Before the service starts on Sunday morning at San Diego Reformed Church, the building fills with the sound of singing. Sean Kinnally, an associate pastor, leads a 45-minute Psalm-sing so the congregation can practice reading music together and using printed hymnals.
“We’re seeking to add more and more hymns—it’s a more robust form of worship,” Kinnally said. “There has been incalculable growth in the singing at our church.”
San Diego Reformed is in the process of shifting its worship toward hymnal-aided congregational singing. The congregation is part of what appears to be a growing number of churches working to recover the practice—never entirely lost, but not as popular as it used to be—of singing from books.
Hymnals offer perceived permanence and stability in a musical landscape that changes quickly and often. The decision to reintroduce congregations to hymnals is often an ideological one, especially for churches that made the transition away from them in recent decades.
But a notable number of churches are making that choice, choosing the printed page over lyrics projected onto a screen.
Dan Kreider, a composer, arranger, and music minister who designed the Sing! Hymnal, which Crossway is releasing in fall 2025, said hymnals aren’t going to replace projection or any of the tech tools that undergird contemporary worship music. But they offer something valuable and different.
“If you’re in a church that just goes with the most popular songs, where is your sense of permanence? Think of the kids growing up in your church. Where is their sense of permanence? What songs are they going to remember and sing as they age? The hymnal slows us down,” Kreider said.
Hymnals have often served to connect Christians to specific traditions. Lutherans form a liturgical link with Martin Luther, singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” while Wesleyans recall the spirituality of the first Methodists with “Arise, My Soul, Arise.”
Many denominations still print and distribute hymnals to help congregations shape their worship according to doctrinal and traditional distinctives. Some denominations have recently renewed efforts to strengthen people’s sense of musical connection.
The Christian Reformed Church of North America has a vetting project, offering guidance on the suitability of the theology of songs that worship leaders might choose for a service. The Christian Missionary Alliance is seeking to create its own modern body of worship music that foregrounds its theological distinctives. And the Global Methodist Church, formed this year out of a split with the United Methodist Church, is seeking to renew its Wesleyan identity, in part through a slim blue collection of 202 Charles Wesley hymns, O for a Heart to Praise My God.
Over the past 40 years, hymnal production has become increasingly linked to the worship music industry. Integrity Music printed its first edition of The Celebration Hymnal in 1997, which included a blend of contemporary songs and traditional Protestant hymns. The Sing! Hymnal is a collaborative project between Crossway and Keith and Kristyn Getty, two standard-bearers of the “modern hymn movement.”
Many of the hymnals and sacred songbooks published by worship music companies also establish historical connections, giving Christians a sense of rootedness.
Jesse P. Karlsberg, a researcher at Emory University and the project director of the digital publishing project Sounding Spirit, which is financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, said that the printing of sacred music has always been commercial, religious, and social. And, he points out, there have long been efforts to revive music of an idealized past through the compilation of hymnals and songbooks.
“There are lots of examples of hymnals and songbooks that are basically retrospective,” said Karlsberg, who studies sacred music printed between 1850 and 1925. “At times there seemed to be a belief that what was needed was the music of the past, even if that was an imagined past.”
New hymnals, including the Sing! Hymnal,the Scripture Hymnal, and The Gospel Story Hymnal, don’t connect people to a specific denomination or a particular Christian tradition. But they offer rootedness through the tactile, concrete nature of a bound and printed book.
Many of the people involved with new hymnals believe that the physicality—singing from an ink-and-paper book instead of the more popular projected lyrics—matters a lot. They say singing from a hymnal shapes Christian spirituality in a deep and lasting way.
When Randall Goodgame, the creator of the popular kids’ musical program “Slugs & Bugs,” began writing songs for what would become the recently released Scripture Hymnal, he saw the music change children’s relationship with Scripture. The music allowed God’s Word to take root.
“I listened to people talk about how these songs impacted their kids, and I started to imagine churches and worship leaders and their congregations engaging with Scripture,” Goodgame said. “Think of the conversations we could be having if we were all just soaked in Scripture.”
