This year has seen the release of two new hymnals for mainstream Presbyterian and Reformed churches.
Last week my copy of the new hymnal Glory To God arrived in the mail. Now having a copy in my hands I did what I always do when I acquire a new hymnal, new or old… I analyze it. I will get to the numerical analysis in a moment but let me make a couple of prefatory comments.
First, I purchased the red pew PC(USA) edition published by Westminster John Knox Press, one imprint of the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation of the PC(USA). I don’t think that having the purple edition or the ecumenical edition will make a difference for this analysis because, as I understand it, the PC(USA) versus the ecumenical only makes a difference in the liturgical bits, not the musical. (But that is not to imply that the musical stuff is mutually exclusive from the liturgical.) In the narrative discussion below I will refer to this as the “New Hymnal.”
It is of standard hymnal dimensions and I found it to be only 34 mm thick. Since it is a full 7 mm thinner than the current The Presbyterian Hymnal (which I will refer to at the “Old Hymnal”) it is replacing you can be assured that it will fit nicely into your pew racks. But don’t worry, this is not at the loss of material as the New Hymnal has 1018 pages, a 42% increase over the Old Hymnal. The difference is of course in the weight of the paper it is published on so if your congregation makes heavy use of the hymnal, as opposed to using them as a decorative feature of the pew racks as you sing off the projection screen, you might want to think about a shorter replacement cycle.
The other thing I had to laugh at is that the New Hymnal has the subtitle “The Presbyterian Hymnal,” as it seems a bit presumptuous that there is one Presbyterian hymnal. But this is nothing new. That was the title of the Old Hymnal and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland names theirs The Irish Presbyterian Hymnbook. But if both the Old Hymnal and the New Hymnal are both “The” Presbyterian hymnal, is that a contradiction or does the new automatically supersede the old?
Read more at http://blog.gajunkie.com/2013/10/22/a-quantitative-analysis-of-the-new-presbyterian-hymnal-glory-to-god.aspx