FRANKLIN, TENN. — I went to a journalism conference, and a church service broke out.
Given that this particular conference was for the Evangelical Press Association, that didn’t surprise me. But an a cappella church service, sung from hand-held hymnals? That was not on my bingo card!
Three of us from The Christian Chronicle attended this year’s conference in the crowded Nashville suburb of Franklin, and I was the only one from our Oklahoma City office. I think that’s a good indicator of how the Chronicle has grown in recent years. Calvin Cockrell, our managing editor, drove up from his home in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and our intern, Ephraim Rodenbach, came from nearby Murfreesboro, where he’s a student at Middle Tennessee State University.
Being in Nashville, the conference had to start with music. Singer/songwriter Jason Gray played some of his latest work, including a great one about responding to today’s culture of outrage called “Jesus Loves You (And I’m Trying).” He also did his hit “Remind Me Who I Am.”
Erik Tryggestad takes a selfie with Christian music singer Jason Gray at the EPA convention.
After dinner, we spent the evening with Keith and Kristyn Getty, a songwriting couple from Northern Ireland who collaborated with Stuart Townend to give the world “In Christ Alone.” They recently produced “The Sing! Hymnal,” a slick compendium of 900 worship songs from past and present.
Calvin and I thumbed through the pages in search of our fellowship’s national anthem, “Our God, He Is Alive,” but to no avail.
We’ll have to paste it on the inside back cover and call it No. 900b.
The Gettys had a keyboard on their little stage at the front of the conference room, so I figured we’d be listening to some instrumental versions of contemporary hymns they’d written. Instead, Keith asked us to turn in our hymnals to No. 4, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” The song, written in 1826 by Reginald Heber, may be “the perfect hymn,” he said, in terms of lyrics, structure and balance.
Erik Tryggestad poses with Keith and Kristyn Getty at the EPA convention.
Keith wanted all of us to sing it.
“And can we do this a cappella?” he asked.
The room — filled with Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, the Salvation Army and more — answered with a resounding yes. I jumped up to film. The sound was absolutely heavenly. It felt like home. I told Calvin and Ephraim that I was going to post the video to TikTok and tell everyone it was from the first worship service of the Cool Springs Marriott Church of Christ.
Good hymns communicate “truth beyond the scratches on the paper,” Keith said. “God created with words, and words have creative power. They can speak new realities into existence.”
Keith advocates for churches to sing three old hymns for every new one they bring into a worship service “because the great hymns are a 50-year gift to people,” he told me after the service, “whereas a modern hymn is a five-year gift.”
Evangelical Press Association members sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” a cappella from “The Sing! Hymnal.”
Newer hymns tend to be “more transient,” his wife added.
He gave hymn No. 434, “Be Thou My Vision,” as an example. It’s based on a 10th century Irish poem (sometimes attributed to Dallán Forgaill, who was blind) and turned into a hymn by Mary Elizabeth Byrne and Eleanor Hull in the early 1900s.
The verses guide the believer through life, Keith said. The first, “Be thou my vision,” asks God to give us a sense of purpose and mission as we start out. “Be thou my wisdom” in the second verse is a prayer that our minds would grow. “Be thou my battle shield,” verse three, asks God to save us from temptation, and verse four builds on that by warning about the temptations of riches and “man’s empty praise.” Finally, verse five focuses on the end of earthly life. “May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heav’n’s Sun!”
Micah Voraritskul speaks on “AI Strategy for Gospel-Centered Content” during the EPA convention. Voraritskul is the founder of VerifiedHuman, a global certification platform for human-created work. His uncle, Verasak “Kim” Voraritskul, is a longtime worker with Churches of Christ in Khon Kaen, Thailand.
The rest of the conference touched on a variety of timely topics — artificial intelligence, covering controversial topics, intergenerational communication and more. But the musicians who launched the gathering provided a firm foundation for our endeavors. Throughout my time at the Cool Springs Marriott, I had multiple songs — some by the Gettys, some by Jason Gray and some by songwriters who lived hundreds of years before them — stuck in my head.
I guess that’s what great hymns do. They remind us who we are.
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.
