Hymnbooks of their own

On a typical Sunday in Valdosta, Ga., up to 250 attendees file into the sanctuary of Covenant Baptist Church and take their places along wooden pews. As congregants sing hymns like “How Firm a Foundation” and “O God, My Joy,” most follow the lyrics displayed on a projector screen behind the pulpit. But some instead crack open the new gray-blue hymnals tucked into the pew racks.

Many modern churches are abandoning hymnals, but Covenant is a rare example of a congregation bucking the trend. Planted in 1999, the church in January received its first hymnal, titled Beholding Christ. Custom-curated by Covenant leaders, the hymnal has 446 handpicked songs, including beloved hymns like Charles Wesley’s “And Can It Be” and a contemporary version of Horatius Bonar’s “Upon a Life.”

Covenant pastors don’t intend to ditch projection technology. Instead, the new hymnals are meant to form the basis of the church’s song repertoire. Covenant is joining a cadre of churches using custom-printed hymnals to curate carefully chosen contemporary hymns while preserving perennial favorites.

Hymnal designer Dan Kreider was behind the Covenant project. Since founding his custom hymnal company Hymnworks in 2018, he has designed more than 50 unique hymnals for churches, schools, and major publishing houses like Crossway.

Kreider, 43, a full-time music minister, began thinking about customizable hymnals in his grad school days at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Kreider recalls a professor who said, “The best hymnal a church could have would be the one that it made for itself.”

While recovering from brain surgery in 2015, Kreider had time on his hands, and his church, Grace Immanuel Bible Church in Jupiter, Fla., didn’t have a hymnal. So he decided to make one, although he wasn’t sure where to start.

“I would look at a hymnal on my shelf,” said Kreider. “I’d call the publisher. I’d be like, ‘Hey, how do you make a hymnal?’”

After spending about 1,500 hours picking the songs, securing licensing, and getting the books printed, bound, and shipped, Kreider introduced Grace Immanuel to the Sing the Wonders hymnal. Shortly thereafter, a church in Virginia asked Kreider to make a hymnbook for its congregation as well.

“And then all of a sudden it just kind of started taking off,” said Kreider. If there are any competitors in his niche line of work, he’s not aware of them.

Churches have long compiled their own spiral songbooks, but those usually don’t include a complete repertoire. Hymnworks offers both spiral and bound books with tailor-made hymnal covers, Scripture readings, and Scripture indexing that most congregations don’t have the time or resources to compile.

This custom songbook created by Hymnworks includes a popular hymn that has endured since 1887. Hymnworks

One of Kreider’s customers, Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, N.D., ordered around 600 copies of a customized hymnal. As a practical matter, the project allowed Faith to pare down its worship repertoire to 350 songs the church doctrinally affirms. “It’s not so much a stylistic choice for us as it is a devotional resource,” explained Associate Pastor Web Gehring.

Another key reason churches might opt for custom-made hymnals is the abundance of newly written hymns. Most ready-made denominational hymnals don’t include anything newer than “In Christ Alone” by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty. But the emergence of hymns from groups like CityAlight and songwriting team Matt Boswell and Matt Papa have been at the forefront of what Kreider describes as a “hymn-writing renaissance.” Without this development, Kreider admits, “I don’t think custom hymnals would have been compelling.”

Since the Protestant Reformation, church congregations have favored four-part anthems. “In the mid-1980s to the present we’ve kind of had a shift away from that, more into the praise chorus, which emphasizes one single melody and the musical accompaniment,” said Greg Straughn, a music professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas. Today’s newly written hymns often resemble those four-part congregational songs of the past.

Although many churches will likely continue to rely on songs from popular labels like Bethel Music and Elevation Worship, the pendulum may be swinging back toward congregational hymnody. Most Hymnworks projects include musical notations that can aid four-part harmonies.

Greg Wilbur, founder of New College Franklin in Tennessee, is a modern hymn composer whose songs have been included in multiple Hymnworks projects. He believes the baby boomer generation had high hopes for contemporary praise music, but the style wasn’t a hit with all young people: “I think there’s a desire with the younger generations to have something that is more tangible … that connects to the past.”

Custom hymnals do have the same limitations as the traditional hymnals that have sat in pew racks for decades. “Once it’s collected and printed,” noted Wilbur, “you can’t really add things to it.” That can be problematic if churches want to keep introducing new hymns after buying a custom-made book.

But churches like Covenant in Valdosta believe the permanence represented by a hymnal is a positive quality. Associate Pastor Tommy Speirs says the best modern hymns, like classic ones, will likely “endure the test of time.”

And according to Kreider, canonizing them in hymnals will contribute to their longevity. “The legacy is not the hymnal,” said Kreider. “The songs and the hymns that endure are the ones that make it into as many publications as possible.”