Page 28 - Church Music Quarterly September 2018

USING CAROLS FOR INTERCESSION
A final idea is to turn our hearts outwards as we sing, out beyond the doors of the church, and to combine carols with prayers for the world. We have adapted
a couple of lines from ‘O come, O come Emmanuel’ and created a short song. After teaching this, we often invite congregations to think about situations where people need God to be ‘Emmanuel’, which is to say, to be with them in the midst of brokenness and darkness. We then sing the song again, singing out and over those difficult situations.
Take a look at the images. Here we have taken
lyrics from carols such as ‘Hark! the herald angels sing’ and used them as a basis for responsive intercessory prayers. (A PowerPoint for this arrangement is available on our website.)
A final good example is Martin Leckebusch’s moving (and non-politically partisan) variation on ‘O little town of Bethlehem’, starting ‘O West Bank town of Bethlehem’: a shocking reminder of the realities
of life within the Holy Land today. This song could
be sung by a soloist, perhaps with spoken intercessions between the verses.
Alongside ‘O come, all ye faithful’ and ‘We three kings of Orient are’, why not introduce prayers and let your Advent and Christmas services deliver strong reminders that, while we feast and ‘deck the halls’, people around the world need our help and prayers?
For a full list of links to all the songs referenced in this article, see the authors’ website at http:// engageworship.org/AdventLinks
28 CMQ
Why not try responsive intercessory prayers with a familiar carol?
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