• Update Oct. 5, 2009! By Thy Mercy: Indelible Grace Acoustic, Vol. 1 - Lead sheets and chord charts are now available for the hymns that are included on By Thy Mercy: Indelible Grace Acoustic Vol. 1.
  • Hymnbook and Songbook available for purchase at new IGraceMusic.com Store! There is a printed version of this website available for purchase: The RUF Hymnbook, a collection of 143 songs! The hymnbook comes with three "learner" CDs that can help worship leaders learn the songs easily. And also available: the Indelible Grace Songbook, Vol. 1 (IG 1 & 2) and Vol. 2 (IG 3 & 4). Purchase these printed editions here!
  • Hymnbook FAQ - If you already own the RUF Hymnbook, check here for pages that have been corrected and for answers to any questions concerning the development and concept of the book.
  • Indelible Grace Discussion Board - Click here to talk about worship, hymns, music, etc.

“The challenge is to provide roots and wings – to bring young people into a sense of connectedness with the past that doesn’t rob them of their vision of the future.” Gerard Kelly

Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) is proud to be able to share with the church at large, some of the rich music that has developed within our various chapters over the last 25 years. We desire to teach our students about the songs of the church and to value the wonderful heritage we have in the hymns. But we also want to encourage our students to build on the tradition. We have been thrilled to see a movement gaining momentum - a movement to help the church recover the tradition of putting old hymns to new music for each generation, and to enrich our worship with a huge view of God and His indelible grace. We have found through years of ministering to college students that there is a real hunger to connect with something real and solid, something that is ancient, yet full of passion. Putting old hymns to new music allows us to hear afresh the rich theology and emotion that fill these hymns.

C.H. Spurgeon, the great 19th century Baptist said once that whenever he came upon a mystery in the Bible, he considered that God had set a little altar there for him to kneel and worship. That’s good advice! And the great hymn writers love to dwell on the paradoxes of our faith that cause us to fall on our faces in worship -- “And can it be? That Thou my God, should die for me?!” In essence, the hymns are mini-meditations on the inexplicable glories of the gospel in all its fullness. Our experience has been that when people taste the rich legacy of the hymns, set to music that flows out of who we are in our moment of history, it is hard for them to go back to merely singing praise choruses.

Some of these hymns are guitar adaptations of traditional tunes, but many are fresh tunes written mostly by students within the ministry. Many have desired written music to help them incorporate these hymns into their own worship and so now we are proud to be able to provide this for you.

There have been several cds of this music released to date. Texas A&M’s RUF CD and Cloud of Witnesses (done by some Vanderbilt students) were released in the late 1990s, as was Auburn’s first CD“Boundless Free…” Belmont University released “Indelible Grace” in 2000, followed soon after by NYU’s “From All Their Sin And Sorrow”. Next came the Belmont group’s follow up “Pilgrim Days” and the latest CD was Auburn’s second offering “Love Unknown.” Most of these CDs are available through the websites www.igracemusic.com and www.ruf.org and we hope soon to have on these sites even more information about the hymns and hymnwriters as well as extra verses and other helpful resources. If you have written piano arrangements or parts for other instruments for these songs and are willing to share them with others, please email Kevin Twit at ktwit@ruf.org

We are still working on full piano transcriptions of all the tunes recorded on the cds “Indelible Grace” and “Pilgrim Days” and hope to have those finished soon. We also plan yearly updates for this collection to continue to share all of the great music being written. Thanks for your support and we encourage you to try your hand at putting old hymns to new music too! Grace and peace,


Rev. Kevin Twit,
RUF Campus Minister, Belmont University
College Pastor at Christ Community Church, Franklin TN
ktwit@ruf.org

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