Our Favorite Hymnals, on Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza Ep. 46

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What are your favorite hymnals? Crawford Wiley and I talk about our top five favorites. Since none are hymnals that our congregations sing from, we use them in our service planning and sometimes devotionally.

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Resources Mentioned on This Episode:

• The United Methodist Hymnal
• Hymnal 1982
• Common Praise
• Evangelical Lutheran Worship
• Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal

Transcript of Our Favorite Hymnals on Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza Ep. 46

Favorite Hymnal 1: Common Praise

Sarah Bereza: Crawford, why don’t you start out – what is one of your favorite hymnals?

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, so one of my very favorite hymnals is one that I first encountered when you and I were at the Christian Congregational Music Conference in Cuddesdon. What year was that? Was that 2015?

Sarah Bereza: I know we’ve been 2015, 2017, and 2019.

Crawford Wiley: Yes, that would be 2015. We were attending services at Christ Church in Oxford. And the hymnal there had this kind of striking, modern cover and I thought, Oh, this is interesting. It’s a kind of thick little book and paging through it. It’s called Common Praise, I should give the title. And it was published in 2000. It is the latest imprint of Hymns Ancient and Modern, for anyone who’s familiar with that and all of its iterations. And some things about it are pretty standard. You’ve got four parts, or depending on which hymnal you’ve bought, just the melody line on one page, and then opposite or underneath it, the block of text. So that’s a pretty common feature in Hymns Ancien and Modern and in a lot of hymnals, particularly in the UK.

Sarah Bereza: I’m wondering – is this a UK kind of thing? Because I have not seen that in any American hymnals for congregational use in any recent version.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, I think that having the text interleaved between the stage of the music is a really common American thing. I think this is also by the way, why we kind of get used to the idea of hymn texts generally being about four stanzas. Because four stanzas is about as many stanzas as you can interleave between treble and bass clef. And then you have to shove them to the bottom and no one sings them.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah, once you have five, it’s hard to read the one in the middle and sing the alto line or whatever.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, interesting side effect of that. So one of the things that struck me about Common Praise was first of, it has a lot of hymns. Let me go all the way to the back here and see just how many we’re talking about. This has 628 hymns which, for a hymnal that is not difficult to hold, is kind of a lot of hymns.

Sarah Bereza: As I recall, it’s a pretty, it’s like a really chunky book and the paper is on the thin side.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, it’s very satisfying to hold. It’s kind of a nice little heft to it, but it’s not awkward at all. And again, this is the edition that has the four-part harmonizations for the music. One of the things that the editors did was kind of two priorities that I wish were done more frequently in hymnals. They included a lot of new tunes and new texts, not just new texts set to old tunes. So instead of like the 13 different texts set to Hyfrydol that you encounter in some modern hymnals, you’re going to get a new tune for those newer texts or an old tune, but that we haven’t sung in a while, you know, so it’s not just setting newer takes on texts to old tunes.

Sarah Bereza: And I’m guessing these are pretty decent tunes that are singable? Because sometimes you get tunes where I’m like, huh, that’s a lot of syncopation for your average choir, right?

Crawford Wiley: No, these are these are really singable tunes. Some of them you’ve probably heard before. And some of these newer tunes are also from the just previous edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern which never really caught on. But the hymns themselves are pretty good. Another thing that they did, is having included lots of newer texts, they kind of freed themselves up to not over-edit old texts. So there’s some areas where they were able to make a silent emendation to be more inclusive, you know, where you don’t really affect the line of poetry at all. You don’t have to come up with a new rhyme. And you can silently amend that. And they did that in those cases, which is pretty sensitive, but generally they acknowledged that the hymn texts were popular for good reason, and part of that is their own quality. And when you start hacking away at a good hymn text, like you’re actually hacking away at a piece of poetry. I can’t think of any other situation in which we would think that was going to produce a good result. And so the result is that, as you’re singing the syntax, you’re like, Oh, it’s so nice to sing the words that I was already kind of familiar with, and not have to keep looking down at the hymnal every line to see which word has been changed. And there’s a new rhyme at the end of the second stanza. So I think that a piece of smart planning on their part was to to include lots of new hymns instead of just rewriting old hymns. Because this way, you get the best of both. You get the hymns that everyone knows and loves. And I guess that’s something that we’d like to talk about. One of the things that makes people love a hymnal is just that it includes their favorite hymns. So you get those, and you get the new hymns instead of just a lot of texts written to old tunes or old texts kind of hashed about.

