Congregational Songbooks: Sixteen Hymnals and Psalters From 1562 to 2006

The Genevan Psalter began as an eighteen psalm edition in 1539 and was completed in 1562 with all 150 psalms set across 125 tunes. It was made so the whole congregation, not a trained choir, would sing the psalms in the vernacular, unaccompanied, which is why it opens this path.

The Scottish Psalter chose Francis Rous's metrical version over William Barton's at the Westminster Assembly and had it revised again. A commission authorized it on 23 November 1649 as the only psalter sung in Church of Scotland congregations from 1 May 1650.

John and Charles Wesley issued this collection in London in March 1739. It was the first to appear under both brothers' names and the first place any of Charles Wesley's hymns reached print, including And Can It Be That I Should Gain. It went through five editions by 1756.

The Bohohlasnyk gathers roughly 247 Ukrainian devotional songs, or kanty, printed in 1790 to 1791 at the Pochaiv Monastery press under Basilian Order administration. It drew largely on vernacular religious song rather than formal chant and was reprinted into the twentieth century.

Richard Allen compiled these fifty four hymns for his Bethel congregation in Philadelphia, and John Ormrod printed them in 1801. It was the first hymnal published by an African American for African American worshippers, and it was printed without notation or author attributions.

Hymns Ancient and Modern grew from a 1858 conversation between two Oxford Movement clergymen about merging their collections. A trial edition circulated in 1860, and Novello published the first complete edition of 273 hymns on 20 March 1861, with words and tunes printed together.

Edited by William Howard Doane and Elias Henry Johnson, this book was published in Philadelphia in 1883 under the imprint of the American Baptist Publication Society. It predates the Society's 1897 narrowing, so its hymnals also served Southern Baptist congregations at the time.

The Central Conference of American Rabbis released the Union Hymnal in 1897 with the Society of American Cantors. It was mostly in English with a section of transliterated Hebrew, built for Reform congregations whose worship increasingly favored English hymn singing.

Published in 1910 in Syracuse, New York, with 690 numbered hymns, this book served the Wesleyan Methodist Church, organized in 1843 as a nonepiscopal, antislavery body. It is the direct predecessor hymnal of one of the two bodies that united in 1968 to form The Wesleyan Church.

The Progressive National Baptist Convention organized in 1961 and issued its own hymnal in Washington, D.C. in 1976, edited by D. E. King, as a special edition of the Broadman Hymnal. A convention publishing its own book fifteen years in marks institutional maturity.

Approved by the Episcopal Church's General Convention in 1982 and published in 1985, The Hymnal 1982 contains 720 hymns. It is one of seven hymnals authorized since 1789 and replaced The Hymnal 1940, partly to expand service music and chant to match the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

A nineteen member committee chaired by C. L. Brooks, with Wayne Hooper as secretary, prepared this 1985 hymnal of 695 hymns and 224 responsive readings. It kept about eighty percent of the 1941 book's selections and added around one hundred forty new songs.

The General Synod of the Church of Sweden adopted this book on 29 August 1986 as its fourth official hymnal after those of 1695, 1819 and 1937. Of its 700 hymns, the first 325 were drawn from a pool shared across almost every Christian denomination in Sweden.

Published in 1989, this was the first hymnal made for The United Methodist Church after the 1968 merger. A twenty five member committee under editor Carlton R. Young prepared its 960 pages, and it sold more than four and a half million copies within a decade.

The 1995 Moravian Book of Worship runs to 954 pages of liturgies, hymns and indexes. It stands in a lineage traced to the Bohemian Brethren, and its Easter Morning liturgy descends from the version printed in the 1778 German and 1789 English Moravian hymnals.

Published by Augsburg Fortress in October 2006, Evangelical Lutheran Worship replaced the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship after twenty eight years. Its 1,211 pages hold 654 hymns, all 150 psalms and fourteen service music settings.