William Petruzzo

I’ve spent the last few days with Indelible Grace Music. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the project, but others are not. The idea behind the ministry is honorable and frankly, just plain cool. The gist, although over simplified, is to reproduce very old, often forgotten, hymns for a new generation of Christian worshippers and thinkers. Here’s a quick excerpt from the statement on their website:

We want to be a voice calling our generation back to something rich and solid and beyond the fluff and the trendy. We want to remind God’s people that thinking and worship are not mutually exclusive, and that not everything worth knowing happened in the last three years. We want to invite the Church to appreciate her heritage without idolizing it. We want to open up a world of passion and truth and make it more that just an archaic curiosity for the religiously sentimental. We believe worship is formative, and that it does matter what we think.

Pretty cool, right? I agree. I stumbled on Indelible Grace while looking for really excellent renditions and arrangements of old hymns. You’d be surprised how few there really are. In fact, if you search for hymns on Amazon MP3, you’ll come up with several thousand results that all sound more or less exactly the same.

Then, while doing my monthly peruse of eMusic (read about it here), I came across Indelible Grace’s Music. I was stunned. They literally have a plethora of modern hymn arrangements, something like 85 of them. While there are a handful I’m really not enthusiastic about (i.e., really cheesy), the majority of them are performed with a great deal of care and, dare I say, relevance.

Most of the arrangements range from mellow indie-folk melodies, to heavier rock, to full blown southern-slide-guitar country. The performers also range from people I’ve never heard of, to bigger names in Christian music, like Derek Webb.

Indelible Grace also makes implementing hymn arrangements into worship services relatively easy. On their website you’ll find pretty comprehensive listings of hymns they perform, as well as lyrics and chord charts for various instruments.

I would very much like to see churches put Indelible Grace’s hard work to good use in their local congregations. Because the words we sing are indeed formative. And, in many ways they do shape our theologies and our ideas about God. In fact, I fairly often hear people quote songs, thinking they’re quoting scripture. If that is the case, then let’s bring real depth and real substance into our songs. Lets sing hymns.

Here are some of my favorite recordings from Indelible Grace Music so far:

O Help My Unbelief
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

Come Then, Lord Jesus
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

Hear Our Prayer (The Litany Song)
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go
Album: Indelible Grace Side B

O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus
Album: Indelible Grace Side A

O Come and Mourn
Album: For All the Saints

Not What My Hands Have Done
Album: For All the Saints

Lead Me On O King Eternal
Album: Beams of Heaven

Jesus Lover of My Soul
Album: Beams of Heaven

Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah
Album: Beams of Heaven

Poor Sinner Dejected With Fear
Album: Pilgrim Days

This list is in no wise exhaustive. There are many other great recordings on these albums, but this list is a pretty good taste of what’s there. If you like what you hear in these, I would strongly recommend you go ahead and buy the albums. You won’t be disappointed. But, good news!

Get Indelible Grace Music for FREE!

I’m probably breaking some rules somewhere, but I just think that this music will be a great blessing to many, so I’m going suggest it anyway.

On eMusic now, if you’ve never signed up, then sign up! They’ll give you 50 songs for free. They’re yours to keep. When you sign up, you’ll have to give them a credit card so that when the month is over they can start charging you the subscription fee, but it’s a trial. So, just cancel before the month is up and it wont cost you anything. But for the purposes today, the trial will get you about 4 out of 6 of the Indelible Grace albums.

So, get on there. Sign up. Download the Indelible Grace Music. Cancel your account right away. Or, keep the service going. It really is great.

I can’t remember where I first saw this video. I imagine I was probably directed to it by a friend. I don’t expect most of you will make all the way it through this video, it’s about 30 minutes long. But, if you will, I think you’ll be moved—probably to emotion, but hopefully to prayer.

Admittedly, this video is not so much contemporary as much as it is kind of cheesy in its production. But, the preachers are speaking of true, God breathed, prayer charged, revival. Something we should all be hoping and praying for.

It’s worth watching.

