If you ever have the desire to break out into song — in the shower, in the car, maybe at your neighbor's infamous karaoke night — you should embrace it whole-heartedly. This ancient art not only feels good, it can enhance your well-being, reduce your feelings of pain and even prolong your life. Using your voice to sing, rather than simply carry out a conversation, offers unique benefits. "When we sing instead of speak, we have intonation, melody line, and crescendo, which gives us a broader vocabulary to express ourselves," says Suzanne Hanser, chair of the music therapy department at Berklee College of Music. "Because singing is visceral (relating to, or affecting, our bodies), it can't help but effect change." Studies have linked singing with a lower heart rate, decreased blood pressure, and reduced stress, according to Patricia Preston-Roberts, a board-certified music therapist in New York City. She uses...

Wow! I feel we are just on the heels of Easter, and my calendar is already filling up with the details and nitty gritties of Vacation Bible School (VBS). I don’t know how many of you have been part of a VBS – whether as a child, a parent, a volunteer, or a planner. My experience had been quite limited. When I was younger, I went to VBS with my best friend, Jill. I remember making crafts, doing a lot of singing, and hearing the bible stories each day. As a parent, our church didn’t offer VBS, and my children, Paige and Grant, didn’t even know what they were missing. But then we moved to Phoenix in 2005 and would spend our summers in Florida (why stay in the dry heat when you can escape to the humidity of southern Florida?). Paige and Grant participated in the VBS program at First Presbyterian Church of Bonita Springs, and they loved it! The first year the theme was “Fiesta” and was a perfect match for our new home in the Southwest. We listened to...

Many individuals over the years have asked me what makes a good hymn — of course, both music and text. Melodies that last use a lot of stepwise movement, combined with the occasional leap of four or five notes. There is no better melody than “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which opens with a drop of four notes and then runs back up the scale of that interval and then back down again — very easy to hear and very easy to sing. Not all melodies are created equal, and if a melody is weak and sentimental, we’ll enjoy it for awhile, but it won’t stick around. But hymns that last also require good text that is multi-layered. I sang hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “The Church’s One Foundation” for many years without realizing their scriptural basis. But once I began to study that scriptural underpinning, every phrase began to take on extra meaning because it echoed with the scriptural context of the phrase. In addition, though, good hymns resonate with human experience. And so we might sing a hymn for years and have it in our memories, but when we hit certain difficult times, all of a sudden...

In early March 2005, the much-anticipated arrival of the Richards, Fowkes & Co. Opus 14 pipe organ became a reality. Dozens of volunteers worked tirelessly for two days to unload pipes and the thousands of pieces that make up the case work and inner workings of the instrument from the large truck which had carried the precious cargo from Tennessee. A smaller truck had delivered hundreds of pipes the previous month, and it soon appeared that every nook and cranny of the sanctuary building held a portion of this magnificent instrument. In less than a week, the framework of the case appeared on the wall, and in two weeks’ time, a few of the pipes were sounding. The organ was played in public for the first on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005, to escort the children out to their church school classes. From that humble beginning, the many different...