Choral Anthems

The Apostles’ Creed

Composer: Douglas Wilson and Mark Reagan, written for Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho

Text: The Apostles’ Creed

Season: Sung September 21, 2025, Beverly Heights Men’s Chorale

Beverly Heights confesses the Apostles’ Creed aloud nearly every Sunday, so a congregation hearing it sung is hearing its own words given back to it. The creed is the church’s oldest short summary of the faith, older than any denomination: twelve articles that run from the Father who made heaven and earth, through the Son who was conceived, born, crucified, buried, raised, and seated at the Father’s right hand, to the Spirit, the church, the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting. Christians have been baptized into these words, taught their children with them, and died with them on their lips for most of the church’s history.

This setting comes from Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, where the congregation sings it in worship. Douglas Wilson and Mark Reagan, the church’s pastor and its director of music, wrote it for that purpose, and it opens the way a catechism does: a question, “Christian, what do you believe?”, and the people’s answer, “I believe.” Beverly Heights, which shares that church’s Reformed heritage, has given it to the Men’s Chorale. Sung in men’s voices and without ornament, it sounds like what it is, a statement rather than a performance, and it is the most watched of the chorale’s recordings.

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:3 and 4; 1 Timothy 3:16

Be Thou My Vision

Composer: arr. Debra Morton; tune SLANE, an Irish melody

Text: Irish, eighth century or earlier; translated by Mary E. Byrne (1905) and versified by Eleanor Hull (1912)

Season: Sung September 14, 2025, Beverly Heights Women’s Chorale

The words are a thousand years old and were a prayer long before they were a hymn. “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart” comes from an Old Irish poem, “Rop tú mo baile,” written by a monk whose name is lost; the manuscripts are medieval, and the poem may be older still. It stayed in Irish until 1905, when Mary Byrne translated it into English prose for a scholarly journal. Seven years later Eleanor Hull put the prose into verse, and in 1919 it was matched to SLANE, a folk melody named for the hill where Patrick is said to have lit the Easter fire in defiance of the high king.

The prayer asks for one thing from several directions: that God be the thing the singer sees, thinks, fights for, inherits, and loves, “whatever befall.” Debra Morton’s arrangement for women’s voices keeps the melody intact and lets the text do the work. The Women’s Chorale sang it to open the 2025 season.

Scripture: Psalm 27:4; Psalm 73:25 and 26

Be Still

Composer: Karen Marrolli (MorningStar Music Publishers)

Text: Karen Marrolli, after Psalm 46:10

Season: Sung October 11, 2026, Beverly Heights Sanctuary Choir

Psalm 46 is a psalm about earthquakes, flood, and nations in uproar, and in the middle of it God speaks one sentence: “Be still, and know that I am God.” The command is not addressed to people who are already calm. It is addressed to people watching the mountains fall into the sea.

Karen Marrolli’s anthem takes that sentence and sets it against the psalm’s storm. The choir sings “Be still and know” quietly and keeps returning to it while the text names what rages around it: earthquakes, tempests, shadows, “the night that seems endless and dire.” Each time, the answer is the same, and each time it ends in a promise, that “the earth shall rise again in joy” and “the morn shall rise in holy fire.” The choir sang it in October 2026, in the middle of a sermon series on the spirit of our age, which is as good a context for Psalm 46 as any.

Scripture: Psalm 46; Isaiah 30:15

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