Every Tuesday, without fail, organist Kathy Marks goes and plays the organ (or piano) at Florence Congregational Church with a short list of hymns or songs that Reverend Averill Elizabeth Blackburn thinks she might want to include in this week’s upcoming youtube sermon.
This follows a flurry of emails and texts that are sent and received on Sunday and Monday … and even then, sometimes Reverend Averill records her sermon and realizes “No, no! It has to be 3 minutes long and not two and a half!” and sends off another message Tuesday morning in the middle of a recording session.
Fortunately for Reverend Averill, Kathy likes playing the organ and is willing to tweak songs even when completely out of left field, as it were.
Of course, not all of the hymns or musical tracks make the cut that week… but they’re stored and filed away in a special subfolder of a subfolder on Reverend Averill’s MacBook and often make an appearance a week or two after.
All of the mp3s were essentially “collecting cyber dust”, until someone had the brilliant idea of loading the tracks onto website, so that anyone can relisten or download their favorite hymns and music from our virtual ministry.
As of this morning (Saturday 07/11/2020) every sermon post has the relevant mp3s listed and available along with the youtube video and links to that week’s Bible passages.
There is also now a masterpost (which will be updated every Saturday afternoon at the same time the youtube sermon is published) that has all mp3s collected and categorized based on genre (including: “hymns from Hymns for a Pilgrim People”, “Spirituals & Praise Songs & Patriotic Anthems”, “Modern Rock/Pop Songs”, and “Miscellaneous”).
Requests are always welcome (“You Lift Me Up” by Josh Groban started out as a request and evolved into a Father’s Day Tribute) … just fill out the contact form!
aeb