“Redeemer Hymnal” Project
Some may be aware that I am part of a committee putting together a custom hymnal for our church here in northeast Louisiana.1 We are several years into the project of culling old and new texts and tunes and deciding what arrangements, keys, harmonization, and more will serve our people now and still allow for some growth going forward. We are calling this hymnal “The Redeemer Hymnal,” and after some delays and slowing of our progress, we hope to finish this project this year. A little over a year ago, I wrote a post making a somewhat abbreviated case for “heartier hymnals” rather than a more narrow corpus of songs. Here’s the link to that post if you would like to read it:
In the above article, I ask, “Why not give people a corpus of songs that includes songs they can sing after dinner, during Christmas caroling, and during the various seasons of the church year?” I was trying to provide a counter perspective to a very limited church hymnody in this article. I believe in heartier hymnals, not because we should not have a core repertoire of songs that are carefully chosen in the worship of the local congregation. Instead, hymnals have a broader function than only on Sunday morning worship. They have six other days of usefulness to Christians who are committed to being singing saints.
A Larger Vision for Hymnals
I’m a music teacher whose proverbial sleeves are rolled up in the trenches of training students (and adults from time to time) to be better skilled in music literacy. That means I want to train my students in music and singing in similar ways that they are trained in their native spoken language. What is the equivalent activity for music if we read to our children and talk with them? Are we singing with and to them during the week? Are we singing in Church with them? This is where the hymnal can aid us in our music literacy. Many learned to read and write without understanding the particular steps leading to reading comprehension. If you asked them, “when did you learn how to read?” They may not be able to give a detailed answer. But they likely can remember being read to on mom’s lap or the sofa with a grandparent. Sure they may remember some things in their school years that helped them learn to read, but odds are their first memory is of being read to. Hearing words and being read to was the foundation. Enter the hymnal.
The hymnal has lots of songs within it. It has Psalms and hymns to be sung in worship. It has carols and children’s hymns. It has service music and canticles. It has seasonal songs and topical songs. It also includes songs that would not be the most fitting to sing in a formal Sunday worship service, not because they are bad songs but because not all songs have the same form, content, and even accessibility that would be best for worship. This is why some hymnals had songs for “informal” or “other” occasions. Christians have referred to Sunday morning services as “corporate worship” or “formal worship.” This is why hymnal publishers had sections and subsections that made that clear.
The assumption was back then and should be remembered today is that hymnals are not merely for worship on the Lord’s Day. A hymnal is ready to be picked up and played through by your eleven-year-old on the family piano or keyboard as a sightreading exercise. It’s ready to be sung after dinner before you get up from the table or maybe after you clear the dishes and gather in the living room. The hymnal is waiting to accompany you to your grandfather’s bedside to sing a setting of “The Lord’s My Shepherd (Psalm 23)” or maybe one of his favorite hymns instead. It’s meant to be dusted off at the beginning of a Bible study if only to sing through the Doxology (Praise God from whom all blessings flow) or maybe even a closing hymn that encourages your small group before they leave your Bible study.
Carol vs. Hymn
If you have several hymnals in your home, you can grab them and take them with you when you go caroling in the neighborhood or at the retirement center. The heartier the hymnal, the more Christmas hymns, and carols can fit inside. Historically, churches would sing psalms and hymns for worship primarily. Carols were “intended for household or social use,” writes American hymnologist Henry Foote citing Christmas carols, “were sometimes permitted in church in connection with Christmas festivities, but it is only within very recent times that they have found any place in hymnbooks.”2 Foote’s “recent times” referred to 1940 when he wrote these words. Here we are another eighty-three years later, and I would venture that most people cannot tell a Christmas hymn from a Christmas carol, nor will they find any distinction in many modern hymnals. While this post is not meant to dwell on the differences between carols and hymns, seven-day-a-week hymnals intended for use outside the Church would be able to include not only Christmas hymns but Christmas carols and other types of psalms and hymns that would be of service in the life of singing saints.
Singing Saints’ Best Tool
In the so-called “worship wars” that have been going on in the Church in recent decades, you have folks like me who would generally like to see a more weighty, set-apart body of music in worship. In other words, songs that don’t feel or sound like everything else being played or sung throughout the week. Either way, the reality is that will never happen if the Church does not prioritize training its congregations to be more skillful musically. Without a desire for music-literate singers in the pews, it seems foolish to complain about the lack of more glorious, robust settings of Church music. This is why it is understandable that many churches only project the lyrics on screens of their worship songs. The thought must be, “if people cannot read the sheet music, why put it up there?” I joke and say if you are only going to put up the words on the screen, at least put the Disney Sing-a-long red bouncing ball up there so you can know how fast or slow the rhythm of the words go. In all seriousness, this is where the hymnal is ready to aid us, as has been alluded to above.
The seven-day-a-week hymnal is a way to not only cheer us and follow the Scripture’s admonition to “sing to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,” but it is also a music literacy primer in the process. It provides sightreading material for us to sing throughout our week. It allows folks who were not trained in music to at least be able to follow along, if nothing else, with the words, notes, rhythms, and harmonies being sung. Just like our young children pick up on language by following along while being read to, who’s to say that more adults won’t glean similarly from following along from sheet music being sung? You can do this with printed hymnals, or you could even do this with music on digital tablets or even with projector screens. As an aside, my Church moved into a building with two large screens, and from day one, we did not have enough hymnals in the pews, so we projected the hymn on the screen one system at a time and scanned from the hymnal. Young mothers can hold their toddlers in their arms, keep their heads up, and still read the music and words on the screen. The point is not that the hymnal is magical, but it is a tool. Are there benefits to reading from a tangible paper book in your hands instead of a projected score? Sure. The point here is that we have a tool that will aid us in many ways if we take it up.
Conclusion
It is important to highlight how the hymnal has and can continue strengthening our people in music literacy, faith, and hope. You don’t have to print your own like my church is doing. There are plenty of good hymnals out there ready for purchase from a used bookstore or possibly even sitting in storage at your church. A seven-day-a-week hymnal only aids in our witness as a musical people who reecho God’s Word, truths, and promises back to Him in song and to one another also—not just on Sunday, but the other six days of the week.
The Redeemer Hymnal is the title of our hymnal at the Church of the Redeemer in West Monroe, LA.
Foote, Henry Wilder. Three Centuries of American Hymnody. United States: Archon Books, 1968, 6.