I’ve heard some parents ask how to sing hymns during family worship, particularly if they don’t play music, or don’t know the hymns themselves. Other parents might wonder why they would even want to. Let’s talk about both.
Learn How to Sing Hymns
Singing hymns in family worship, ultimately, is pretty much as simple as everything else — you just do it. (No need to overthink it.) But that might be easier said than done if you don’t know hymns or can’t play an instrument!
We’re at a distinct advantage in this respect because Michael used to be a music minister “by trade,” so he knows the hymnal fairly thoroughly, and he and one of our kids can play keyboard for us. But there are options even if this is all new to you.
Online Videos
For newer songs, we occasionally take advantage of YouTube videos. The music plays for you to sing along with, and if you look for a “lyric video,” you can often find one with the words displayed, too.
This does have some disadvantages, though. You don’t necessarily know what arrangement you’re getting. Occasionally, someone has transcribed the lyrics oddly. And, most significantly, it can be a bit awkward to have ads popping up in the midst of worship. Still, it’s a tool to keep in mind.
Text + Music
As a rule, my top recommendation would be to find a source for the music, and also pick up a hymnal so you have the lyrics to look at. If you don’t have a hymnal, you can find the lyrics to most well-known hymns (and a lot of not-very-well-known ones!) either by doing a general search for them online, or by visiting the Cyber Hymnal. (The Cyber Hymnal also has audio files of most the hymn tunes, so you can get familiar with them, but most aren’t in a form you’d likely want to sing along with.)
Keep in mind that not every source has every verse in the same order, so you might need to make note the first time of whether your printed verses are all in the same order as your audio accompaniment.
For audio, I’m especially partial to this set of CDs/mp3s. I bought these years ago when my oldest was young, for introducing hymns to her, and I’ve been very happy with them. Whereas most performers who do hymn recordings add some “spice” to them, which can sound lovely but make it tricky to follow along, these recordings are simply a choir, singing the songs “straight,” just like you’d hear them in church. This makes them easy to follow along with. And the collection includes most, if not all, of the most common favorites. (A few of the songs in the set are praise choruses, but most are hymns.) If you buy the CDs, they come in a set of four, so make sure you get/have all 100 songs.
Buying a Hymnal — What to Get?
There isn’t really a single right answer to the question of which hymnal to get. The hymnal we have (and which you’ll see in my photos) is the 1991 Baptist Hymnal. There are two major reasons for that. 1) It’s the hymnal we sang from when Michael was in full-time church ministry, so it was already familiar. 2) I found a whole box of them for a great price at a used bookstore, so we have plenty of copies for our whole family or even a small house church. Obviously, these are not reasons that are going to be relevant for most people!
There’s going to be a lot of overlap between most hymnals, but there are also some songs that probably won’t overlap, so you probably want to choose a hymnal that’s from your own denominational tradition. If you’re Baptist, look for a Baptist hymnal. If you’re Presbyterian, look for a Presbyterian hymnal. And so on. If you don’t have a denominational tradition, choose one from a denomination that’s theologically solid, because the quality of doctrine will show up in the hymn selection.
Why Sing Hymns at Home?
The other big question, though, is why you should learn how to sing hymns. We’ve observed multiple benefits, particularly if you use a printed hymnal, or printed hymn sheets that include the music as seen in a hymnal.
Singing Hymns Presents An Opportunity to Learn Doctrine
One of the reasons we sing hymns is that they are, as a whole, doctrinally rich. (There are poor hymns, too, but most of the hymns that have stood the test of time have depth.) When we sing them, we’re learning doctrine.
When we learn the songs so that they play on repeat in our minds, we’re meditating on doctrine.
And when we sing these together at home, they provide unique opportunities for discussion.
Although family worship at our house is a time we expect our kids to be still and respectful (which is sometimes more of a challenge with certain kids than others), it’s also a less formal setting than a larger church service, so we can stop and address questions, points of confusion, etc. This means that if a particular theological point comes up in a hymn, we can take a moment after we’ve finished singing it to talk about it and add clarification.
Or if it surfaces that a particular hymn has poor theology, we can address that, too.
Singing Hymns Offers Rich Vocabulary
Most hymns — especially those you’ll find in the average printed hymnal — are old. Consequently, they use old language. Just as singing hymns during family worship allows us to stop and clarify potentially confusing points of doctrine, so it allows us to stop and define potentially confusing words as necessary.
“God, our Maker, doth provide
For our wants to be supplied”
This is an example of a potentially confusing text. Children need to have it explained to them that “wants” wasn’t used in the past like we use it now, and this is not referring to “everything we want,” but, rather, to what we need.
We choose to use the NKJV and not the KJV because of this kind of change in language, but learning about words in this context provides knowledge that carries over to reading of the KJV, as well as other classic texts.
Hymns also often use beautiful language and complex imagery, exposure to which is especially beneficial for children who are ordinarily surrounded only by shallow language and dumbed-down description in everyday modern life.
Singing Hymns Builds a Shared Worship Vocabulary
It’s common today for church worship leaders to be perpetually seeking the next “new” thing. They want worship to be “novel” and “exciting.” But this means that what should be a time of focusing on God is often a time of focusing on trying to learn something new…over and over and over.
