That we may with “one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6).

My father lived for five years after an accident in which he sustained a severe head injury. Even after he had trouble recognizing his own children, I could say to him, “Shew me thy ways, O Lord; thy paths, O teach thou me,” and he would reply, “And do thou lead me in thy truth, therein my teacher be…My sins and faults of youth do thou, O Lord, forget; after thy mercy think on me, and for thy goodness great” (Psalm 25:4-7 in meter). He grew up in Scotland singing from the Scottish psalter; and those songs stayed with him in his heart all through his life, even when he couldn’t remember much else.

What we learn to sing has a most remarkable power in our mind and in our soul. Music, said Martin Luther, is “a fair and lovely gift from God…next to the word of God the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart.” Rhyme adds great strength to reason. Truth appears all the more beautiful to us when it sings. Or, in Paul’s words, it is a great blessing to us when the word of Christ dwells in us richly.

God’s Word is given to us, in part, to bind our hearts together in Him, that we may with “one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6). The Scottish psalter my father grew up on served that purpose magnificently. A whole nation joined together to sing those songs at school, at church, and at home. If the King James translation of the Bible unified the English language, that psalter united the Scottish heart.

We are blessed nowadays with a great many English psalters; but surely this is somewhat of a mixed blessing. How will the next generation be able to sing together in the nursing home as they do now (often, you notice, all verses by heart)? Just what exactly will they sing? This is a very pressing problem in the wider church, where worship songs come and go each year faster that the “Top 40.” In a fragmenting world, in a disposable culture, churches increasingly struggle to answer the question: How can we all with “one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6)?

In the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, our proposed answer is to join with you. Our old psalter has served us well for 80 years. Generations now unite in the same familiar and beautiful verses. But we also have a pressing need for a contemporary English version in our modern and increasingly international congregations. “I don’t understand,” confessed one honest graduate student to me recently, when I asked him about the psalms we sing. “I don’t even understand the syntax.”

A few years ago, our General Synod’s worship committee contacted our dear friends at Crown & Covenant Publications. Your ministry has meant so much to us over the years. Speaking personally, it was your CD recordings in the mid-1990s that totally changed my understanding of God, of His worship, of the character of Jesus Christ’s present reign—and they totally changed what I thought good worship music was. Over the years, we have been so impressed not only with the accuracy, power, and faithfulness of your translations, but also with the unparalleled support you provide—song CDs, instructional DVDs, integration with family worship and educational resources, and so forth. So we asked, “Now that your new psalter is nearly complete, can we begin work on a joint project? Can we now, at last, begin to sing the Lord’s songs together?”

The result has been the proposed ARP Psalter, which will be presented for final approval at our 2011 ARP General Synod, following these last two years of evaluation in draft. It contains the whole Psalter in contemporary English, selecting one version of each psalm from your new Book of Psalms for Worship. In the back, we have chosen 60 of our most popular and beloved selections from our current Bible Songs metrical psalter, through which we desire to bind ARP generations and congregations together in closer unity.

It is ultimately the perfect, inerrant, unchanging Word of God that binds all of us Christians together, and not any one translation. Nevertheless, we eagerly look forward to the day that draws near when we will all be able to join together and with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ by singing:

“Behold how very good it is, a pleasant thing to see; when brothers join to live as one in peace and unity!” (Ps. 133:1)

David Vance is pastor of Redeemer ARP Church in Blacksburg, Va., and formerly chairman of the ARP Synod’s Worship Committee. He is married with six children.