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This coauthored article emerged from a joint presentation and concert the authors gave at ��͹��Ƶ entitled “Singing the Psalms: How the Psalter Speaks to All Church Music Styles” on Saturday, October 11, 2025.

Musically speaking, our friendship is an unlikely one. Growing up, one of us adored Phil Keaggy and Eddie Van Halen, while the other one spent hours watching YouTube videos of pipe organs. One of us would consider Nashville the center of the musical universe, the other the Netherlands. And one of us would have once told you that worship involves turning the lights way down and the band way up, while the other would hold that worship involves tuning up the reeds and pulling out all the stops.

Both of us entered college with hopes of learning to lead worship in our respective styles. And both of us got something entirely different: four years in staunch, brightly lit rooms filled with people singing psalms a cappella. No praise team, but no pipe organ either. No fog machine, but also no festive postlude. Somehow, we had both ended up at the college of a small Presbyterian denomination that sings psalms exclusively without instrumental accompaniment. That was their practice not only on Sundays but for Wednesday morning chapels too. Imagine a thousand people singing metrical psalms in four-part harmony to one another. Just human voices, week after week, month after month, year after year. How would you react?

For many of us, ditching anything but psalms in church and disbanding the musicians would feel like a double splash of cold water on our worship. But some of the long-term effects of a cappella psalm-singing have shaped us in ways we never expected—not only as musicians but as Christ-followers.

1. The Psalms challenge assumptions about “traditional” and “contemporary” worship.

It’s no surprise that the topic of music in worship evokes strong emotional responses. Music penetrates deep into our hearts and stirs our most basic memories. It is not a trite or trivial matter. Congregations need to be willing to have difficult conversations about what music will best honor our Creator and Redeemer in each specific, unique worship context.

The psalms offer a way into the discussion that can get us past the stereotypical categories of “traditional” and “contemporary” worship. They are both, and neither. The psalms are ancient even as they urge us repeatedly to “sing a new song.” In Revelation 15:3, the saints before the throne sing “the song of Moses . . . and the song of the Lamb.” The psalms describe the entire redemptive history of God’s people, and we have reason to believe they will continue to be sung into eternity.

We are not just recommending the psalms as a template for worship, although they certainly can be a rich source of inspiration for present-day songwriters and worship leaders. We are talking about what can happen in a church as the psalms become more and more of the actual content of our worship. Historically speaking, movements of reformation and revival have consistently coincided with returns to the psalter, from the Old Testament efforts of King Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 29:25–30) and Ezra (Ezra 3:10–11) to the Protestant movement under John Calvin and John Knox and all the way to the present.

The psalms reflect themes that are both indelibly human and reflective of our God who is wholly Other. The texts of Psalms 23 and 100, among others, are familiar and beloved, while other psalms, like Psalm 109 or Psalm 137, challenge our horizons of what emotions are appropriate to voice in Christian worship. Nevertheless, if we believe that the psalms are “God’s psalms,” to use Calvin Seerveld’s phrase, then Christians are obligated to consider how all of them—not just the texts we find most accessible—should shape our life together.

Musically, the history of adapting psalms to a variety of Christian worship styles is rich. There are chants based on psalms. There are psalm settings that sound much like traditional hymns. There is also a wide variety of more recent compositions. Whatever your church’s “home” style, there are psalm settings that can provide an entry point.

2. Singing the Psalms prepares us for our inevitable encounter with death.

A friend who has faithfully served as an RUF (Reformed University Fellowship) minister at a university in Nashville has said countless times that his job is “to prepare students for their inevitable encounter with death.” One of the primary ways that he has worked to this end is by singing psalms and hymns with his students which address this topic head-on. We learn from what we sing. We fall back on what we sing when tragedy strikes. The Lord is gracious to have made it abundantly clear in Scripture that we are to sing when we gather: not because he needs to hear our voices, but rather because we need to hear each other’s.

When my own church family experienced an unthinkable tragedy, losing six precious lives to a senseless mass shooting, I’m thankful that we didn’t have to change anything about how we worshipped. We gathered in those coming days and reminded each other what we already knew to be true through what we sang: that God’s people will not be left to the grave (Psalm 16:10) and that death has been conquered.

We need to sing songs that prepare us for the hardships of life so that when tragedy inevitably strikes, truth is just muscle memory. There are moments in ministry (whether vocational or personal) when mere words and sentiments won’t suffice. When you’re visiting with a family who has just lost a child, or when you’re sitting beside someone on their deathbed—or when you yourself are at the thin place between this life and the next—equip yourself for these moments with the words of the psalmist set to the greatest memory device we’ve been given: music.

3. The Psalms prepare us to sing, talk, think, and act more like Jesus Christ.

Jesus himself knew and sang the Psalms. Not only did He know them, but He himself was the fulfillment of them. We see this alluded to most often in reference to Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22 on the cross, but throughout the psalter, we see allusions and explicit statements that point forward to Jesus as the better Prophet, Priest, and King. In Reformed circles, we likely find it uncomfortable to “fill in the blanks” of what Scripture does not make plain—to imagine what Jesus may have felt and acted like as a child growing up and in His non-recorded everyday life. There’s an old Rich Mullins song called Boy Like Me/Man Like You in which Mullins muses what the childhood of Christ may have been like, how He might have become aware of his own divinity. Mullins asks in the refrain, “And did they tell you stories 'bout the saints of old? Stories about their faith? They say stories like that make a boy grow bold; Stories like that make a man walk straight.”

But whatever we think about Jesus’s early years, our Savior must have read and known each of these psalms which pointed forward to him. Did he have a veiled foreknowledge of every way in which he would serve as the fulfillment of them? I think it’s safe to say we’ll never know on this side of eternity. But we can know for certain that Jesus’ earthly life was marked by a keen knowledge and a living out of this inspired songbook.

James K. A. Smith has popularized an Augustinian insight in the title of his book You Are What You Love. As we turn our eyes toward what commands our attention and devotion, we become like it. But we could also add, “You are what you sing.” If we want to become more like Jesus, we can start by singing the songs he sang.

Dordt’s chapel series for 2025–2026 has highlighted the psalms as “Songs from the Struggle.” In Abraham Kuyper’s language, the Christian life is one of antithesis—a lifelong struggle against sin, Satan, and a world set against Christ. Even though the Psalms come from such a different time and culture than our own, we can still sing them, because they tell a story of the faith that we ourselves are members of. And because the psalms are songs from the struggle, they are also songs for the struggle. They are songs that can only benefit us as we obey our Savior’s command to take up our cross and follow him—through death into the glorious light of resurrection.