Emily R. Brink

BGail Ramshaw. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997. Paper, 140 pp. Reviewed by Emily R. Brink, editor of Reformed Worship.

During the past generation, a wealth of new worship songs have been written. Many were inspired by the reforms of Vatican II during the 1960s, when the Roman Catholic Church translated their liturgy into the vernacular and began to encourage congregational singing. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of those new songs assume both Word and Table every Sunday. Also, since most Protestant churches celebrate the Lord's Supper more frequently than they did a generation ago, most hymnal sections on the Lord's Supper have steadily increased in size.

Every June issue of Reformed Worship is a theme issue, and every year the Reformed Worship staff and editorial council weigh various themes. Some of our theme issues have dealt with "hot button" topics of our time. Last year, when the RW editorial council discussed what the next theme issue should be, the Lord's Supper was clearly at the top of the list.

The three songs in this issue are all taken from the Psalter Hymnal (1987) and are accompanied by commentary from the new Psalter Hymnal Handbook (1998). We're celebrating the completion of that huge project in this issue (see also the editorial on p. 2, the interview with primary author Bert Polman on p. 7, and order information on the inside back cover). We're also heaving huge sighs of relief after ten years of research!

Have-you ever tried to picture what the great wedding banquet of the Lamb will be like? Those three images—of wedding, banquet, and Lamb—are poetic metaphors of what lies "beyond the Jordan," to use another metaphor. Every time we meet for worship, we anticipate another time when we will begin a worship service that will be so perfectly planned and carried out that we won't want it to end. And it won't. Scripture is full of poetic language that gives us hints and glimpses of what eternal life is all about.

Soon after the Psalter Hymnal was released in 1988, people started calling, wondering when the Psalter Hymnal Handbook would be ready. I got calls and letters, even from different countries. After all, this would be a first for the Reformed tradition: there was no English-language companion volume that dealt with both psalms and hymns from the perspective of the Reformed heritage of congregational song.

Paul Westermeyer. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997. 159 pp. Revised edition. Reviewed by Emily R. Brink, editor of Reformed Worship.

Brink and Polman are coeditors of the forthcoming Psalter Hymnal Handbook.

Again in this issue of Reformed Worship, we offer a preview of the forthcoming Psalter Hymnal Handbook, a collection of essays on the history of music in the church as well as entries on every song and author and composer in the 1987 Psalter Hymnal. This ten-year-long project is now in production and is scheduled for release in Spring 1998.

This past year was one of the most invigorating enjoyable, and exhausting years I have spent for a long time. In the March 1997 issue (RW 43:2) T wrote that I was on a partial study leave to deal with a number of questions:

ADVENT

HARK,THE GLAD SOUND!
THE SAVIOR COMES

Again in this issue at Reformed Worship, we offer a glimpse at the forthcoming Psalter Hymnal Handbook, a large project that is nearing completion at long last. You will be hearing much more about it in the next issues of RW!