Dead Men Walking: Aaron Snell Director of Music Logos School on psalms, hymns, & modern church music

Psalm Singing as the Gold Standard for Worship

Welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking Podcast. We're live in Rapid City at the Fight East Rally, and we're having a good time, aren't we, Jason? We sure are.

We've got a lot of great things going on here, a lot of boobs, a lot of great speakers. Absolutely.

We've been singing psalms Friday night, Saturday. We're going to do some tomorrow, too, and who do we have with us on the podcast today?

Aaron Snell from Logos Music School. Well, Logos School.

Logos School, yeah. He can get some applause, right? Oh, absolutely.

Thank you. Thank you. Yes. You have been, yeah, bringing us through some great psalm sings. Our fake audience loves you. Yeah, yeah.

No, that's not fake. That's actual people. Oh, that's real. Yeah, we have real people off camera, you guys. That's right. Clapping like that. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do.

Sure.

So, I teach music at Logos School. This year, actually, I teach first grade all the way through twelfth, so I get a big range of ages. I'm married to my beautiful wife, Amy, and I have five children, ages 17 through six, and we live in Moscow, Idaho, and are very thankful for the Christian community there that's been encouraging our family, and for Logos School, that has just been a huge blessing to us.

Absolutely. And I should say, too, before we go any farther, we also have Josh Ivey on here. He's been our audio video guy, just coming out here, doing stuff with us. We brought him out from Michigan.

We usually tell people to watch out. He's our security.

He's our cannon. But I will warn anyone watching and listening, we do have four musicians here, so when you get four musicians together, they might get a little crazy. Yeah, we will. More technical. More technical.

You know, it might be a suspended chord in there, too, maybe a seventh, I don't know, but we wanted to have you on just because what you're doing and bringing attention to singing psalms, there's so many churches across America who have just kind of pushed those to the side.

I know a lot of non-denominational churches, a lot of your merging church, a lot of those just go, eh, you know, that's part of the Bible, but we're not going to sing those. And your emphasis on those and how you bring them to life is just absolutely amazing.

Can you talk a little bit about the importance of realizing and singing and worshiping with psalms?

Sure. Well, not that there is anything wrong with hymns or spiritual songs or any of that, but God has given us a psalm book. And so if we opt for other things to the exclusion of that, we've gotten something wrong.

God has given us a psalm book, and one of the most important things I think it does in the life of the church is it orients the church to worship God in the way He wants us to worship Him, to talk to Him the way He wants us to talk to Him, to think about what's going on in the right light.

These are not good and helpful godly lyrics. This is God's Word modeling all of those things for us. So it's the gold standard, right? Absolutely. And these are beautiful psalms that we're singing. I absolutely love classical music.

I went to college for music, so I was always into classical. But whenever we're starting to sing these tunes, it's so powerful because we're only using voices right now. We don't have the fog machine.

You didn't bring it.

We didn't have the bass, didn't have the drums. I left my guitar at home. Oddly, nothing gold falling from the ceiling, either. Very disappointed in this conference. Yeah, but it's true.

It's just beautiful. I love hearing the voices. Well, and that's intentional for it. I mean, that's the idea. We don't worship at Christchurch with, you know, we do with instruments, so it's not voices only.

But in this particular point, it's like we're really trying to make a point of we need to hear each other sing. That's a part of congregational singing that's been lost when you have four parts, ideally.

I mean, you've got your soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, hymnody written that way, coming out of the Reformation because they recovered congregational singing, and they said, not everybody's voices are the same, so you need a part that will fit your voice so your voice can contribute to this beautiful harmony.

And so that's part of what hymn singing and psalm singing recovers, is that unity and diversity in the church. Everybody's got parts of the body. We all have a role to play, and they're different, but they're all complementary.

And that's something that is lost in the contemporary worship environment where you get decibels pumping out of you from a sound system where you can't hear the people next to you, much less yourself, and you hear this, you know—.

Your one vocal. One vocal or, you know, sometimes professional level or quasi-professional level or not. And that's what you hear, and what you then see in a lot of those environments is this is a spectator thing, right?

Yeah. It disengages the congregation. It's not corporate. It's not corporate. So part of us doing it this way at this conference where it's a cappella is to draw that attention back to this—worship is what the body gathered does, and singing is a part of that, and it should be the sound of our voices primarily raised to God.

Yeah.

Amen. And I will say, when we were in Nashville or outside of Nashville, the very first night when we worshiped like that, I'll admit it here on the podcast, I mean, my eyes start sweating a little bit.

