On Thursday, the Church has announced, we’re going to get to see the first 12 hymns in the forthcoming new hymnbook. (There will be periodic drops of new hymns between Thursday and whenever the actual new hymnbook comes out.) We won’t know until Thursday eleven of the twelve new hymns; the twelfth will be “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”
The new hymnbook will be the first in English in 40 years—the green hymnbooks that grace our chapels were first released in 1985. (The blue ones that preceded those have a copyright date of 1948, making the 40-year stretch roughly par.) The new hymnbook will have somewhere in the range of 500 hymns and children’s songs and (thankfully!) will be numbered the same, irrespective of language.[fn1]
But there’s one big potential problem I see with the new hymnbook: will it lead our wards to sing different songs?
Absent any affirmative work by the institutional church, I suspect the answer will mostly be a resounding no. And I base that no on two main things.
The first is, I’ve been a member of the church since (slightly) before the green hymnbook. I have a lot of experience with church members. And honestly, as a collective, we don’t sing when we’re not familiar with the hymn. There are, of course, exceptions—we have singers who will sing even if theirs is the only voice. And we have wards that will tackle unfamiliar hymns with relish. But in my experience, both are the exception.
Take my ward. On Sunday, the closing hymn was #80, “God of Our Fathers, Known of Old.” Now, my ward sang the intermediate him, “Master the Tempest Is Raging,” with power and passion. But that was gone for the closing hymn. A few of us sang. More opened the hymnbook but, well, didn’t sing. Why not? I mean, I can’t swear that I’ve never sung “God of Our Fathers, Known of Old” before. But I don’t remember it. If I’ve sung it before, those times have been few and really far between. But mostly, wards I’ve been in have stuck to the same couple dozen hymns the congregation knows.
And that makes sense. After all, part of the point of hymn-singing is collective and participatory worship. If three quarters of the congregation doesn’t know the hymn and doesn’t sing it, that kind of defeats the purpose.
Which takes me to my second basis for why I suspect that, absent some sort of intervention, the new hymnbook will not significantly expand the repertoire of hymns we sing at church: music is a learned skill, one that takes practice.
And I say that kind of selfishly: I started playing piano when I was 5. Saxophone when I was 9 or 10. Guitar and flute as a teenager. I’ve put in more hours than I can count studying and practicing music. I’ve sung in church choirs. Spent my freshman year as a music performance major. Done band and jazz band and choir and community band. I’ve played in a soul jazz group and, recently, with Cat Jam Chicago.
What I’m saying is, I can sight-read and -sing music. But it’s because it’s been such a critical part of my life, and because it’s something I’ve put time into. But not everybody has put in that time. How are the members of our wards who aren’t obsessed with music going to learn the new hymns? Sure, they can listen. They can sing at home (but what if nobody at home plays piano? And don’t say they can sing along to the church’s mp3s, because yes, they can, but traditionally, those have been unbearable except as an absolute last resort). And yes, they can try to sing along at church, but that’s not the ideal way to learn. And with about 500 songs if we were really rotating through the whole book, we’d hit each hymn like once every 3 or 4 years.
But there are ways to do it, ways that don’t demand that people teach themselves music! In fact, there are things that the church has done formally! My favorite comes from my childhood. There was some period of time, either in the late 1980s or early 1990s, where, after sacrament meeting, primary teachers headed out to set up their classes. Everybody else stayed in the chapel for music practice. IIRC (and I may not, because I was young and it’s been a long time), it lasted about 10 minutes. The chorister introduced the ward to a couple hymns. We’d go over the melody (and maybe the parts?) for a new hymn, and we’d review one that we’d learned the prior week. The idea wasn’t to just sing through them, but, instead, to become familiar with them, to the point that we could insert them into our regular worship services.
It wasn’t all learning unfamiliar hymns, of course. Sometimes the ward chorister would take requests and we’d just sing through well-known and well-loved favorites.
And it was really cool.
In light of the new hymnbook, and the fact that it will have unfamiliar hymns (and with any luck at all) unfamiliar styles of music, bringing back that 10 minutes to learn the new songs would be, frankly, a blessing. Yes, it would cut some time out of the second hour. That’s not a bad thing! We believe that the song of the heart is a prayer to the Lord. Taking time to learn to sing hymns doesn’t detract from our church worship—it’s an integral part of that worship. And honestly, if we don’t actively make space and time to learn the new hymns, we’ll continue to sing the same couple dozen we’ve been singing for the last four decades, and the new hymnbook will be both unnecessary and extraneous.
The fact that the church is periodically releasing new hymns in small batches makes it even easier. Instead of being paralyzed by 500 options, we could use the 10-minute hymn period to learn one or two at a time, solidifying our extended repertoire and allowing us to smoothly embrace the new hymnbook.
I sincerely hope that the church encourages this kind of collective, congregational approach to learning the new hymns. It’s worth the time and the effort to ensure that we worship God through song.
[fn1] I don’t know about your ward, but mine has both English and Spanish speakers, with occasional French and Portuguese speakers too. And having the same numbers for the hymns would be really useful.
Photo by Michael Maasen on Unsplash