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.