William J. Reynolds obituary

I will have more to say in a later post, but suffice it to say that I aspired to emulate Dr. Reynolds in as many ways as possible.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090329/NEWS01/903290374


tennessean.com

March 29, 2009

Hymn composer William J. Reynolds dies

By Janell Ross
THE TENNESSEAN

William J. Reynolds, creator of Southern Baptist hymns such as "Share His Love," died early Saturday in Nashville.

For Mr. Reynolds, a man born in Iowa to parents who met at a Chicago Bible institute, Baptist worship music was a family tradition, a vocation, a form of ministry and a matter fit for life-long study.

Mr. Reynolds, 88, published his last book, Songs of Glory: Stories of 300 Great Hymns and Gospel Songs, in 1996 and saw hymns that he composed included in the 1956, 1975, 1991 and August 2008 editions of the Southern Baptist Hymnal.

"Dad really loved music," said Timothy Reynolds, Mr. Reynolds' son, who lives in Nashville. "But it wasn't about him, or his voice.

"During the 15 years that he handled the music for the annual Southern Baptist Convention, Dad put the focus on the choirs he brought in and ... tried to get as much variety in as possible to let people who were coming to the convention see the diversity of Southern Baptist music programs."

In the early 1950s, Mr. Reynolds moved his family to Nashville to complete a doctoral degree and lead the music department at the organization then known as the Baptist Sunday School Board. The board later changed its name to LifeWay Christian Resources.

In 1973, Mr. Reynolds hired John Gardner to work in the board's music department. Mr. Reynolds became a friend and mentor, and Gardner came to admire Mr. Reynolds' ability to use simple and spare language to create moving songs.

"He taught me a great deal about the art of worship and how to lead worship to make it a meaningful experience," said Gardner, who is retired, lives in Franklin and leads Clearview Baptist Church's senior adult ministry and missions.

While with the Baptist Sunday School Board, Mr. Reynolds worked with other composers under at least 36 pseudonyms to expand the denomination's children's music catalogue, Timothy Reynolds said.

Mr. Reynolds edited the 1975 edition of the Baptist Hymnal, and in 1978 wrote A Joyful Sound: Christian Hymnody, a textbook recently published in its fourth edition.

Moves to Texas

In the late 1980s, Mr. Reynolds left Nashville for Fort Worth, Texas, where he taught at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a school founded in part by his grandfather, for at least 20 years.

Mr. Reynolds was featured in the 2006 documentary Awake My Soul. It has aired on public television in Nashville and explores the history, music and traditions of Sacred Harp singing, an early American music form of unaccompanied group singing.

Mr. Reynolds, who returned to Tennessee after he retired, was hospitalized most recently in connection with heart failure and pneumonia, Timothy Reynolds said.

Details of a service for Mr. Reynolds had not been set Saturday, but one thing was clear. "Oh yeah, there will be a lot of music," said Timothy Reynolds.

Dr. Joseph Lowery's Benediction at the Inauguration

If you turned off the Inaugural before Dr. Lowery spoke, you missed a great part of the ceremony.

Please watch and listen.

God's creation. Oh So Big.

The Boston Globe ran an “Astronomy Advent Calendar” during the month of December. My favorite is their science editor’s favorite as well. This is a part of God’s handiwork which just absolutely boggles my mind. In this photo are not “10,000 stars”, but rather “10,000 Galaxies” in just one small patch of sky!!!

Our God truly is an awesome God!

To see the really big image, click the hyperlink below.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/hubble_space_telescope_advent.html#photo25

Caption:

25

This image is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and it is by far my favorite Hubble image. Starting in late 2003, astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. The result is this amazing image, looking back through time at thousands of galaxies that range from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Some 10,000 galaxies were observed in this tiny patch of sky (a tenth the size of the full moon) - each galaxy a home to billions of stars. Go outside tonight, take a ball-point pen with you, and hold it up in front of the night sky at arm's length. The tip of your pen is about 1 millimeter wide, and at arm's length, it would cover the 10,000 galaxies seen in the Ultra Deep Field image. That's how unbelievably massive the visible universe is. By way of comparison, to really put us Earthlings in our place in the Grand Scheme, please have a look at another famous image, the Pale Blue Dot - a photograph taken of the Earth (the tiny pale speck, top center) by Voyager 1 in 1990 from 4 billion miles away (about 6 light-hours). I will finish with the words of astronomer Carl Sagan about this Pale Blue Dot: "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." (NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith - STScI, and The HUDF Team) -- Best wishes to all, and a Happy New Year - Alan. More (see this on Google Sky) #