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Issue: Summer 2013 | Posted: June 4, 2013

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Read, Pray, Sing Conference celebrates the Psalms

Ray Van Neste was optimistic about drawing participants in a conference designed to illuminate and magnify the Psalms. But he probably didn’t expect much representation from Myanmar.

Kyaw Zin Htwe, a pastor from Yangon, Myanmar, saw information online about the conference, entitled “Read, Pray, Sing: The Psalms as an Entryway to the Scriptures.”

Van Neste says he made contact with Htwe before publicity for the conference had even begun. Htwe says he had no prior knowledge of �鶹��Ƶ, but he came here from Asia to improve his preaching about the Psalms.

The conference attracted a mixture of pastors, students, musicians and interested lay people who wanted to delve into the subject through two plenary sessions and nine breakout sessions.

Heath Thomas, associate professor of Old Testament and Hebrew and director of Doctor of Philosophy Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Andy Davis, senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., headlined the conference.

Using Psalm 117, the shortest Psalm in the Bible, Thomas developed the conference theme of the Psalms serving as an entryway to understanding the Bible in his plenary session.

�鶹��Ƶ’s R.C. Ryan Center for Biblical Studies sponsored the two-day event as part of its biennial conference series. In addition to information sessions, participants got together to sing the Psalms in corporate worship.

“The Psalms have been central to the worship of the church through the ages, as Christians not only read them but prayed and sang them as well,” Van Neste said. “If this use of the Psalms is uncommon for us, we are the unusual ones in the flow of church history.”

Conference organizers asked participants to provide written feedback about the event.

“As we sang together at Psalmfest, I felt a strong connection to the people of God through the ages, from the temple in Jerusalem to the catacombs in Rome, from the cathedrals of France to the auditorium of 2013,” wrote Reeves Garrett, a conference participant.

“The worship experience of the Psalmfest was greatly encouraging to me,” wrote Philip Lundy. “It caused me to look at the source for my worship language. When that language is nearly entirely Scripture, I know that I am participating in something much greater than myself or my time period, and that is valuable worship.”

Van Neste says about 250 people attended the conference, and some admitted to having reservations about singing the Psalms aloud.

“I guess I was a bit skeptical about how the Psalms could be put to music or how they could ‘sound good,’” wrote one participant, who quickly found the singing enjoyable: “this experience proved to foster unity among those present rather than a sense of awkwardness.”

Wrote another: “The session challenged me to use the Psalms more in my personal prayer life and personal worship. But more than just on a personal level, I saw in a new light the value of using the Psalms in corporate worship.”

Pastor Hwte returned to Myanmar satisfied that his long journey was not in vain.

“[The corporate worship] was amazing,” Htwe said. “I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Word is not human words; it directly comes from the Lord.”

Listen to audio from the Conference

Samantha Adams (’13) contributed to this story.