I was just like, I hadn't experienced that in such a long time, the corporateness of it. And it really is exactly what you said. I don't want to be focused on one voice or a couple instruments. It's hearing my brothers and sisters worshiping with me and worshiping the inspiration of God, right?

The gold standard, as you said. It's just such a powerful thing, and to open these conferences with them, and then even all the way through each morning, and then tonight we'll have another one. I would like to shift gears and just give you a compliment.

You probably won't like it. You seem like the type of person that doesn't like compliments, but I will give you one, okay? So as a musical director, both times that I've seen you at both these conferences, you get up there and you talk with almost just such a confidence and authority that you're talking about, you're talking to maybe a lot of non-musical people, but you just direct them in such a way.

You make it. Makes sense. I see people kind of straighten up. A thousand people. I'm in a choir, okay. He's talking, uh-oh, I'm part of the choir, okay, now you're going to sing this part, and then we're going to round it, and we're going to echo, and you have a lot of people who don't maybe have musical talent, but they go, okay, this guy's told us what to do.

We got the word. So I just wanted to compliment you that you do have that gift of that musical leadership to kind of bring everyone in order and say, okay, and then step back. I love that you started in the mic, and then you step back and you let the worshipers thrive, and so just wanted to throw that compliment out to you.

And I appreciate that, and it's just God's providence in bringing me, you know, prior to teaching at Logos School, I was a public high school choir teacher for 15 years. Okay, there it is. And so You're a triangle high schooler.

That's where your patience came from. Yeah, if I can do it with a bunch of high schoolers, this crowd is easy. You're right. So Actually, Josh and I were in a madrigal choir together in high school.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. There were 16 of us. Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. We had a good time.

Yep, we Yep, that's where I cut my teeth too. Okay, okay. So, yeah. So how long have you been at Logos outside of the high school? Three years now.

Oh, okay. Three years, and so my family and I moved there for Logos, specifically for my wife and I to teach there, our kids to go there, and it's just been a huge, huge blessing on both fronts.

The Corporate Nature of Worship and Congregational Singing

Now, there is a beautiful woman sitting over here watching everything you say. Is that your wife?

That's her. That's Amy, the beautiful Amy Snow. We'll give her a shout-out. Nice to meet you.

Oh, man. So what do we have in store tonight? I know we have some more psalms this evening. Is that right?

Well, we're kind of, you know, before each talk, we do some psalms, either just some sing-throughs or some instruction time. And so we're going to be introducing a couple new ones and practicing some ones we've done already before, and then tonight is going to be the other bookend event.

We kicked it off with beer and psalms, a psalm sing, and that's how we're going to kind of close it out to culminate that, and it was really interesting. I was talking with a fellow actually right outside your table yesterday who was saying, you know, as you were saying, these older psalms are beautiful and great, but some of this is weird.

It's hard to sing that, but it's beautiful and I love it, and why is it like that and our modern music is not like that? And so it was, one of the reasons is we were trying to recover something that was lost because our forebears in the Reform Stream thought a lot more deeply about what the music was doing with the setting of the words than we often do.

I mean, we get a C to E minor chord change and we're like, oh yeah, in the contemporary scene that that does something, right? But they had a much deeper understanding of how the language of music worked and how it could convey things in the text.

And these are technical songs that we're singing here. These are not just, Lord I lift your name on high. Right, right. This is...

There's no good good father here. Yeah, it's really strange.

No good father. No good father. I'm trading my sorrows, I'm trading my shame. Yeah, but there's a gap.

No, you're really facilitating the reclamation of, you know, a lost, like you said, a lost art. Yeah. You know, centuries ago, after dinner, everybody would sit around with songbooks and sing voice parts and you're helping people who don't sing kind of capture that again.

And it's very important.

It's been really great. Yeah. And there's, I mean, there's something with, you know, power in numbers, you get a lot of people doing it. It's easier for the people who are more, you know, hesitant or timid about it to jump in and do it.

But there is a bit of a, there's a gap to fill where, because there's a lack in our day and age of the sort of well thought out musical settings of psalms, we kind of, we have to go back and we don't want to despise the past and say, because it's old, we know better now.

We're doing it better now. And they didn't, they weren't as good then. I would almost make the reverse argument. It really is the reverse. We've lost so much. And so going back to that, recover something that was lost, that we didn't know was even in the basement down there, right?

But the other thing it does is it challenges us to grow in an area that God wants us to grow in. He calls the command, and it's a command, is to sing skillfully, right? And so we go and we sit in church and we take notes about the sermon and we want to learn.

But then we approach the singing as something that's got to be just really easy and accessible and not something we need to work at. And we all know this as adults, that the things that are worth your time are not the easy things, right?

