Psalm singing is experiencing a resurgence in the broader church. With that renewed popularity, new psalters or psalter-hymnals have cropped up. The increased singing of psalms is a marvelous development, and can only help a society that has lost an understanding of Scripture and its absolute truth.

But the new books that contain psalms tend to stand alone; that is, they exist with few if any support materials for congregations and individuals. Since our mission has always been to incorporate psalm singing into the worship and everyday life of the church, we are always thinking about how to better support psalm singers and would-be psalm singers.

In August we launched a major upgrade to Psalter.org. It is more like a brand new site or even a phone app than it is like the old tune-playing site. This site allows you to access all the words and music of the psalter, as well as all 15 Crown & Covenant psalms albums, from any phone, tablet, computer, or even TV that you use.

These features are all available for less than the price of a psalter or album, at $9/year. A month-to-month subscription is $1. What about those who only want the free features of Psalter.org they have become accustomed to, such as tunes, harmonies, and search? Those features are still free, and don’t even require a login.

The subscriber features of Psalter.org integrate the standard features and add the following:

▶ Works with your phone or computer, any browser, any system

▶ Includes lyrics and music for every verse of all 150 psalms

▶ See text with or without music and resize text

▶ Navigates easily to selection with slider bar or search box

▶ Access the entire library of choral selections of these psalms (more being added each year). Currently over 200 selections from The Book of Psalms for Worship are available.

▶ Works with Chromecast and AirPlay, and also on any TV equipped with a browser

▶ “Mute all audio” for use in church services

▶ Digital pitch pipe to change the pitch of playback.

▶ Option to purchase multiple subscriptions at a discount for groups and churches, from within the site.

The phone app for The Book of Psalms for Worship is still available in the iTunes store and on GooglePlay, and some will continue to prefer using the app. But for those who use multiple platforms and who like a longer list of available features, Psalter.org has advantages. Some of the features listed above are exclusive. With a phone app, you can listen to psalms you have purchased; but with Psalter.org you can listen to all the psalms albums without purchasing anything extra.

If you want to sing Psalm 1A in your devotions, for example, but don’t know the tune well, you not only can hear the tune played on a piano but can also click a button to hear it sung by a choir. You also have the option of listening to the choir selections in order of their appearance in the psalter.

As a beta release, Psalter.org is still being refined, and we will continue to work to make sure that anyone who wishes to sing psalms, regardless of whether they are “musical” and regardless of whether they have sung psalms in the past, has all the support they need. We are grateful to Scott Doherty who is the brains behind this new digital form of the psalter.

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Now on Spotify

For those who use a music service such as Spotify, Pandora, ApplePlay, Amazon, or GooglePlay, good options for psalms selections have been scarce. Crown & Covenant once again is trying to support psalm singers by making all its albums available free on these music services.

Crown & Covenant’s 15 albums are gradually being added to these services. Several are already available. To find these albums, go to your favorite music service and search for “Crown & Covenant.”

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Sing! Again

For the second year, Crown & Covenant had a psalms booth at the Getty Sing! Conference. The theme of this year’s conference was singing about Christ, and there were 13,000 pastors, music leaders, and others from 50 countries in attendance.

The Sing! Conference is just in its third year and has grown significantly. Last year’s conference theme was singing the psalms in worship and had 8,000 attendees. Crown & Covenant not only had a book table but brought New Song from Geneva College to sing psalms in the exhibition hall.

We were pleased to have about 100 people who had attended last year’s conference come back to our booth and say they had purchased a psalter last year and were using it in their personal devotions, Bible studies, and/or churches with great blessing. A couple of New Song members also joined us at the booth occasionally this year, and we held informal psalm sings with customers.

Once again this year, we had the privilege to introduce psalm singing to people who didn’t even know that complete psalters existed. Next year’s Sing! Conference will be back at Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn. The theme is the singing of Scripture, and once again Crown & Covenant plans to be there.

Drew Gordon is a co-director of Crown & Covenant Publications and is editor of the Witness. A publications feature appears semiannually in the magazine.