Hymns: New Songs for Methodists

Compiling a hymnal for his fellow Methodists in 1761, John Wesley admonished them to “sing lustily,” keeping always “an eye to God in every word you sing.” True to his urging, Methodists have always been among the most song-minded of all Protestants. This week their brand-new hymnal arrives in church pews with the largest advance sale of any book in U.S. publishing history: 2,154,000 copies.

The first new hymnal for Methodists since 1935, the revision was ordered by the church’s General Conference in 1960. To find out what worshipers wanted, the editors, headed by the Rev. Carlton Young of Dallas, polled 12,800 ministers and laymen, fed their answers into a computer. The result is a songbook that neatly balances tradition and innovation; among the 539 entries are 122 new texts, 119 new tunes.

While discarding a number of sentimental Victorian horrors, the hymnal ecumenically includes several Roman Catholic canticles based on plain chant, along with hymns borrowed from Anglican, Lutheran and Presbyterian songbooks. In response to popular demand, in went Billy Graham’s longtime favorite, How Great Thou Art. Out, at the request of Negro Methodist bishops, went Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional, with its colonialist reference to “lesser breeds without the law”; the hymnal includes five Negro spirituals, carefully edited to exclude dialect wording. Reflecting the musical cross-fertilization inspired by church missionaries, there is one hymn (The Righteous Ones) by a Thai convert to Christianity, another based on an African chant.

During the past century, every revision of the Methodist hymnal has tended to reduce its Wesleyan content. Reversing the trend, the 1966 edition includes 81 hymns by John and Charles Wesley, 20 more than the 1935 version contained. Also included is a nostalgic fundamentalist favorite that was left out of the previous hymnal because it did not suit the musical palate of the time: The Old Rugged Cross. All in all, proudly sums up the Rev. Nolan B. Harmon, retired Bishop of Western North Carolina and one of the supervising editors, “it’s the greatest hymnal we’ve ever had.”