toddpedlar
Iron Dramatist
Here's a quote from Terry Johnson's contribution to "Give Praise to God", a book on worship (and specifically in honor of the late James Boice) put out a few years ago by P&R. Commenting on the dearth of psalm-singing among even congregations of the PCA (let alone anyone outside confessionally reformed circles), Johnson writes:
The psalms are the 800 pound gorilla of evangelical worship. There they sit in the middle of our Bibles, the book that provides the content of our worship. They make up the longest book in the Bible. They are the only canonical hymnbook. Yet they are mostly ignored even by those with high views of Scripture. Nearly a decade has passed since the Trinity Psalter set all of the psalms to familiar and singable tunes. The whole Psalter is easily and inexpensively accessible to hymnal-using congregations. Though nearly twenty-five thousand copies have been sold, this number represents less than 10 percent of the membership of the Presbyterian Church in America, James Boice's denomination. The anecdotal evidence is that few congregations in the Presbyterian Church in America sing psalms on a regular basis from any source. Extend the survey to include the broader evangelical world and one would probably find that the typical worshiper is more likely to be struck by lightning on Sunday morning than to sing a psalm in church. What has been obvious to me for the last quarter of a century - that psalms should be sung - is obvious to only the tiniest of remnants. The 800-pound gorilla sits, largely ignored. (Give Praise to God, P&R, 2003, pp. 258-9)