Church of the Servant’s Lessons & Carols service is always a special evening. The format is simple: scripture and song. But somehow the combination is profound. We hear scriptures of waiting and fulfillment, sing cherished carols of the season, hear musical styles from hillbilly to highbrow, and experience the variety of voices that make up our [...]

Church of the Servant is pleased to announce Carol Browning’s setting of Psalm 131, “Help Me Have the Faith of a Child,” the winner of the 2011 COS New Psalm Contest.
The judges evaluated 57 submissions from all over the world, with styles ranging from metrical to responsorial, from four-part to folk to free form, and [...]

One of the reasons to use lament in worship is that the Bible shows us that it’s part of the believer’s vocabulary. The other reason is to prepare us for days of doubt, the deaths of those we love, and the inevitable times in which evil has a temporary triumph, as it did on September [...]

Worship at Church of the Servant is an intergenerational event. There are dancers as young as six, orchestra members in middle school, and liturgists who are approaching 100.
Here is an MP3 recording of a father/daughter scripture reading from the September 4 worship service. Todd and Anya Kapitula have clearly taken great care rehearsing their readings. [...]

As we gear up for the COS 2011 New Psalm Contest, we continue to use songs submitted to last year’s contest. On July 31, we sang David Lee’s setting of Psalm 17, “Hear, Lord, My Cry for Justice.” This responsive Psalm is a great example of how the Psalms can be enlivened when sung.
Psalm 17 [...]

One of the benefits of our annual New Psalm Song Contest is that we get to enjoy the fruit of the submissions all year round. The latest submission to be used in COS’s worship is Joy Koning’s setting of Psalm 13, “How Long?” The fact is there are not a lot of settings of this [...]