Germans and we punished ourselves like that (I’m kidding…sort of).
As a teenager I started attending a non-denominational church (what you’d call an “indy-fundy,” which is churchgoer slang for independent fundamentalist). In that church we sang those old-time Gospel hymns with titles like “I Love to Tell the Story” and “Nothing But The Blood.” At the youth group, we sang what we today would call praise songs and I thought we were cool and countercultural.
What once made us rebels is now regular Sunday morning fare and I’m perfectly okay with that. Now, however, it’s on a grand scale. New songs are coming out all the time and it’s hard to become familiar with so many new tunes. Just when you start to recognize one and feel comfortable singing out, you’re guaranteed never to hear it again (except for those rare occasions when the worship leader starts the song by saying “remember this one?”).
So what’s the answer? How do I become familiar with the songs we’ll be singing, to be prepared for worship on Sundays? I use Spotify. (For those my age, that’s a streaming music app for your smartphone or computer.) It’s free, although if you hate listening to ads like me you will buy a monthly subscription. We publish two playlists that I’d like to call to your attention: the Weekly Worship Playlist and the Worship Music Library.
The former updates each Monday with the songs we’ll be singing the following Sunday. Put that one on repeat and sing along to learn the tunes! The latter is every worship song we’ve sung at Rio since we started with these playlists and presently it sits at 199 songs, or 18 hours and 28 minutes worth of music. I am fond of putting that one on in the car when we’re driving. I hit shuffle play and for the next however long, you have familiar worship songs to sing down the road.
To find these playlists, open Spotify and search for “riovistachurch.” That’s our username. Do NOT search for Rio Vista Community Church because that will land you on our sermon audio podcast, with no clear path back to our user profile and playlists (thanks, Spotify!). So be sure to search for the username. You’ll see the playlists right at the top of our profile. Add them to your library so you can always find them easily.
I’ll see you on Sunday, knowing the tunes and singing out!
— Mark