Emily R. Brink

The other day I had parking-lot security duty during our worship service. The person who shared that duty with me used the opportunity to express his frustration about organists who play different arrangements of the hymns on different stanzas. He likes to sing bass and is irritated when organists take off on strange harmonies and lose him. "Why do they do it?" he asked.

Sydney: The Presbyterian Church of Australia, 1987. Available from the PCA, G.P.O. Box 100, Sydney 2001

. Paul Westermeyer. New York: Harper & Row, 1988,128 pp., $14.95.

Models for Paying Church Musicians

With this fourth issue of RW we complete our first year of publication and introduce our first theme issue: Introducing New Hymns and Hymnals. Because hymns express emotions as well as faith, few things in the church are more challenging than introducing a new hymnal or new hymns. Such introductions call for sensitive planning and the cooperative efforts of all the church's leaders.

Singing Psalms of Joy and Praise.Fred R. Anderson. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986, 77 pp. $5.95.A Psalm Sampler.Prepared by the Office of Worship for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986,44 pp. $4.95.These two paperbacks join the growing number of publications from the many different traditions that are once again discovering the riches of singing the psalms. Neither one is a complete psalter, but each builds on and expands the long Reformed tradition of psalm singing.

Every year more North American congregations are discovering the beauty of a traditional English service called, very simply, "Nine Lessons and Carols." The structure of the service is as simple as the title: nine passages of Scripture are followed by nine carols. But the content of those readings and the traditional way of conducting the service have become very meaningful to many congregations.