21 Days of Hymns

About a month ago, our Sunday School class was visited by a couple who were guests of our classmates. The man’s name was Greg Vaughn and he is a Christian filmmaker and producer…and also an Emmy Award-winning maker and producer of Christian films (there is a distinction there, y’know). 2023 marks his 50th year of filmmaking.

Greg shared with us a project entitled Worship 101 that he’s produced, in partnership with best-selling author Dr. Robert J. Morgan. Worship 101 is a series of videos that focus on the great hymns of the Christian faith. These videos are extremely well done, and provide the historical and cultural backdrop for the creation of these musical masterpieces, as well as insight into the authors’ personal lives and testimonies.

Out of this project has come a devotional series called 21 Days of Worship. Subscribers to this online series receive each morning for three weeks an email containing the story behind one of those hymns, and links to additional related material, including a video and a playlist of various arrangements of the hymn as performed by wide sampling of musicians. It is also accompanied by some suggestions as to how to apply the message of the hymn to your daily life.

Here’s Greg Vaughn’s introduction to 21 Days of Worship:

If you’re interested in subscribing to this 21-day devotional series, you can sign up via this link, which is also on the YouTube page containing the preceding video.

I just finished with the devotional series and I found it to be an interesting and uplifting way to start the day. I grew up with these hymns and even as they seem to be increasingly displaced by so-called contemporary praise and worship songs and choruses in corporate worship — and I’m not here to disparage that style of music at all, because I find a lot of value in much of it — they still are capable of imparting and reinforcing significant theological truths, and of doing so in beautifully crafted language that is also in short supply nowadays.

Need an example from the series? Here’s a link to the video accompanying the devotional for The Old Rugged Cross. (They’ve restricted the ability to embed the video on other websites, so hop over to Vimeo.com to view it.)

If you are also a fan — if I may use such a glib term — of hymns and hymnology, I highly recommend subscribing to this series. I think you’ll find it to be time well spent.