Favorite Hymnals 2 and 3: Evangelical Lutheran Worship and Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal

Sarah Bereza: This is reminding me of two of my favorite hymnals. I really like Evangelical Lutheran Worship from 2006. It’s from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is the cranberry hymnal, I think I’ve heard it called. And I like the purple hymnal – I love how we do this by colors – that is Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal. It’s from 2013. And it’s from the PCUSA – Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Both of these, I think, do a very good job of updating texts without being unduly clunky.

Sarah Bereza: Other things I like about both of them is that they include new music that is very singable. And I think that I tend to use these hymnals – actually, I’m ordering ordering copies for myself right now. I’ve used them like regularly since I’ve been a musician in both of these denominations. So I’ve had them in the church where this was the congregation’s hymnal. Bbut I’m ordering them for my work in a congregationalist church. And what I like about them is that they’re a curated collection of more recent hymnody. And for me as not-a-Lutheran, they’re also a curated collection of like the Lutheran chorales that are still in current use that we can still sing, that other mainline denomination congregations might be able to sing, might enjoy incorporating into their worship.

Sarah Bereza: The other thing I really liked specifically for Glory to God: The Presbyterian hymnal, is that they have an excellent set of PowerPoints and other digital resources that are affordable and useful. Crawford, you and I have recorded before about hymnals and screens. And you know, people really get upset about screens and such because “you can’t have the music.” And I’m always like, Well, you know, Glory to God has excellent sets of music that you can put on your PowerPoint. So you can sing with the notation as well as the text. And it kind of alleviates that one concern that people have with screens, which is that I want to sing the tenor part, or what have you.

Crawford Wiley: Right, right.

Sarah Bereza: Because the denomination has put it all together, it saves a ton of time for the musician who’s organizing all this or the pastor or secretary. It’s all there Right now, I don’t have screens in the church where I work. But I am in the process of building basically a database of the hymns that we sing in notation that I can pop into the into the bulletin, because we aren’t always singing stuff out of the hymnal. And, man, that’s a lot of work for me. And you know, that’s fine. I work there full time, this is part of my job. I think it’s important. But you know, for someone who’s in a PCUSA who can just, you know, plunk down some money and have it all there for them in a reasonably affordable and really useful way – lucky them.

Crawford Wiley: That’s a huge advantage – as someone who also spends a fair amount of time, text-setting different hymns that aren’t in our hymnal.

Sarah Bereza: And that’s not to say – I’m sure people in those denominations occasionally want to bring in other hymns or something…

Crawford Wiley: Sure, but you’re just pointing out that this is a really good resource for them. Which I think is brings us to something else. I don’t know if you wanted to introduce this yet, but like we were talking about before we started recording. A lot of our personal use of these hymnals has nothing to do with whether or not we would order them for a congregation. I mean, as you’ve said before, and as we’ve both said on previous shows, PowerPoint slides are kind of great in churches that are okay with using them. Which means, either between that or printing off Orders of Worship every week, I wouldn’t necessarily even buy a hymnal for a church that I’m in.

Sarah Bereza: I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal is designed to be basically the last hymnal of the PCUSA church. Because we live in an age where there’s a lot of new music created. Many people want to sing something that’s really recent, and hymnals are can be really useful, and I think that they can be really great devotionally. But individual churches are not going to sing all 700 texts from the hymnal. So in a way, each church at this point creates its own hymnal out of this repository. And so when I think of like saying, you know, how am I using Evangelical Lutheran Worship, how am I using Glory to God, how are you using Common Praise – I’m using them as a really tightly curated collection of music for me as the minister of music to be familiar with and think, oh, would this work in my specific congregation’s context? Do I want to add it to our “little hymnal”?

Crawford Wiley: Yes. And with licensing and stuff, you can reproduce those.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah, OneLicense is great.

Crawford Wiley: Another thing, just like varied uses that these hymnals have, is you can use them to draw very simple four-part anthems for your choir. In between larger seasons, maybe just have the choir sing some unfamiliar four-part hymns. And these can be a great resource for that. Or also, and I would a shout out to Common Praise again, where the text is presented on the separate page – these are honestly really nice devotional aids. And I don’t mind saying that there. You don’t have to sing along to the music on your own if you don’t even want to. You can just read the poetry, some of the poetry is really great poetry.

Sarah Bereza: And when we read it, we would hope that all hymnody would be like that, and it certainly isn’t.

Crawford Wiley: Oh, it’s definitely not!

