Welcome to Zion Psalms! We're still in the data-gathering phase. Consider evaluating songs from the playlist to contribute today!
A psalter for today
The mission of this project is to resource churches with recordings, analytics, and a broad community to implement more Psalms into their liturgy, forming our congregations in the richness of the Scriptures' own songs. From there, may Christians resound with hearts that can span the beauty and breadth of these songs.
Lord in Heaven, would your Church see your Son alive in the songs that he sings and would our hearts be enriched by the glories spoken of him in the Psalms.
If your worship leader is a guitarist, it's likely your congregation has been deprived on the beautiful, historic, and formative tradition of singing the songbook of God's people--the Psalms.
There are far too many wonderful-but-hidden musicians, churches, and arrangements to sift through as and individual. My personal goal was to try to listen to as many contemporary renditions of the psalms as I could, evaluate them for use in my context, and put them into my church's repertoire.
But why keep that to myself? The vision of the Zion Psalter is to crowdsource input and allow any musician to access the community's wisdom and shared catalog of well over 1000 published recordings of psalms.
This project requires community involvement. If you are a musician, worship director, avid church music fan, pastor, or regular family worship leader, then this project needs your input. Simply listen to a song on the playlist, fill out the evaluation form, and once enough data is collected, come back and put the community's work into action!
The refinement process will never truly be finished. More psalms will likely be added are more musicians write more pleasing arrangements of the texts. More online users means more feedback can be generated. More data means more accurate reflection of the psalm.
The step that has yet to be completed is the user interface for the data.
When you go to plan a service, or just want to listen to a reflection of a psalm, come to singzion.com. From there, you can type the psalm number you want, see what's available, and listen until you find the arrangement that's perfect for your liturgy or afternoon listening.
As a stretch goal, singzion.com will allow users to log in and curate playlists. This will allow an individual church or family to produce their own Psalter exclusive to their own context.
See below for a simple mockup of the Common Public Psalter.
Coming Soon: The Shared Psalter