With Heart and Voice ® Program 1113

How wonderful to hear Heart and Voice continuing. THANK YOU. (The lamentation for Absolom I am hearing now is gorgeous and heartrending, I am weeping.)

We "attend" the Crystal Cathedral and I am beside myself with unhappiness over the degradation of the musical program there recently. They have just acquired a music team which may be highly qualified and even excellent as far as they go, but I suspect from their obvious musical preferences that things will not change for the better. I am really put off by the chickaboom adaptation of the Ode to Joy they open with, and general mediocre offerings. I am not saying pop music is all mediocre but OH I grew up on good meaty Lutheran hymns and I do not find in the casual guitariness of what they offer exclusively now, a satisfying religious experience. I assume they are doing this thinking to attract the Guy in the Street who has mediocre musical preferences and will feel right at home in it. In the meantime, with the vaporization of Don Neuen, I feel abandoned. And more than that, I resent it being inferred that the pop stuff is the only meaningful way of experiencing religious music. I have always found the music to be a profoundly moving and intensely meaningful part of the worship service, and there is nothing particularly moving about snapping your fingers and (as were we instructed to do a couple of times) shaking your bootie for the Lord. gaaak. I think they even may have dumped, or at least sidelined their organist. This is a very disturbing turn of events and all I can say is--- keep on being an oasis for civilization.

http://articles.ocregister.com/2010-10-07/cities/24632160_1_...

Your work is cut out for you and I hope you have as long and successful a run as Richard did, whom I miss very much. You are doing a fine job too. Again- thank you SO MUCH.