Hi Folks,

In this article we will discuss a subject that is near and dear to me, titled “How to choose hymns effectively for church service”. But first, you may be wondering: why are hymns so important to church service?

First, hymns help to prepare the minds of the congregation to receive, understand, and appreciate the sermon. Think of it this way… Imagine you have a very important guest at your house, and you want to serve him rice. Do you just give him rice alone? No! Rather, you support the rice with some stew, meat, fish, vegetables, and so on to wash it down and make the rice more enjoyable. So, just as you need to use good stew to support your rice to make the rice more palatable for your guest, that’s how you need to use good hymns to support your sermons to make the sermons palatable to your congregation.

Second, well-chosen hymns serve as useful tools to help preachers convey sound doctrine to the congregation. They sometimes work like proverbs, conveying deep insights in a concise and beautiful way.

Third, hymns help to encourage spiritual growth by singing biblical truths.

And fourth, singing the right hymns creates more unity, friendship, and sense of belonging among believers.

Now we understand why hymns are important to the church service, let’s go into how to choose hymns effectively for church service.

First, you need to carefully study and take into consideration any existing rules used by your church to select hymns. For example, if you attend Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), then usually the first hymn comes from the Forgiveness (Idariji ati Ironupiwada) section of the hymnbook. If you need to deviate from the established pattern, do so with care.

Furthermore, make sure you choose hymns that are relevant to the bible lessons. You need to carefully study the bible lessons. Read them multiple times if necessary. Then identify the keywords and themes of the passages. If a suitable and relevant hymn comes to mind you can consider it, otherwise, search through the hymnbook carefully for hymns that contain the relevant keywords and relate to the theme. You can do this fairly easily with an electronic version of your hymnbook (e.g. YHM provides an electronic version of the CCC hymnbook). These relevant hymns will add more substance and power to the service than hymns that were picked randomly simply because you like them.

Another important strategy is to plan ahead if possible. If you have been given the bible lessons for the next one month, then pick hymns that are relevant for the next 4 – 6 weeks up front. The advantage of doing this is that you get to assign the most relevant hymns to each bible lesson on right dates and there is less chance of assigning the hymns to less suitable dates.

Next, choose hymns that are familiar and easily singable for your choir and congregation. If you plan to introduce new hymns, then first have the choir practice the song during choir practice and make sure they are comfortable with it before selecting it for service. Choose hymns that fit within the singing ability of your choir and one with familiar rhythm. Remember that hymns are designed to carry everyone along, including the choir. How do you know which hymns are familiar to your choir? By taking accurate and consistent records of all hymns selected for church service. So, when you want to choose a hymn, if you aren’t sure whether your choir knows it, then check your hymn number records to see if your choir has sung it in the past. This task can be made very easy if you use an electronic hymn number records. YHM provides one by the way. Also, do not introduce too many new hymns at once into the service.

Next, take into consideration any special seasons your church observes e.g. Easter, Christmas, etc. During these seasons you need to choose hymns that are relevant to them. For example, if you want to choose hymns for Palm Sunday, then pick songs mostly from the Palm Sunday section of the hymnbook as they’re most likely to be relevant to the event. Don’t pick songs from clearly irrelevant sections like Easter for example.

Also, make sure there is good variety in the hymns chosen. Don’t repeat the same hymns too much otherwise it could make the service too predictable and boring. What are some things you can do to make sure you aren’t repeating hymns too much? One approach could be to create a rule that says that you won’t choose a hymn that has been sung within a certain time frame, e.g. one month.  How can you tell the last time a hymn was sung? Simply check your hymn number records. What can you do if you find this kind of search tedious? Easy. Use hymn recommendation software. For example, YHM has a hymn recommendation feature that you can use to easily find suitable hymns that haven’t been sung too recently, and you can configure how much time that should have passed before repeating hymns. Note that this is just meant to be a guide and adjustments can be made if necessary.

That’s all for now. Till next time, happy hymns management.

Hi Folks,

We’re very pleased to announce a new feature on Yinkos Hymns Manager, especially for choirs that sing in multiple languages. YHM now has improved support for languages. How does this work?

Firstly, when you save your hymn MP3s in YHM, you can now specify if the hymn was sung in English or Yoruba and the language will become associated with the hymn and will be easily visible when browsing hymns. This makes it easier for users to find hymns in the correct language, especially if they store hymns in multiple languages.

Also, when you pick hymns numbers for a forthcoming church service on the Hymn Number Records page, you now have the option to specify the language of each hymn, i.e. whether it’s English or Yoruba. On saving the hymn number, the language gets displayed next to the number, making it easy to tell what language to sing the hymn in. But that’s not all. When you specify the language for the hymn number you have picked, YHM automatically connects it with the corresponding hymn MP3 in the specified language if available.

This means let’s say you upload an MP3 for Hymn 5 in English and then you also upload a separate Hymn 5 MP3 in Yoruba using the Hymn MP3 page. Then you later decide you want to sing Hymn 5 in English for your next church service. So, you go to the Hymn Number Records page and choose Hymn 5 and specify English for the language.  As soon as you do this, if you open the Hymn 5 English lyrics and play the audio, it will play your English MP3 recording. Similarly, if you open the Hymn 5 Yoruba lyrics and play the audio, YHM will play your Yoruba MP3. You can do all these with just a few clicks right there on the same page.

