ATLANTA — Bucking a trend in
many churches to eschew four-part harmonies for praise choruses projected on a
screen, a new hymnal released March 8 seeks to introduce both old favorites and
lesser-known new compositions to a new generation of Baptist congregations.
“We were trying to create a
hymnal for churches that use hymnals,” said Stanley Roberts, a Mercer
University professor and member of the editorial team that planned the Celebrating Grace Hymnal, “to provide a resource that our current generation and
future generations could use for worship in the local church.”
Tom McAfee, a Georgia layman
who conceived of the idea for and oversaw development of the hymnal, said the
new song book seeks to embrace a denominational identity broader than battle
lines that divided Baptists in the United States in the latter decades of the
20th century.
“One of the things we did in
the beginning was to intentionally be inclusive,” said McAfee, chairman of a
health-care company and member of First Baptist Church in Macon, Ga. “I think it’s one of the things that make
our hymnal unique.”
Starting at the grassroots
level, McAfee said, editors and board members sought input from individuals and
churches affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, African-American
Baptists, Canadian Baptists and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Thomas McAfee, center, introduces members of the editorial board. |
“If you had a Baptist badge,
we wanted you to be involved,” McAfee said. “We also wanted to incorporate some
Methodist traditions, Presbyterian traditions. We wanted to be something that
is, yes, Baptist, and is built by Baptists with Baptists in mind, but we also
wanted to be able to bring in these other traditions so that others can use the
book as well.”
“It’s not just a book for
Cooperative Baptists or Southern Baptists or the other brands of Baptists,”
said McAfee, “We’ve got materials there that will meet the needs of a number of
different denominations.”
Mark Edwards, vice president
of music and worship resources who oversaw the music side of the project, said
Celebrating Grace was already in the works and unrelated to a new Baptist
Hymnal that LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention
released in 2008.
“We are doing hymnals that
are to different markets,” said Edwards, who was minister of music at First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., for 30 years. “I think they’ve done
a good job,” he said of the new Southern Baptist hymnal. “It’s a good book for
what it is. They’re just doing a different thing from what we are doing.”
In addition to the 700-page
printed hymnal, the Celebrating Grace Hymnal includes online support for extra
features including orchestration, piano and organ music, hand bells and “congregational
anthems” that arrange hymns in ways that treat the congregation like a choir
instead of singing four stanzas by rote.
“In times gone by you could
publish a hymnal and just do a book, and that was enough,” Edwards said. “These
days it’s not enough. There are other things that have to go along with a
hymnal if it’s going to be used in a church effectively. So part of this whole
process was building a body of materials to go along with the hymnal.”
The project also includes a
component of interactive, online worship planning trademarked by David Bolin,
minister of music at First Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, who said he developed the concept over
three decades as a local-church worship leader “never dreaming this would some
day be used by anybody other than myself.”
Originally conceived in 2005
as a contribution to Baptist worship by Mercer University Press in Macon, Ga.,
McAfee said, the project grew into a new not-for-profit corporation. Early
conversations, McAfee said, included: “Is there a market for a hymnal today?”
“That became very evident
very quick that there was a strong need for a hymnal today,” he said. Other
problems involved: “How to repackage some of the hymns to make them fresh,
taking old hymns and giving them new treatment, and to give training materials
for some of the younger generations who may not have been exposed to hymnody
the way that my generation has been exposed.”
One major challenge, McAfee
said, was “how to get the book out into the churches.”
“The old model from SBC days
was that you had state music reps in each of the states, and those were your
salespeople,” he said. “That model doesn’t exist today.”
McAfee declined to discuss
specific finances but described pre-sales of the new hymnal as “exceptionally
good.”
“Our first printing was
around 25,000 copies,” he said. “We’re in the process of getting the second
printing running. We’ll expect to have those in hand in the middle of April.”
McAfee said sales have
performed surprisingly well in an otherwise-poor economy.
“For the most part we are
finding it is a gift that is given in honor of, and those types of gifts are
reasonably small,” he said. “If a church wants to go out and solicit from its
congregants to do a memorial in honor of one person buying one hymnal, $20 by
that individual is doable by just about everybody.”
“We’ve had situations where
families have stepped up and they’ve given the entire congregation hymnals,” he
said.
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Allen is
senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.)