Do you keep track of the hymns your congregation sings?
Most churches I’ve been in have a fantastically low-tech way of keeping track of when hymns are sung: somebody just writes the date in a hymnal!
As long as that somebody is consistent, you end up with a record that tells you something about the congregations familiarity with a hymn text and probably a hymn tune too.
But I wanted something deeper to help me as I plan hymns, something to help guide my choices each week.
So I created a database in Airtable (like Excel but much easier to use and much prettier, also free to individuals). The template I made is freely available here.
Here’s what it looks like:
The whole spread doesn’t fit into one image – here’s another one showing my notes at the end.
The Spreadsheet Includes These Fields:
- hymn text
- hymn tune
- congregation’s familiarity with the hymn
- my desired frequency of singing it
- the type of hymn (and if it’s associated with a liturgical season)
- the date we last sang it
- notes
How the Database Helps Me Select Hymns
There are hundreds of hymns out there. But there are only 52 Sundays a year. And with my church’s liturgy, that’s only around 200 hymns we can sing each year.
Having a hymnal of 700 hymns doesn’t really help me – it’s too much, and it isn’t tailored to my specific congregation.
So I needed a system to help me focus on the hymns I really want us to sing!
I’ve identified the hymns in our “core repertoire” and carefully selected hymns that I want to gradually introduce to the congregation. These are all in my own database (not the template I’ve shared), and I’m using it track what we’re singing.
Familiarity Versus Frequency
I think it’s important to remember the congregation’s familiarity with a hymn, not just how often it’s been sung. At my new church, I’ve selected some hymns that I thought the congregation would know well (based on records the church kept), and then been a bit blindsided when most of my choir was sight-reading the hymn. I can’t keep that kind of information in my head, so I’m tracking it here.
If you’d like to use this database, it’s freely available as a template here.
Let me know what you think! The template is editable, so you can change it to suit your specific needs.
Image via.
Would you mind posting a video showing how you use this?
Maybe this is the nudge I need to finally try a FB live video 🙂
Dustin, I was thinking the same thing.
Sarah, this is awesome. I’ve been playing with the template for a (very) little bit. This has led me to a question.
I get why you want when the hymn was last sung, but why don’t you have historical data too? For example, knowing that we sang a “quarterly” hymn 2 months in a row may influence whether you will do it 2, 3, or 4 months since the last.
Also, a bit cheeky, do you really sing some hymns “monthly” or is my seasonal? For example, using “I want to walk as a child…” as the gathering during a sermon series or season.
Again, thank you for sharing. I signed up for your emails. I look forward to learning more from you!
Sean