Why a Hymnal vs Projecting Songs on Screens?

I’m of the opinion that we are formed by the hymns and songs we sing.  We are (perhaps more than we realize) formed, too, by the tangible objects of our faith.  We are people of the book — not just people of the Word of God, but also people who have been corporately, theologically, devotionally, and socially formed by hymnbooks.

In Christopher N. Phillips’s book, The Hymnal: A Reading History, he writes of the history and literary reading of hymnals – those “small companion[s]” that traveled with parishioners from church, home, and school.  Phillips leads the reader like an artful detective through the early reading practices and religious life of the 18th and 19th centuries in America and across the Atlantic.

Perhaps we might (today) see hymnals as outdated accessories of a worship service. But hymnbooks have served (and still may serve) a larger purpose.  These books were the way children learned to read, the way illiterate congregants were able to apply a sermon, the way families instructed their children (and paved the way for children’s literature), the way poetic careers began, and the way that dissimilar individuals became the worshiping people of God.

Hymnbooks helped to bind the people of God together.  Because “readers can be both individual and corporate,” writes Phillips, hymnbooks in worship nurtured the “achievement of corporate personhood.”  For new religious groups, hymnbooks were one of the first acts of creating a visible identity.  For denominations, hymnbooks were used to wage war or create peace by what was included, what was excluded, and how the books were published and circulated.

Phillips helps us see accomplished hymn writers like Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and William Cowper in the context of their times.  More broadly, he reimagines for his Christian reader how the methods and practices of our reading form our loves and attention.  It is not simply the content of hymns sung, read, gifted, or memorized that informs our thinking and spiritual appetites.  The books themselves — and how they’re read, circulated, used, and travel — shape us.  To put it quite simply, we are formed not only by what we read but by how (and with whom) we read.

Hymnbooks were so well-worn prior to 1820 that many haven’t survived — they were touched, held close, and their covers, spines, and bindings show what Phillips, quoting another scholar, calls “hand piety.”  The hand piety we exhibit most often (today) manifests in sore pinkies from holding our phones and hunched backs from staring at screens.  It might seem easy to harken back to a “golden age” of hymnals or pews, but for the time period Phillips chronicles, hymnbooks were innovative and divisive.  Instead, believers (today) should begin to consider, through Phillips’s history, larger questions about how our reading informs us.  After all, the form an object takes is never neutral: It always creates meaning.

For those who read hymn and song lyrics projected onto screens each Sunday morning, have you lost something?  If hymnbooks helped to form marginal groups into a people with a distinct identity, then what forms of corporate and private worship can bring us together as God’s people (today)?

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel