I love this time of year. Fall approaches, sweater weather nears, kids go back to school (!), and our ministries renew their energy. The continuing global pandemic may have us down, but we are a resilient people with many blessings in our community. It is time to celebrate and give thanks.

We are excited to announce a new partnership between Saint George’s and 9th Street Chamber Music, a new venture by musicians we know well. Having played for us individually and together over the past years, we welcome the four musicians of the 9th Street String Quartet, Matthew Richardson, Jennifer Wade, Elizabeth O’Hara Stahr, and Andrew Rammon as our Artists in Residence and look forward to their participation in our worship services.

We rejoice in the good news that beginning on Sunday we can return to congregational singing (masked) in all of our worship services – 8 am, 9:15 am, and 10:30 am. What a wonderful thing! Important research completed this past year by the University of Colorado and University of Maryland found that we can sing together in a manner that is very safe by following a few simple mitigations such as wearing a mask. I have missed hearing you sing and look forward to Sunday when once again our voices will raised together in song. So, do sing out and rejoice! There will be good hymns. Afterall, we have to make up for lost time.

I’ve always loved this hymn. As a young child, I liked it because it talked about nature and the refrain was one I could sing easily. As I got older, I was much more interested in the tune. I didn’t appreciate it for the well-crafted hymn tune that it is with its balanced phrases and flowing lines. I simply thought it was a rockin’ tune and my mother really rocked it at the organ.

Beginning this Sunday you will notice our online worship looks somewhat different than it has the past year. Over the next few weeks we will be transitioning to a true live-stream of our service. Instead of collecting individual service parts in preceding weeks and creating a “worship video” in my basement, our complete worship service will take place in our nave at the same time and we will have limited live music rendered in accordance with the most recent guidance for doing so safely.

The great variety of hymn texts and tunes we have available to us today bring a great variety of insight and expression to our worship. From the time before the birth of Christ up until the contemporary moment, women and men have written hymn texts expressing their insights and stories of their contemporary faith.