In a previous charge, an elder would appear at my front door on a Monday morning with a list of hymns that he thought we should be singing.   It was a list with only 45 hymns on it, and I would look at the list and thank him.   When he questioned why I did not pay much attention to his list of 45 hymns I would look at them again and say “but that is only 9 weeks worth of hymns.”

The list he assured me were the hymns the congregation favoured and knew well, and he thought it would be better if we stuck to this list rather than continue to introduce new and different hymns.   We usually agreed to disagree, although I would try to explain that in picking hymns I did try to get a balance between what a congregation know and hymns that reflected particular seasons.   At points in the year there could by 5 well-known hymns, while at another point the struggle of learning something different would be worthwhile and maybe meaningful.

After he had gone, I would stomp around the manse – I try to keep my stomping to myself – and take his list to see how many of the hymns had been sung in recent weeks.   More often than not most of them had been sung in the last six month period, although perhaps not always on the Sundays he was there.   There was one hymn he always placed on his list that I was bemused by, because when it was given to the congregation to sing almost no-one knew it.   Perhaps it was his favourite.

Is picking hymns an easy task to do?   It is if you just want to pick five well-known, easily sung hymns.   It is not so easy if you want to pull out the theme of the readings, encourage a congregation in new thoughts about faith, and catch the season of the year and congregation.   It is not easy when you do not know the repertoire of a particular congregation.   It is not easy when your policy is to try not to repeat hymns within a four to five month period.

There is a distinct disadvantage in having grown up in a congregation where it seemed like we sang almost every hymn from the hymn book, the third edition of the church hymnary of course.   It’s not helped by that jaunt in childhood to the Church of England and another spectrum of hymns, or in teenage years hanging around the Baptist Church and learning a different genre of church music.   Of course I love music and words, and the combination of the two opens up the possibility of exploring something new of God.

Hopefully there will be no-one at the door tomorrow with a list hymns hymns they think we should sing, because I think between the two services this week I managed to cover my bases on the need for something familiar to get your teeth into, with the unfamiliar to set you thinking.