Songs you don't like in your hymnal?

[Lamb]

Are there any songs in your hymnal that you don't like? Is it the music, the words, the theology...?

 

[Josiah]

In Lutheran Service Book (the usual hymnal of the LCMS) there are quite a number of clinkers - songs with great lyrics but difficult music. I can read music (and that helps a lot) but our bulletin just gives the lyrics so sometimes I'm completely lost in singing a very difficult song. The sad thing is no one notices the GREAT words because they are trying - desperately - to figure out the music.


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[Lamb]

In Lutheran Service Book (the usual hymnal of the LCMS) there are quite a number of clinkers - songs with great lyrics but difficult music. I can read music (and that helps a lot) but our bulletin just gives the lyrics so sometimes I'm completely lost in singing a very difficult song. The sad thing is no one notices the GREAT words because they are trying - desperately - to figure out the music.


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Don't you have enough hymnals so you can look at the music? I need the music in front of me, which is why I hate looking at screens with just the text. We don't have screens, thankfully.

 

[Lees]

Are there any songs in your hymnal that you don't like? Is it the music, the words, the theology...?

Though not many churches use hymnals anymore, sadly, in the past the one song I detested, both words and music, is/was 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'. Everyone sang it gloriously on the week of July 4th as though it was about Christ and God. It is not. The Christ it represents is the transcendental social Jesus.

Written by one who was a transcendentalist, and abolitionist, not a Christian, to encourage the Yankee army to slaughter the Southern slave owners, and people. Set to the tune of 'John Browns Body', because she and others wanted and made Brown a Christlike figure, and his gallows a cross. And Brown was nothing but an insane murderer.

Most Christians don't know what they sing when they sing it. And if they do...they don't care.

Lees

 

[Josiah]

Don't you have enough hymnals so you can look at the music? I need the music in front of me, which is why I hate looking at screens with just the text. We don't have screens, thankfully.

We have no hymnals.... instead, the church has an annual license to use the material. It COULD print the music in the bulletin, but it doesn't. The words (alone) are in the bulletin and on the screen. There IS a "hard copy" in the church library (which is in the chapel) and because I can read music, sometimes I go back there and use the hymnal but usually, well, not.


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