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Monthly column on hymns and songs

The numbers game

How do they introduce the hymns at your church?

I write from memory, but someone made a list of some possible ways of doing it. They included the numerical, the historical and the anecdotal. Numerical? 'Hymn number two eight four, two eight four, ten thousand times ten thousand verses one, two and four, one two and four.'

Or historical. 'The writer of our next hymn was born of humble but godly parents in a small village in the Cotswolds where her father was the blacksmith and her mother the schoolmistress. She was the fifth of their ten children and by the age of three was writing sonnets and could play the trombone, double bass and bagpipes.' And so on.

Or anecdotal. 'A wonderful story is told about this next hymn. An American soldier lay in hospital thousands of miles from his native land, suffering terrible pain from gunshot wounds.' Etc.

Better than most is the Scriptural introduction: 'This hymn is based on Jacob's dream at Bethel as told in Genesis 28...' But one golden rule is surely to avoid overdoing any of them. No more than one hymn per service, if that, needs anything approaching an extended lecture by way of preamble. It is good to have our understanding enriched, but not to the point of tedium nor dictated by a rigid routine. Cultivate the element of surprise without shock, and never allow the story to overshadow the hymn or distract us from the praises of God our Saviour.

No introduction

Some ministers, mainly of the higher Anglican sort, make a point of not introducing any hymns; no, not so much as a first line or a number. If you have never experienced this, it has some unexpected bonuses. The snag is that if the hymn-board or notice sheet is all you have to go on, and you are a short-sighted frozen-fingered parent with three toddlers in tow, you may just miss the first two verses altogether. Even to read the opening lines of a hymn gives time to find the page, freedom to clear the throat, or even (for those with serious visual or learning difficulties) the ability to sing at all.

I wonder when hymn-boards were invented - by whom and where? In 1894 Samuel Butler described one at Peterborough as if it were a novelty, comparing it to the indicator board on a station platform. In his monumental volume England's Thousand Best Churches 105 years later, Simon Jenkins included in his chosen pictures nothing so vulgar as bikes, prams, umbrellas, or people. But in the tiny church at Dale in Derbyshire ('a gem'), the hymn numbers were still on display when the photographer dropped in. So that gets my first prize.

Hymn bingo

That Sunday, the winning numbers were 202, 301 and 304. I conclude, therefore, that their book was Hymns Ancient and Modern, standard edition, and it was the Sunday after Ascension Day. The Psalm, however, was No. 138. But the hymn boards, like the pulpit, look a bit older than 1894.

If one crime is not to put the numbers up, another is not to take them down. A worse one is to throw them all on the bonfire on the footling grounds the projector and screen have made them redundant. You may need them yet.

We were discussing introductions. 'Rejoice, the Lord is King: not only are the words by Wesley and the tune by Handel, but this hymn was memorably sung in Dale at Ascensiontide 1998, when Simon Jenkins of The Times was scooting round England to find its thousand best churches...' See; you can do a lot better than that.

Christopher Idle