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A service plan for Lent focused on Psalm 34 and viewing Jesus as the suffering servant in a Lenten series on the Psalms.

The psalms reflect our deepest emotions as people of faith. In their expressions of thanksgiving, trust, lament, anger, joy, doubt, and praise, these ancient prayers seem to peer right into our souls and put words to our thoughts and experiences. But the psalms are more than human words to God. Embedded as they are in the scriptures, they are now also God’s word to us.

A panel discussion in which Amanda Benckhuysen, Karen Campbell, G. Sujin Pak, and moderator Kathy Smith ponder the challenges and opportunities in preaching and teaching from the psalms. Are there incomplete or incorrect assumptions about the psalms that sermons and lectures can tackle? How do we handle the imprecatory psalms when we have a Savior who told us to love and forgive the very enemies many psalms talk about?

Studying, reciting, singing, and praying the Songs of Ascent from the book of Psalms helped Centerpoint Community Church make its worship and spiritual formation more intergenerational. It also gave people a shared language for bringing all their emotions to God. The church created a website to make all of its Songs of Ascent resources freely available.

Psalms for All Seasons includes all 150 psalms, most in multiple formats.

A service plan focusing on the struggle with seemingly unanswered prayers, the nature of God and the nature of faith in a series addressing difficult questions of the faith.

The psalms were written to be sung. But if your church favors guitar and band-led modern worship, how do you sing the psalms? Songwriter Wendell Kimbrough answers this question through the use of short antiphonal psalm refrains that are singable and memorable for his congregation and provide a musical entry point into a psalm. They have become a beloved staple in his home congregation’s worship.

The psalms are a rich resource for our human experience of emotions, community, and connection to God. We will practice activities based on the truth of the psalms and on psychology to strengthen our capacity for navigating suffering with grace and resilience.

A free concert at the Calvin Chapel, this prelude to the 2012 Calvin Symposium on Worship featured The Psalm Project, a group of musicians from the Netherlands who have taken Genevan Psalm tunes from the 1500s and updated them with arrangements for piano, guitar, and strings.

Anneke Kaai studied fine art and painting in the Netherlands at secular schools in the 1960s and ’70s. That experience compelled her to express her Christian faith through her art. She has painted many works based on scripture, including three series of paintings on the psalms, which she sees as a bountiful resource of imagery for the full range of human feelings in relation to God.