This video was made by Barats & Bereta, a comedy duo on MySpace video. I don’t get the impression that they’re a Christian group, in fact that seems highly unlikely. Regardless though, this video is pretty well done and at least worth a chuckle. I thought I’d share it.

I’m sure many of you have already found SermonAudio.com, but for those of you who have not, I hope you will find something that encourages you.

SermonAudio.com is…

In a nutshell, SermonAudio.com is a massive database of free audio files which can either be streamed and listened to from you computer, or downloaded and loaded onto an mp3 player or cell phone. I did say “free” right. Right, free. There are sermons from contemporary preachers from all over the US and internationally. That’s great and all, but it gets way better. SermonAudio.com also has a wealth of classic preachers as well. Tozer, Pink, Jonathan Edwards, Spurgeon—just to name a few. But really, it seems that the list just keeps going.

How it works…

When arriving at the site you’re dumped into a fairly cluttered environment. It takes some time to catch your breath and figure out what exactly you’re looking at. However, most folks won’t have too much trouble after a minute or too.

The main column of the site is filled mostly with updates and daily postings, popular downloads and featured speakers. But, the really juicy stuff starts on the left.

You’ll see four very important links: Sermons by Bible, Sermons by Speaker, Sermons by Topic and Sermons by Date. I’m sure you can figure out what these are. This is the main artery for browsing sermons. Choose to look up all the sermons by a favorite preacher, by the date they were delivered, or the topic they’re about. Or, by my favorite, the verse they are taken from.

When you select “Sermon by Bible”, you’re dropped onto a page displaying each book of the bible and a link to the each chapter. Within each link you’ll find sermons relevant to the selected verse. And, at the top of the page you’ll find an handy quick reference to the chapter of the bible you’re browsing in. From the scripture quick-reference, you can also further narrow your searches down by clicking on a particular verse and displaying sermons relevant to that specific verse.

When browsing through sermons, you also have some pretty advanced sorting methods to choose from. You can sort by the geographic area the sermon was delivered, the speaker, the denomination of the speaker and more.

The sermon…

Once you’ve actually found the sermon you’d like to hear, first you’ll have to sign up for their newsletter. No biggie. Then, you’ll have the option of either streaming the sermon live using Windows Media Player, meaning no hard drive space will be taken up on your computer. Or, you can choose to download the sermon onto your computer. The sermon comes in the form of an mp3 file. The files are a pretty decent size, not too big, but not so small that the sound quality stinks.

If you choose to download the sermon, you’ll then have the chance to load it into itunes, then onto you ipod. Or any other mp3 playing device.

One drawback to downloading the mp3’s are that they are not intelligently named files. So, for example, if you download a sermon by Charles Spurgeon, the file may not have a name you recognize. It will more likely be titled with a seemingly random string of numbers. You’ll want to rename the files so you can easily find them later.

Membership options…

I offer kudos to SermonAudio.com for offering this service for free. It’s commendable and, I believe a great gift to the church, if she would only take advantage of it. However, more robust options are available for people who are willing to pay a nominal premium.

For free you can get pretty much all of the best benefits. Listen to sermons. Download sermons. Browse sermons. Search the bible. Stream sermon related videos. Even get access to a lot of PDF sermon resources.

For bloggers and other web junkies, $4.95/month will get more features. Namely, the ability to download a lot of stuff unattended–although I don’t really know how this works. There’s also things like blogging tools and some advanced RSS options.

For churches and pastors, $29.95/month will get everything, plus the ability post your own sermons from your church. It seems that there must be some kind of a screening process, because the site really doesn’t seem to be overrun with junk. But whatever the case, that’s the gist of the complete package.

However, take note, the best and most important features are offered for free. The way it should be.

Highlights…

SermonAudio.com has a host of really cool and free features. There’s a few that stick out to me.

1. RSS Capabilities. Lets be honest, we’re not going to be visiting this site all that often. It just wouldn’t be a very practical stop along the road. But, with RSS subscriptions to sermon series or speakers, you can bring SermonAudion.com into your RSS reader. With Google, the sermon can stream directly from the feed.

and

2. Morning & Evening Devotions with C.H. Spurgeon. In addition to being able to read Spurgeon’s Morning & Evening Devotions, a good audio version is offered making the devotional easy to do in the car on the way to work or at your desk. Pair this one with the RSS functions and you’ve got a pretty sweet pair.