Why is this so cool? Because it means it’s now very easy to access and listen to all the audio recordings of the hymns you plan to sing for a future service in the correct language. This makes personal practice easier.

So, what are you waiting for? Visit YHM to try it out. We look forward to your feedback. That’s it for now. Till next time, happy hymns management.

Hi Folks,

In this article we will explore how to keep good records of hymns chosen for church service. But first, you may be wondering. Why is it important to keep records of hymns selected for church service? Here are few reasons.

Firstly, good hymn recordkeeping helps you know what songs your choir knows how to sing and what songs they very likely do not know. That way, you can more easily pick relevant songs that your choir can sing confidently, and that your congregation can relate to, enjoy, and learn from. It also helps you avoid awkward situations that happen when you accidentally choose hymns that the choir has no clue how to sing.

Secondly, good hymn records help you know how frequently the choir has sung a particular song. That way, you have a decent idea of how well they can sing it. This helps you to be able to assess how much practice the choir will need to get up to speed with a song. For example, if a choir has sung a hymn several times within the last year, chances are that they will easily remember it and will be able to perform it easily and excellently with little practice. But if the choir has only sung the song a few times in the last several years, then most likely they will need more practice to be able to perform it fluently. This insight can help you avoid choosing too many hymns that the choir may not be very fluent in for a single service.

Thirdly, good hymn recordkeeping helps you plan how to introduce new hymns to the choir to expand their knowledge. Let’s assume you come across a new melodious and highly inspirational hymn from your church’s hymnbook, and you start thinking to yourself how amazing it would be if your choir could learn this song to bring some new excitement to the church service. How can you tell with high confidence if the hymn is indeed new to your choir? Simple. Check your hymn records to see if the song has never been picked in the past.

Now that you know why keeping good hymn records is so important, let’s cover the next topic. What details should good hymn records contain? One important detail to write down is the date on which the church service takes place. You can even include the day of the week too, e.g. Sunday, 4/1/2026. Next, if the service falls on a special day in the church calendar, e.g. Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, etc., then it’s good to include that detail. Also, it’s useful to include the positions and hymn numbers. For example, if the first hymn chosen for the service is Hymn 11 and the second hymn is Hymn 378, then you can have a record like 1. 11, 2. 378, etc. Next, it’s handy to take note of the main bible lessons used for the service.

Next, how can you keep good records of hymns chosen for church service? We will cover 3 approaches, starting from the simplest to the most sophisticated and robust.

The simplest way to keep records of hymns chosen is to write them down in a book. An advantage of using a book is that books are cheap. Also, they are easy to use. There are some downsides to using books though. The first disadvantage is that it can be quite tedious to search books for specific hymns. This means it’s hard to do any analysis to gather insights on the kinds of hymns sung. Also, physical books cannot be easily shared. Furthermore, they are quite bulky to store.

As you can see, there are quite a few drawbacks to using books to keep records of hymns. So how do some choirs overcome these issues? This brings us to the next approach to keeping records of hymns, called spreadsheets. What is a spreadsheet? A spreadsheet is a computer software used for organizing, storing, and analysing data in a tabular form. An advantage of using spreadsheets is that they make it easy to keep your hymn records organized. They are also easier to search than books. Furthermore, they’re relatively easy to share. Some downsides of using spreadsheets are that they are quite limited in the kind of information they can display to a user. For example, if you want to see some more details about the hymn written in your spreadsheet, you may have to leave the spreadsheet and find another document e.g. a hymnbook to get those details.

What if you want something richer and more robust than just hymn numbers/titles and dates? For example, what if you want to be able to access more details about the hymns being recorded e.g. the lyrics? This brings us to the third technique you can use to keep records of your hymns, i.e. using a hymn planning software. What do I mean by hymn planning software? This is a computer program designed to allow choirs easily plan what songs to sing during church service and keep records of songs chosen in the past. Some examples of hymn planning software are Hymnnotes, The Hymn Planner, and Yinkos Hymns Manager (YHM). If you attend Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), then YHM is an excellent choice because it provides a robust Hymn Planner that is designed for planning hymns for CCC service. It can help you not only plan your hymns, but also listen to the hymn MP3s, view the lyrics in English and Yoruba, and read the hymn tonic sol-fa. YHM even has a Hymn Recommendations tool that can suggest good hymns for you to pick for future church services. That’s not all. YHM can help you analyse how frequently your choir has sung any hymn, helping you gain insights about if and how well they know certain hymns.

Here’s the thing, whatever technique you choose to keep records of hymns, it’s very important to store the hymn details diligently. This requires discipline. If your church has service on multiple days of the week, it’s necessary to keep track of the hymns chosen for all service days, not just for Sundays alone. That way, the book or hymn planning software can provide maximum insight and support to the people who choose hymns.

So, there we are. We have discussed various techniques for keeping good records of hymns chosen for church service and why it’s important to keep good records of hymns. Till next time, happy hymns management.