The Scripture Hymnal includes 106 original songs that are all word-for-word settings of text from the Bible, written by Goodgame and a team of collaborators that includes fellow Christian artists Ellie Holcomb, Andrew Osenga, and Taylor Leonhardt. The commitment to singing Scripture alone is usually found in Calvinist Reformed churches, but Goodgame’s project isn’t rooted in that tradition. He said it grew out of a desire to offer more of the Bible to worshippers.
“We want leaders to feel good about challenging their congregations to learn Scripture through song, so we tried to make it beautiful and singable,” Goodgame said. “What we’re talking about is revival. If people in the church learn a ton of new Scripture, it will produce revival in their own hearts and in the church.”
Dan Kreider, who also designed and arranged the choral versions of songs in the Scripture Hymnal, said that the proliferation of new hymnal projects is an encouraging sign that worshipers are not just accepting whatever is new and popular but thoughtfully considering the music they want to sing.
Kreider designed and printed his first hymnal, Sing the Wonders, in 2016, for his home church. A conversation with one of his graduate school professors inspired the project.
“My hymnology professor said that the best hymnal a church could have would be one that a church could make for itself,” said Kreider. “That stuck with me. He was speaking of hymns as an identity around which a group of people could coalesce.”
Since that first in-house hymnal, Kreider has gone on to found the company Hymnworks and has designed more than 40 hymnals. Most of them grew out of word-of-mouth connections with other musicians and leaders who were intrigued by the idea of a bespoke hymnal.
In Kreider’s view, the rise of projection as the primary mode of reading and singing lyrics may be driving renewed enthusiasm for access to words and music on paper.
“We’re trying to curate songs that are rich in content, with lyrics that deserve to be chewed on. But with projection, they flash on the screen for a moment, then they’re gone.”
Kreider pointed out that because of the rise in self-publishing and increased access to custom printing, it’s become easier and more affordable for churches to commission their own hymnals. For most churches, he added, it is still cheaper to purchase existing hymnals, but that price gap is getting narrower.
“These are high-value, long-term projects,” Kreider said. “This is a project churches should think of in terms of shaping their musical identity for the next 15 years.”
Reintroducing hymnals in churches where they have fallen out of use requires both a shift in musical culture and the teaching (or reteaching) of skills like note-reading and harmonization. Some leaders and congregations are embracing this challenge, seeking out or creating new tools and resources in the process.
Isaiah Holt developed Sing Your Part, an app that teaches users to sing in individual parts and read music. He said the project grew out of the realization that if congregations are going to use their hymnals, they would need some education.
“Pastors reach out to us looking for a lifeline,” said Holt. “There are so many of us who don’t read music, but still, a lot of Protestant churches are using hymnals every week.”
Sing Your Part, which launched in June 2024, contains the full repertoire for seven hymnals and a large collection of songs in the public domain. Holt said 100 churches are currently using the app weekly. “How Firm a Foundation” is currently the most popular song on the app.
Holt hopes the app will help “breathe new life” into print hymnals. In just a few months, it seems to have helped churches put roots down into older Christian traditions of worship.
“Many church leaders we talk to are trying to help their churches reclaim something,” said Holt. “They feel like they’ve lost the musical literacy their ancestors had.”
Interest in traditional liturgy seems to ebb and flow in the trend cycle among American evangelicals, as does the search for historically informed musical worship practices. The current surge in demand for hymnals may be another cycle, and new volumes like the Sing! Hymnal and the Scripture Hymnal are meeting a demand for musical resources that can be held in hands and stacked on shelves.
Perhaps the interest will wane again in a year or two. But the people promoting hymnals say they really want the permanence that hymnals seem to offer.
“My goal,” said Dan Kreider, the minister behind the Sing! Hymnal, “is that every Christian could have, along with their Bible, a hymnal. We can’t take projectors with us everywhere.”