Favorite Hymnal 4: Hymnal 1982

Sarah Bereza: But I want to jump into one of my favorites, the Hymnal 1982, which is from The Episcopal Church in America, and it’s one of their authorized hymnals. I came to the Hymnal 1982 as a devotional aid. I wasn’t using it in a church. I think I was given a copy. And I was just entranced by these hymns with excellent texts that I love. I’m thinking specifically of My Shepherd Will Supply My Need. That’s not a hymn that I knew grew up knowing – it’s to the tune Resignation, an Isaac Watts setting of Psalm 23. I’m also thinking of, I think it’s a George Herbert text, King of Glory, King of Peace.

Crawford Wiley: One of my favorites.

Sarah Bereza: I memorized them out of the hymnal. These were not hymns I was familiar with, but you know, nerdy kid who loves music, I memorized these and I would sing them in the car devotionally. So there’s Hymnal 1982. I think some other amazing things about Hymnal 1982 – I’m not the only person saying this is one of my favorite hymnals. It’s really well laid out. And the part writing is excellent, especially for organists. So I actually keep a copy of Hymnal 1982, if not at my organ console, then in my little bookcase that I have in a closet off the sanctuary. So I can play the part writing out of Hymnal 1982 because it’s really good. Sometimes, maybe it’s a copyright thing in some hymnals where I’m just like, the counterpoint is really not that very good. So I’ll play out of Hymnal 1982. It’s also just a great collection of music.

Favorite Hymnal 5: The United Methodist Hymnal

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, it is. The other favorite hymnal that I wanted to talk about just briefly, is actually the United Methodist Humnal. I don’t know if you’ve had the occasion to play out of it.

Sarah Bereza: I went to Duke University!

Crawford Wiley: Oh, of course. Well, you’re really familiar with this.

Sarah Bereza: For listeners who don’t know, Duke is a Methodist affiliated university, and I was the accompanist for one of their choirs. So anytime I played for a service I was playing out of the United Methodist Hymnal.

Crawford Wiley: It’s easy to forget that Duke Chapel is Methodist though to me.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah it’s pretty non-denom, but it’s still Methodist.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, well, then you’re really familiar with this one. But for any of the listeners who might not be familiar with it. I’ll just go ahead and get out of the way. It’s it’s one flaw which is that is very edited. So a lot of the hymn texts have been changed around a bit and sometimes that’s a little bit confusing. But that flaw aside, there are so many hymn texts, I think it’s printed on very thin paper and it might have more hymns than any other major hymnal, I would have to check on that. But it’s just shocking. By the time you get to the end, I forget how many numbers you’re in. But it’s just like incredible that you can fit so many hymns in such a little book. And that also has to do with the layout of it. It’s somehow very easy to read. The text is printed clearly. The music is very easy to read. And it includes, just about everything. I mean, you have all of your kind of Southern American evangelical favorites. You got tons of Lutheran chorales. Obviously you get more Wesley than you’re going to get in any other hymnal.

Sarah Bereza: I thought you were gonna say, one flaw is that it’s like 90% Wesley!

Crawford Wiley: Oh no. Oh, I wish it were over 90% Wesley. No, it’s not unfortunately. But it’s still a lot of Wesley. No, 90% Wesley would be good. That would be a fine hymnal. If anyone is listening and decides to make a hymnal that is 90% Charles Wesley, you have your audience right here.

Sarah Bereza: Send it to Crawford for Christmas.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, please. But no, I really love the United Methodist Hymnal. And another thing about it is that anyone familiar with denominational hymnals knows – most of them have a variety of indexes in the back. And to be honest, some of these indices, I go through them and I think, who came up with this? I mean, no offense to anyone who spent a lot of time working on it, but I just think this does not reflect anyone’s use of a hymnal that I know at all. I remember going through a major Roman Catholic hymnal recently. And there was no section for Mary. And I was like, who do you think uses this hymnal? Like you have Marian hymns in here? Catholics are literally the ones using this hymnal? Why would you not provide an index for Mary. Good grief. But the UMC hymnal has wonderful indexes on just about any word that you could think of. They’re like, Oh, the Gospel passage today is dealing with thus and such topic. I wonder what hymns deal with that. It has fantastic indexes for that. And also the scripture index is really good, which I guess you’d expect from a Methodist hymnal because so many of Wesley’s hymns paraphrase scripture, and this hymnal actually looks at that. So you get really fantastic scriptural references as well. So just anyone who’s making a hymnal from scratch, you know, if you want to kind of model what you’re doing off of the UMC model, you could do worse. But also since we talked about hymnals being really useful as resources for us ,and since the UMC hymnal has so many hymns in some ways, it’s almost encyclopedic. Yu can use its index as a resource for locating hymns that you might use from another hymnal.

