With what variety and freedom the Lord has blessed his Church! The purpose of Christian Worship: Musician’s Resource is to make that variety readily accessible to the congregations of our church body. A range of talent, training levels, and available musicians exists across the nearly 1300 churches in WELS. To encourage and enable use of this vast array in worship, the Christian Worship: Musician’s Resource will curate existing and provide new resources that support, enhance, and add variety to congregational singing.
The specific focus of these resources is to support the congregation as they sing hymns from Christian Worship. But this is not a resource for musicians only. Although the resources will be used primarily by musicians and worship planners, the benefactors are every individual in the congregation—every person sitting in the pew singing the promises and praises of Jesus.
Rich Resources for a variety of congregations
Christian Worship: Musician’s Resource includes a broad variety of extended musical materials for beautifying worship.
Resources will include alternate keyboard harmonizations and accompaniments, vocal and instrumental descants, alternate choral stanzas in varying voice combinations and styles, arrangements for liturgical ensembles, handbell resources, extractions of the chorale voices for transposing instruments, and more. Not all resource types will be appropriate for every hymn, but where possible, these types of resources will be available for any given hymn.
versatile options for maximum flexibility
Christian Worship: Musician’s Resource will offer a most flexible and versatile purchase model.
These resources will be available from your WELS publisher, Northwestern Publishing House. The working model is a dedicated area of the NPH website with a la carte purchasing. Not everyone will be able to use or be interested in using everything available for each hymn, so an a la carte model is highly appropriate—you buy only what fits your worship situation.
core resources with future expansion
Christian Worship: Musician’s Resource will launch with the new hymnal and expand thereafter.
Resources will begin to roll out with the release of Christian Worship in 2021. With more than 600 hymns to resource as described above, the resources will likely be released in phases. Priority will be given to the Hymn of the Day, often-used hymns, and newer hymns for which these types of resources do not already exist.
Examples
Browse several representative examples below to see the kind of additional materials you’ll discover in Christian Worship: Musicians’ Resource. Examples include mixed choral alternates, alternate keyboard harmonizations, final stanza modulations, full modern arrangements, instrumental settings, and choral arrangements.
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