We joined First Baptist Durham this morning. The congregation voted after the service, and we are pleased to announce that the ayes have it. We are very excited about getting involved at First Baptist. We’ve been attending a Spanish-speaking Sunday School class on Sunday mornings. Emily’s joined the choir and we are helping with a youth retreat this weekend. Check out the church website. Though it’s a bit dated, you can download this Sunday’s sermon and hear what we heard. And if you do so, you will hear in the sermon today that Pastor Andy referenced the British Empire. And I, for one, learned a new British anthem that I hadn’t heard before: Rule, Britannia!

Emily was able to recite the chorus of the anthem as the pastor read it. Once we got home, I snooped around on the Internet to see what all I could learn and find out about this glorious maritime hymn. Below is an mp3 of the 1994 BBC recording of the song at Last Night of the Proms, something British that was new to me today as well.

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When Britain first at Heav’n’s command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never shall be slaves.

(The mp3 is from the Wikipedia article: Rule, Britannia!. Download here. Interesting note: the article says that the third verse in the above mp3 is in Welsh.)