Sarah Bereza: This is this is actually one reason that I like to, you know, have a set of hymnals on my desk when I’m picking out hymns for my congregation. And I’m frequently choosing hymns that are actually in my congregation’s hymnal. But the indices are terrible. I think that like the scripture section is like, you know, three pages long. It’s ridiculous.

Crawford Wiley: Oh, yeah. And you think, okay, you’ve literally not done your work!

Sarah Bereza: It’s really lame. So I often go on hymnary and search for topics, search for scripture there. Honestly, it’s a wonderful resource, but it’s so much that it can be overwhelming. I’m like, I did not need 900 responses for this. But using say the scriptural index or the topic index of the Methodist Hymnal or one of one of my other favorites, it’s just a really great way to find something that I already know but just can’t think of. It’s like, oh, I have this theme, the scripture passage, you know, and then find one the fits perfectly. And I knew the hymn, I just needed something to jog my memory, something to help me make that connection, which is what those indices are for.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah, exactly. Yes. I couldn’t agree more. And especially like if you’ve worked in one domination, and only one denomination for years and years and years, it’s fair, you might have your denomination’s hymnal kind of memorized backwards and forwards. But if you’re searching for material from other hymnals, as well, an index like this is going to be invaluable.

Sarah Bereza: And sometimes denominations print a new hymnal and some of the hymns are lost, or you have multiple hymnals within a denomination. I’m thinking of, for instance in the Episcopal Church, there’s Hymnal 1982. But there’s also Lift Every Voice and Sing. I think there’s In Wonder and Praise. And so you know, you can reach out to other other sources and bring things into your particular congregation.

Crawford Wiley: Oh, sure. And I think something worth pointing out, like, given how quickly hymns can become beloved, it’s surprising how many already popular hymns haven’t made it into, or didn’t make it into older hymnals. I remember recently I was looking for the the tune and text How Shall I Sing that Majesty? The tune is I think Coe Fen, or something like that. And I looked in the Hymnal 1982 – I had assumed would have this and it wasn’t, it was not in that hymnal. By the way, I was able to find it in Common Praise. So there you go. A shout out to my favorite hymnal. So even things that you might think oh yeah, surely this is in my hymnal, you might want to look outside that hymnal, which is why it’s good to have. I don’t know – how many hymnals would you say that you regularly keep on your desk when you’re planning?

Using Other Hymnals as You Plan Worship Services

Sarah Bereza: Oh, six maybe? But I also have my desktop browser open to hymnary while I’m planning, and actually like not to completely derail into planning software, but I keep a spreadsheet of a subset of hymns that I want to prioritize in our congregational singing because you know, the church where I work, we sing three or four hymns a Sunday. That’s 52 Sundays a year. That’s not actually a lot of music, and 700 hymns in the hymnal is way too much. Like literally, it’s just too much music. The congregation is never going to be comfortable with that amount of repertoire, even accounting for duplicated tunes. So I am very conscious of keeping the number that we sing smaller than that. I know people who do contemporary services where they’re like, we have 40 songs on rotation. We have 35 songs on rotation. We have 70 songs.

Crawford Wiley: I don’t think that’s bad at all, like you only learn stuff by heart by repeating it.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah. And you know, Crawford, you and I grew up in traditions where we were in church three times a week or more.

Crawford Wiley: We’d sing the hymns at home, too.

Sarah Bereza: Yes. So of course, we knew hundreds and hundreds of hymns. But if you’re in a church, where people are there every other week, every three weeks or four weeks, and they sing three hymns, like that’s not a lot of music.

Crawford Wiley: If you want to give the gift of having hymns deep inside them, yeah, you have to repeat stuff.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah. And so so what I’m thinking about like using other hymnals and planning like, I’ve got these other hymnals and and yes sometimes I do find something that’s really specific to the text that’s really perfect. And I bring it in. It’s not a very familiar song, and, you know, that’s fine. Maybe it would be better if the choir sang it than if the congregation did. But by and large, I try to pick things from my list of like 150 songs rather than from the whole hymnal because it’s too much for my particular setting. So when I’m planning, I’m often just looking at my repertoire list that I’ve already already selected for myself out of out of the hymnal.

