Canter Bridge

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

A Newsboys worship album is not a Picasso. It is not abstract and perplexing. Music lovers who want profound mystery and enigmatic musical arrangements need look elsewhere.

An album like Devotion is first of all intended to be singable if it is to provide words and a voice to Christian worshippers. From this angle, the Newsboys and Devotion excel.

The title track expresses a familiar biblical sentiment to which the apostle Paul might have happily given assent:

all my world
all I’ve lost
the wrecks I’ve made here
the lives it cost
Your hand restores
Your works make whole
with all my soul
I thank You
I owe You
all my

CHORUS:
devotion
all that I have to give
here’s my devotion
You’re all that it means to live

Those who hanker after hymns will not get much satisfaction here. But if they linger long enough to absorb the lyrics in spite of a preference for a different musical dynamic, they might well come away feeling that these Aussies have captured, recorded, and—most importantly—passed on a medium of worship that in its own way discovers an ancient and faithful word and sings it out loud in service of the neighbor.

That at least is the perception of this appreciative reviewer who has perhaps been more palpably stirred by other Newsboys albums but who finds in Devotion grist for a communal exaltation of the Creator and Redeemer.

‘I Love Your Ways’ is practically Psalmic in its insistence that the Lord’s ways are—may one say it in this way?—adore-able?

The same can be said of ‘Strong Tower’, an eminently replicable tune. Clearly, the boys have had their Hebrew Bible off the shelf:

strong and mighty
strong to save us
like a fortress
never failing

strong in battle
strong in kindness
when we stray, Lord
You’re strong to find us

when the winds come hard against us
You are steadfast, You are true
when the ground beneath us trembles
Your foundation never moves

CHORUS
strong tower
high and glorious
strong tower
mighty in love
our refuge
our defender
strong tower
Lord above

strong to lead us
through the shadows
strong to carry
all our sorrows

when the enemy surrounds us
closing in as darkness falls
though his armies rage against us
they can never scale these walls

Nor do Devotion’s lyrics fail what one might call the ‘centrifugal test’. Both ‘God of All Nations’ – with raucous delight – and ‘Blessed Be Your Name’ – more contemplatively, focus worship horizontally on the ethnic horizons of biblical faith and vertically, on the blessing of the Lord that is not dependent on personal prosperity or well-being. ‘You give and take away // Still I will say …’ is, after all, a decidedly theological reflex.

Not bad twenty-first hymnology, if you ask me.

Not complex. Not enigmatic. Just intelligent praise your mind can embrace and your voice can sing.