Hymnals of The United Methodist Church

It used to be pretty simple to talk about the official hymnal of our church. There was always just one. There were denominational hymnals for The Methodist Church (1966, 1935, 1905), The Evangelical United Brethren Church (1957), and dozens of official hymnals of the predecessor denominations. These were the hymnals that each body's General Conference authorized and approved. Our present United Methodist Hymnal was adopted by the 1988 General Conference and released in 1989.

In addition to these official denominational hymnals, there have been many, many other songbooks and collections that have been published by various United Methodist groups and agencies that are not "official" in that they were not mandated or approved by General Conference. These include The Cokesbury Hymnal, Songs of Zion, Celebremos, The Upper Room Worshipbook, The Faith We Sing, Global Praise, and a host of others — some bearing the word "hymnal" in their titles and some not.

But when we referred to our hymnal, it was understood to be THE United Methodist Hymnal. Then in 1996 came a second official United Methodist hymnal, Mil Voces Para Celebrar, a Spanish-language hymnal published by The United Methodist Publishing House (UMPH), with editorial supervision by Discipleship Ministries and approval of General Conference. (So now there were two.) General Conference went on to approve in 2000 a third official United Methodist Hymnal, Come, Let Us Worship, a fully bilingual Korean-English hymnal published by UMPH and editorially supervised by Discipleship Ministries and released in 2001. (And now there are three.)

We do not yet have official denominational hymnals aimed at other language, racial, cultural, or geographical groups in The United Methodist Church, such as African Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Asians (other than Koreans), or any of many other indigenous groups in The United Methodist Church family. Perhaps these will be called for someday by a future General Conference.

Much has been made of the inclusiveness of the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal, with its multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual contents and its broad range of musical and hymnic styles. It is certainly true that it is the most inclusive of Methodist and United Methodist hymnals.

To understand the actual contents of the 1989 hymnal better and to appreciate its breadth of inclusion, I did my own page-by-page analysis of its hymn contents (numbers 57-734). I chose my own category headings and assigned each entry to one of the headings. I allowed a very few entries to appear in more than one category. My categories are a combination of ethnic, linguistic, style, use or function in worship. In the end, I gathered several categories together to provide a better picture of the ethnic and geographical thrust of the 1989 hymnal, while still providing useful statistics on some of the component categories. My categories include:

Euro-American traditional and contemporary hymns
(including psalms, chorales, gospel songs, folk hymns, Wesley hymns, contemporary praise & worship, and choruses) 492 titles Ethnic and global (Hispanic-Latino-Spanish, African American, African, Native American, Asian, other) 96 titles Chants and Taizé 6 titles Canticles 18 titles Psalm settings 2 titles Service music 17 titles Prayers and text 63 titles TOTAL TITLES INCLUDED
(a few counted in more than one category) 678 titles

See the hymnal's contents by each category on our website. It strikes me that as diverse and inclusive as the The United Methodist Hymnal is, it is certainly not an ethnic hymnal in the sense that Mil Voces Para Celebrar and Come, Let Us Worship are ethnic. The United Methodist Hymnal succeeds at being what it was planned and intended to be: namely, a diverse and inclusive hymnal for the primarily English-speaking, Anglo-European congregations of our denomination in the U.S.A. There is much to commend its use in other congregations, but it is not a book designed primarily for other ethnic, cultural, or language groups. It will be interesting to see how hymnal publishing evolves in the future as The United Methodist Church continues to grow in number and vitality outside the U.S.A. — especially if the UMC continues to decline in numbers within the U.S.A.

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Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. All rights reserved. Used by permission.