Music for next Christmas?

CHRISTMAS PRAISE!
Praise Trust. 73 carols, hymns & songs. £18
ISBN 978 1 739 156 305

It’s the hardest thing. What do you do to freshen up a Carol Service – and in particular find those one or two pieces that make the whole event memorable?

Christmas Praise! from the Praise Trust is wanting to give you fresh ideas and alternatives, all from a framework of clear evangelical doctrine.

And that is a laudable thing. Christmas Praise! is an eclectic book – it’s a mixture of well-known writers, with more in-house writers and arrangers to offer churches something fresh and different.

Bringing good theology together

Some of the pieces work well and have imaginative arrangements; other pieces could have done with external editor to make a few tweaks. But all that is to be expected in any collection. Even in the most famous collection, Carols For Choirs from OUP, churches regularly only use a third at most.

What is distinctive about this book is that, with its heart and theology in the right place, it has a number of offerings that you won’t find together in one collection. What Kind of Throne by Joel Payne, along with O Come All You Unfaithful from Sovereign Grace, various pieces from Getty and Townend, and some lovely lyrics from Chris Idle and Emma Turl, plus a number of newer writers and arrangers are all side by side in one collection. And that is what a songbook does. Instead of visiting many different websites, here it is, all in a book!

The compilers are to be thanked for doing this; for supplying a number of arrangements online and pulling a wide range of material together. You may wish you had this for last Christmas, but at least you have a resource for the future, and that makes it all just a little easier. Steve James is a song and hymn writer and was rector of Holy Trinity Platt Church.