A recent video introduces Hymnes21, a new project of Philippe Viguier, pastor of the Grace Brethren Church in Lyon, France, and Kevin Stauffer, worship pastor at the church (and a professor of music in the Geneva Bible Institute).
In the video, Kevin explains that he has made contact with 75 different churches to learn about their worship music ministry and determined that most of them have need of help. The group they are bringing together will encourage new compositions, will test them in churches, will put together a complete repertory, and will centralize this by bringing together in a publication a variety of compositions.
Philippe, who is also the co-author of The Gospel and the Citizen (with Florent Varak), says: “The project is in connection with the gospel coalition in France. We are starting a project with like minded pastors and musicians to create a music platform. Our goal is to encourage new songs in French and provide solid translations of solid songs, according to three values: poetry, musicality, and theology. With this we will also build a blog with articles, tutorials, videos, etc. We have a team of pastors and musicians from several other denominations that will participate. We hope to have a songbook by next year, and for every song from the public domain or that give us the rights, we will put them on our website!”