More than Writers

We have just come back from a lovely holiday in France. It was a holiday booked for 2020, and this year it finally happened. Some of you might know the place, it’s Le Pas Opton, a holiday centre run by Spring Harvest Holidays. As it was a holiday in term time, there were no groups and clubs for the kids, but there were morning devotions. I went along to most of them, as well as the evening ones The music is always interesting. You see, I grew up Psalms-only in the Netherlands, using the Geneva Psalter, translated from French in 1773. The Genevan psalms came out well before that and were translated by a Dutch pastor. He did a good job, and some churches, especially in the south of the Netherlands, still use his metrical version. It’s not the easiest to sing, especially if you don’t stick to singing syllables. So, one of the synods actually asked for good metrical versions to be written, and they received entries from poetry societies, pastors and people who had written some of the p