Crawford Wiley: Yes. Which makes a lot of sense,

Sarah Bereza: Which I think is kind of what you do also? Like you don’t do you even have a hymnal where you work?

Crawford Wiley: Yes, yeah, we have an older copy of Ritual Song, so not the new edition that has come out. And we keep them in the pews. And I’ll provide the numbers for like the Psalm that is being sung. So if people want to follow along in the hymnals, text wise, they can do that.

Sarah Bereza: But you actually have a much more tightly edited amount of hymns that you do, right?

Crawford Wiley: Yes. I don’t actually know what the number would be. But it’s a fairly limited number of hymns that we sing so that people are familiar with.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah, limited number plus Christmas.

Crawford Wiley: Yeah or other things. I felt kind of guilty this year, for years I’ve wanted to introduce How Brightly Shines the Morning Star because I think it’s just one of the most beautiful hymns. I love it and we sang it last week, and we’re going to sing it this week, but that’s really all that it works for if you’re a liturgical church. Like it’s very much an epiphany hymn. Or, you think of something like All Glory Laud and Honor which is a fantastic hymn. But I think it will be our fifth year to sing it on Palm Sunday, and I think it’s only this year that people will start to feel familiar with it because you can’t sing that on any other Sunday of the year.

Sarah Bereza: Yeah, it’s really those kinds. They’re tricky and yet…like with Christmas music and I think also Easter music, we sing the songs once a year, but people really know those. And maybe it’s because if you’re going to go to church, you’re going to go on Easter, you’re going to go on Christmas. And so you tend to know those particular ones.

Crawford Wiley: Yes. Oh, definitely. I think this is something interesting about hymnals also, as we were talking about earlier, is that some of them are so unwieldly large, precisely because they don’t weed out those one-use hymns. And so in some hymnals, you have a Christmas section so long, that you’d think that Christmas was the longest season of the church year, when in fact, you probably seen fewer Christmas hymns than just about anything else.

Sarah Bereza: Although, I did a Christmas carol-sing the Sunday after Christmas, because I work in the less liturgical congregation. We sang like 20 hymns plus We Wish You a Merry Christmas. It was great.

Crawford Wiley: That’s a really great idea.

Sarah Bereza: Because we were singing so many, I didn’t have a problem doing one or two stanzas of something that people don’t know as well, like,’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime. Because, hey, we’re singing 20 of them, we’re going to get to Joy to the World!

Crawford Wiley: Yes.

Sarah Bereza: We’ve kind of gotten far afield! So we’ve talked about Common Praise. We’ve talked about the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran hymnals, and Hymnal 1982. Any final thoughts?

Crawford Wiley: Yeah. So like circling back to those original hymnal ideas. I think, do we want to just say one or two things about what makes these hymnals in particular, so special. Because I think that we probably love these hymnals in some way. And it’s not just oh objectively, they’re good hymnals. I kind of feel like I’m trying to convince someone that they should go out and buy their own personal copy of common praise and the UMC hymnal.

Sarah Bereza: Well you’ve convinced me to go get Common Praise!

Crawford Wiley: So I guess what I want to say about Common Praise, that’s the one that I’ll really pitch is, it’s such a beautiful little book. And I find myself carrying it all sorts of places just to have with me because it’s so full of really good texts, texts that are very familiar and already a part of me, and texts that I didn’t know before I bought this hymnal and I remember one episode, we talked about Morning Glory Starlit Sky.

Sarah Bereza: Oh, that’s a great one!

Crawford Wiley: I discovered it in this hymnal. Just such beautiful hymns and a really good wealth of four part harmonizations. So I use it all the time in playing services. Yeah, it’s a beautiful resource. It’s a beautiful book, just to have for your own personal use. And you’ll find yourself using it a fair amount in church as well.

Sarah Bereza: Well, I’ll finish out with a plug for Glory to God: The Presbyterian hymnal, which is not..Maybe you could use the devotionally? I haven’t. But I think that if you are in a traditional service setting or a blended worship setting, and you, like me, are like, hey, I want to bring in some music that’s a little bit more recent, I want to introduce something that is going to work with my organ-piano-choir-based kind of service – Glory to God is a really great resource for that kind of music where it’s recent but it works in a traditional kind of service. And it’s just a curated resource for learning new hymns that could work for your congregation.

Crawford Wiley: I think you sold me. I’m gonna buy it.

Sarah Bereza: It’s good.