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Wellness Wednesday for March 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I've got to say, church is great. My partner and I recently went after almost a decade, despite both being atheists. We are admittedly part of a non-traditional "New Age" style church, but it was great. I actually teared up during the service, which I did not expect.

If you're in a bad way I'd recommend giving it a chance!

Does this “New Age” church conduct wedding ceremonies for homosexuals?

How does that affect his recommendation to go to service if you're doing poorly? It isn't a wedding ceremony and it isn't your church.

Might as well ask their thoughts about transubstantiation.

Might as well ask their thoughts about transubstantiation.

This, but unironically. Do people really choose their church based on whether they like the music and not on their doctrine?

The music obviously. Theology and preaching are Satan's schemes to keep you away from direct interaction with God, IE sacral music.

More seriously, that might be relevant question to ask if you're looking to join a particular church, but I can't imagine that was the goal here, nor the point of the general recommendation.

It's strange, after learning how to read the four-part hymns and practicing how to sight-read the bass lines, I've found that many churches, especially the more progressive ones, don't even use hymnals any more, opting to just print lyric sheets and figuring you'll pick up the tune. Like, that's the main reason I would go in the first place, is to sing some harmony. So strange.

I've never been in a church where the congregation is expected to sing multiple parts, the choir does that. I've been to Catholic, Protestant and orthodox churches and I've never heard the congregation sing multiple parts.

Sweden is exceptional at choir singing but I don't think that the Swedish psalm book has ever contained arrangements with multiple parts. The older versions of the psalm book didn't even have sheet music.

Or are you saying that the choir isn't doing multiple parts?

Maybe it's a quirk of where I grew up. We always sang from hymnals with all the parts printed. Nobody was expected to sing anything in particular but those that could, would. Many of the tunes would be uncomfortably out of my range otherwise.

Where I've been people mostly just pick a preferred octave.

I went and checked and there are actually a few songs with two parts in the Swedish psalm book (<1%), and all are newer songs.