Conclusion…

SermonAudio.com is fantastic. It’s an excellent resource, especially considering all the classic content. And, it’s free, which is great.

So, go check it out. Download some sermons. Learn a thing or two and fall more in love with Jesus.

Today, I discovered Second Life.

I know a lot of people are already familiar with Second Life, but there a whole lot who also aren’t. Second Life is kind of a like a gigantic online version of the computer game The Sims, crossed with a chat room sporting some pretty cool graphics.

The schtick though is that basically, anything you might like to do in real life, you can do in this virtual world (including fly). In a way, you get to reboot your life. Of course you still have to deal with your first life, you get a second life to do whatever you like with. It’s weird, I know.

In the virtual world, it’s free to move about, visit different places, meet people, talk about things, and so on. But, if you wanted to, you could purchase land. On the land you could build your dream home, a bar, club, restaurant, marina, pretty much whatever you like. Even a church.

That’s what provokes me to write today.

Now, I’m not much of a gamer. I just don’t have the time. But, since the software was free, I thought I’d give it a shot. When I found out just how much real-world like stuff there is in Second Life, I thought I’d go and see if there’s anyone planting churches in this virtual world. And what do you know? There is.

These folks did. I decided to make a trip over to the church. I was pretty surprised at what I found.

The ALM CyberChurch property is pretty much everything you’d expect in a modern day mega-church. Huge panes of glass, lots of grassy fields. Interesting designs and lots of seating. Of course with one pretty important difference. This church doesn’t exist in real life. Well, in tangible life anyways. It is real. Just not exactly tangible.

Almost every facet of the CyberChurch mirrors what you’d find if you ventured out to your local brick and morter spiritual establishment. It’s kind of eery actually. When I visited, although there was no mistaking the cyber-nature of the place, it still had that be-quiet-your-in-church feel to it.

And, like any quality mega-church, the CyberChurch even had a coffee shop decked out with couches and espresso machines.

Upstairs in the coffee shop you can find where the church meets for virtual small groups, or at least I assume, based on the arrangement of the chairs.

The main sanctuary looks like anything you’d find in most churches. When you visit the virtual church, you can either attend their weekly service at 11:00am on Sunday mornings, or you can go at any time and listen to a recording of the last service.

Scattered all around the virtual facility, are signs alerting people to their need to believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior. And this, I think above anything else, created questions in my mind. As I explored the area, there was a certain novelty to seeing what was built. But when I came across these notices, I realized something interesting. I wasn’t seeing the words as reality. Some how they were merging into my subconsciousness as part of the virtual reality I was experiencing. If I began to see the call for repentance as a virtual stimulation, how likely is that to translate into actual, spiritual repentance in my heart?

I won’t pass judgement on whether or not these virtual ministries are effective, right or even good.  It seems likely only time will tell. But I will say, it’s an awfully fascinating turn in church history. Unprecedented.

If you frequent the world of Second Life and would like to visit the church, you can “teleport” there from this link.

My friend Ric sent me an email sharing this video with me. It’s from Rhetta & Link. I can’t say that I was laughing out loud the whole time, but the quality and attention to detail was quite excellent. Hope you enjoy as much as I did!

PS – Ric, I’m sorry if I stole this posting from you!

After about two months of long days and (seemingly) endless tweaking and troubleshooting, I’ve finally finished new website! I have to admit, I love Wordpress & Zenphoto who provided such an excellent platform to build my website on!

I kept a familiar layout, but upgraded to a formal status with khaki colors! I also added a ton of new information. I now have a section for regular updates which I’ll use for introducing new albums and images. I also have a more robust section for pricing, as well as a fairly comprehensive FAQ section, answering a lot of questions people might have.

I’ve also tweaked the way that images display, making navigation easier, and hopefully accessible from lower screen resolutions.

All in all, I’m pleased with the new website. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to check it out and maybe drop me some feedback!