NEW BAPTIST HYMNAL

In 1991, the Southern Baptist Convention press, now Lifeway, gave us the Baptist Hymnal. This hymnal is the one my church uses today. Lifeway is currently working on the New Baptist Hymnal, scheduled to be released July 1, 2008. This new offering will contain around 650 songs, only a few less than the prior version. Lifeway is also supplementing the pew version with an online resource and database of 1000 songs that will be available to churches in various formats: a multimedia database of texts, a recorded database for churches without musicians and, orchestrated accompaniments for larger churches. Lifeway is hoping to add 100 songs per year to this online database, giving churches access to new songs as well as all the old standards that many baptist churches love to sing.

The aim of such an online database is to provide a centralized resource for worship planning and to confront some of the problems of hymnal publishing that are unique to our digital age and to put better tools into the hands of worship planners, giving more options than the standard pew publication provides. It also shows foreword thinking for those on the mission field and small churches who may be worshiping where musicians are not available. Granted, the idea of playing an MP3 recording for my congregation to sing to is not exciting to me, but considering that most of our convention's churches have less than 100 members, with limited budgets for paying accompanists, it appears that Lifeway is truly seeking to help churches where they are.

The printed hymnal will be dually titled The Baptist Hymnal and The Worship Hymnal. Both editions will be available hardbound in order to market the hymnal to non SBC churches who may share our hymn tradition and theological perspectives but may be of another denomination and aren't interested in many of the "changes" to texts that many other published hymnals of the past few decades have indulged, such as gender neutrality and theological tweaking to take away "unhelpful" themes like "sin" and "judgment" and "eschatological triumph." Many denominations today find these as unnecessarily provocative and harmful to the christian message and have changed traditional hymn texts accordingly.

The publishers say that they have found that most Southern Baptist churches use around 300 of the hymns in the 1991 hymnal. They have retained these baptist standards and are supplementing these with over 200 new songs that have been published in other hymnals but have been absent from the Baptist Hymnal. They also will debut over 100 hymns that have never been published in any hymnal to date. Maybe this will include modern hymns like "In Christ Alone." I'm crossing my fingers.

Oh, in one article, they explain that "I'll fly away" will make it back into this edition. That will make my church family glad!

For more information, check out Lifewayworship.com for news and updates on the new hymnal project.