What churches used to have — and still should — is what my husband refers to as a “shared worship vocabulary.” If everyone knows the same songs, then everyone can simply come together and sing, not come together and learn how to sing.
Remember how I mentioned that hymnals don’t usually overlap by 100%? This idea of worship vocabulary is never completely perfect. Most of us will find ourselves in settings where we’re learning something new. But by building a common repertoire well-known throughout Christendom, we’re ensuring that there’s enough of an overlap in our worship vocabulary to be meaningful.
Using a Hymnal at Home is Good Practice
Using a hymnal at home is good practice for using a hymnal in a church service — and/or to learn music (or some elements of music), in general.
Right about now, you might be starting to feel a little panicky, thinking, “but I don’t know how to read music; how am I supposed to do this?!” It’s okay. You don’t have to actually know how to read music, as in, being-able-to-identify-all-the-notes-type reading music, in order to make good use of the hymnal.
But there are a few things you’ll probably want to know because they help you follow along, and it’s easier to learn them when you can take a couple minutes before the start of a song to go over them, than when you’re in the middle of a church service and just find yourself lost on the page mid-song. So let me explain a few things that will make it easier to follow along with various hymns.
Singing Notes
Sight reading can be a handy skill — but it isn’t a necessary skill. Even those who are largely music-illiterate can use the printed music to help when learning a new hymn by simply noticing whether the notes are moving up, moving down, or staying the same.
The top row of notes is the one that follows the melody, and you can watch it to see which way the music is moving — even if you don’t know what any of the actual notes are.
What’s even more important to be at least a little familiar with, though, are the various kinds of endings songs sometimes use. Otherwise, you find that everyone else has gone back to somewhere in the middle of the song and you’re not sure which words you’re supposed to be singing!
There are three major ways this can happen. The first is a simple repeat.
This symbol should be paired with one that’s its mirror image later in the music, kind of like a pair of brackets. When you get to the second one, the music goes back and repeats from the first one…and that means you have to go back in the words to this spot, too. (Often the words will be a literal repeat. Occasionally they’ll give you two sets of words: one for the first time through and another for the second time through; but the tune is the same.)
The second is multiple endings. This is much like a repeat, except that the overall repeated section has two different endings. You sing through the whole section, through the first ending, go back and repeat most of it, but skip over the first ending and sing the second instead. That makes a lot more sense when you’re looking at it.
Like this. See those bracketed areas labeled “1” and “2”? Those are the first and second endings. (And see that repeat symbol I mentioned earlier?)
Here’s another look. You have the “opening” repeat symbol, the “closing” repeat symbol, and the indicators for ending 1 and ending 2.
What you’re going to do is sing all the purple-highlighted part, then the blue, then the purple again, then the pink.
Ordinarily, that’s about as complicated as it gets, but every once in a while, you have a hymn that throws in a real humdinger. “Lily of the Valley” does this, tossing in a D.S. al Fine.
Wait, what?! Yes, it sounds foreign. That’s because it is.
D.S. stands for “dal segno” — Latin for “the sign.” And “Fine” refers to the “finish,” or the end. So this phrase means, “go back to the sign and sing/play until the end.” The “sign”? It’s this funny-looking thing that kinda looks like a fancified “S.”
This is really just another kind of repeat, but you have to know to look for “the sign,” rather than the repeat symbol. In the case of this hymn, there’s basically a chorus that uses the same tune as part of the verse so they just throw the words in under the music to save space. Which can be super-confusing if you’ve never encountered this before and it suddenly shows up at church!
The instruction “D.S. al Fine” (from the previous image) is on the right-hand page, so you can’t see it in this image, but this shows you what you’re supposed to sing here. You see the “sign” (where you’re supposed to go back to, musically), and the word “Fine” (where you’re supposed to end the repeat). And a “D.S” that indicates the row of lyrics you’re meant to sing during this extra time through the music. (You can click on this image to make it larger if you need to.)
More About the Hymnal
Before we go, I just want to quickly point out a couple other things about how a hymnal is typically set up. They’ll all vary a little, but a lot of the same basic elements will be present.
First, most hymnals have multiple indices (indexes). The Baptist Hymnal, for instance, has a topical index of responsive readings; Scriptural index of responsive readings; “Scriptural bases for hymns” index; authors, composers, and sources index; alphabetical index of tunes; metrical index of tunes; topical index of hymns; and a medley index.
But the most basic index — the one we typically think of as “the regular index” at my house — is the “First Lines and Titles Index.” This index, just as it sounds, includes the titles of every hymn, as well as the first line of each if it differs from the title.
Sorry my photo is blurry. The lighting in my house is so bad almost everything is blurry if I don’t take it in a lightbox. Hopefully you get the idea, though.
Hymns in a hymnal are numbered by song, not by page, by the way. And what you see in parentheses here is the key each hymn is in, which you’ll probably want to ignore if you don’t play music.
There’s also information provided at the bottom of the page with each hymn. You probably don’t need most of if you’re just starting out, but if you have the kind of kids who ask you a thousand questions about what everything on the page is for, hopefully this will help you provide them with answers!
