Published on
December 8, 2016
Video length
3 mins
Wendell Kimbrough is a songwriter and worship leader in southern Alabama who believes church music should simply be good music that forms us as we sing it together. Drawing on the sounds of American folk and soul music, Wendell writes scripturally-rich songs with singable, memorable melodies. His music has been embraced by a growing number of churches, young and old, large groups and small, contemporary praise bands and traditional choirs.

View the entire 60 minute conversation between Wendell Kimbrough and John Witvliet, professor of music and worship and director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.

Wendell’s newest album, Psalms We Sing Together, provides a collection of congregational songs that invite a powerful encounter with the psalms. The album emerged from a liturgical practice at his church in Alabama. Each week, Wendell creates a refrain for the congregation to sing in a form of call-and-response during the weekly psalm reading. This regular discipline of meditation—for the congregation and for Wendell himself—yielded an immense collection of music, emerging from a single congregation pressing into the wild, enormous, real-life experience of worship that we find in the psalms.

Recent Media Resources

Psalm Singing and the Genevan Psalter

Why and how did psalm singing become such a hallmark of Reformed worship? Join Dr. Karin Maag for a fascinating journey through time, from Reformation Geneva to Scotland and from the Netherlands to New England, exploring the roots and impact of metrical psalm singing. Along the way, we will hear the voices of early modern Christians as they learned how to sing the psalms, both in unison and in harmony.

December 4, 2025 | 38 min video
Kathleen Harmon on Becoming the Psalms

Sister Kathleen Harmon of the community of the Ohio province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Dayton, invites us to be transformed by the psalms and experience them as the whole story God is revealing to us. As we keep praying and singing them, the psalms interpret us, and that’s when the transformation comes.

December 2, 2025 | 32 min listen
Vinroy D. Brown Jr. on Black Psalmody is for Everyone

Vinroy D. Brown Jr.—conductor, musicologist, educator, and minister of creative worship and music at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City—explores the vibrant intersection of Black sacred music and the psalms. He talks about Black composers and how they have reimagined the psalms through choral music, spirituals, and the gospel tradition for the benefit of everyone.

December 2, 2025 | 34 min listen