For the entire history of the church until, quite recently, the Psalter was the songbook of the Christian church. It was something shared across denominational boundaries. The Apostolic church sang the psalms and the post-apostolic church continued, in different ways, in the following centuries. Sometimes it was monastic choirs singing the Psalms but they were sung in worship. In the Reformation, the Reformed churches in particular were known for their Psalm singing. When the French authorities went looking for Reformed folk to arrest and kill, they could find them by listening for the sound of Psalm singing. The Huguenot martyrs obliged by singing the Psalms on the way to their deaths, until the authorities cut out their tongues to stop them. The Reformed translated the Psalms into the language of the people, set them to meter, and made songbooks out of them for use in public worship by the church. Where the medieval church saw monks chanting the Psalms, the Reformation saw whole congregations singing the Psalms. In the Modern period, through the 18th and 19th centuries the place of the Psalms in worship was gradually lost to non-canonical hymns so that, in our day, there are not a few younger Christians who have never once sung a Psalm in public worship, not even Psalm 23 or Psalm 100. We live now in the most psalm-less age in the history of the Christian church. Now we do not even have monastic choirs to chant the Psalms for us but instead we praise bands and worship leaders (the new monastic choirs) to sing non-canonical songs in place of the people.

The goal of this series is to help re-acquaint the late-modern church with the only song book inspired by the Holy Spirit in the hope that God might use it to help restore his Word to the place it once had in public worship in the Presbyterian and Reformed world and beyond.