They're the things that take effort. And then on the other side of that effort, you're like, oh, this is way better than that thing I could have done with my life, right? Absolutely. So there's something to be gained in working to train our voices to sing more beautifully to God.

Worship as Obedience, Thanksgiving, and Joy

Yeah, isn't that funny how all-knowing, all-sovereign God understood the psychology of delayed gratification. We know it. Right. Yeah, and it also allows you to meditate on it as well as you're learning it.

Meditating on the Psalms, meditating on the Word of God. Yep. What'd you have there, Jason? Did I cut you off?

No, no, no. Finish up? No, I'm having a good time just listening.

Well, as we finish up here, I'm going to ask you a big question and you can answer it in a few sentences if you want. But as a music director, someone who is in worship and leading worship and praise, what is, and we had this question asked yesterday, but what is worship?

Define worship for us. Is it just music? Is it the way you live? Is it all-encompassing? What do you see it as biblically and you yourself? How would you paraphrase it?

Yeah, so Pastor Wilson touched on this in a talk yesterday where he says that the words, both in the Hebrew and the Greek, the word of worship and service is synonymous. There's a correlation between those two ideas.

And so worship is, as it says in the New Testament, our acceptable service, our acceptable worship. It's that which we do to be obedient to God. And so that's why in the New Testament, it can point to your life as worship, right?

The way you live in obedience to God as worship. However, there is a special thing that is the called out gathering of the saints to worship the triune God. That is a unique thing. It's a corporate thing that is beyond just an individual's obedience to God.

And so that's being obedient. And one of the fundamental things that being obedient means is thanksgiving and rejoicing. If we understand who God is and who we are and what he's done for us and through us, we are thankful, we are grateful, and we rejoice.

And almost every time in the Psalms that it talks about rejoicing, it pairs it with singing. It's like that is how God designed us to express joy. It's fundamental. Now, it's not like singing only ever can express joy.

You go through the Psalms and there are other emotions. Yeah, other affections and things like that going on in the Psalms and it gives us those expressions for it. But corporate worship to be obedient is to be filled with gratitude and joy.

And that finds its expression in singing. And the way corporate singing, not individual singing, but corporate singing works together is like God's painting of what that is, oral painting of what that looks like.

It's like you don't have to explain it. You just you experience it. It's a picture of what he wants our life to be like in harmony with one another as we're doing that together. So good. There's a lot of layers there.

Yeah, love it. So awesome. Wrap up here. Do you have anything you want to plug or anywhere people can get a hold of you online or social media?

Well, I am on Facebook sometimes. But yeah, you can find me on Facebook and I would just really love to encourage Christian education is a huge passion of mine. What I'm doing with music is in service a lot to that of training the next generation of worshipers.

And so just a shout out to the ACCS, Association of Classical Christian Schools. ClassicalChristianEd .org is their website. Logos School is my local incarnation of that. And then the Christ Church website, which is ChristChurch .com, K-I-R-K, is our church.

And it has a lot of resources on there, both all of these. So this is our old Psalter here, the Countess Christi. We've got a new one that's got more in it. It's actually complete. The new one's a complete Psalter.

All the Psalms are there. But all that music is on there. And in many of them, there are some of them, there are recordings where you can listen to them if you're wanting. If you get some of this music, you're like, how do I practice that?

There's a music library. And in some of those, you'll get recordings of our church choir singing that. So you can sing along with your families at home or introduce them to your church. If you're getting a taste for this, either through what you've seen on the podcast here or if you're at the conference and you're wondering, how can I help my church, which seems so different from this in its style of worship, in its style of music?

How do I make that connection? There's a band called Brother Down who did an album called Old Paths, New Feet. And they took some of the same ones we're doing here at the conference, some of our gems of these Psalms, and put them with kind of like a contemporary folky type of music.

And yeah, they're on Spotify. That's the one. That's the one. And so that is a great sort of way to introduce these meaty Psalms tunes of them in a way that's maybe a little more familiar, and it can be a bridge.

So that'd be a thing, too. There's also an app for iOS called Sing Your Part, which we're getting the full Psalter, all the Soprano, Alto, Tenor bass parts put on there. Oh, I see. Wow. If you want, I want to learn the bass part to that.

It's an app, and it'll teach you that bass part. And what's that app called? It's called Sing Your Part. Sing Your Part. Sing Your Part. And I think there's a link for it on our church website, Christkirk .com.

Awesome.

Man, thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, Aaron Snow. Yeah, the crowd goes wild. Guys, we appreciate you listening. And as always, God bless.