New Church Praise, St Andrew Press, 1975: Editorial Preface, and Foreword by Erik Routley
[Editorial Preface]
New Church Praise has been produced in response to a demand within the United Reformed Church for a supplementary collection of hymns which might be used alongside the parent books (Revised Church Hymnary, 1927; The Church Hymnary: Third Edition, 1973; Congregational Praise, 1951) as a vehicle for worship in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The General Assembly of 1973 appointed a special committee to prepare such a hymnbook supplement. This committee had the benefit of the advice of a number of local churches which had taken part, during the previous two years, in a pilot scheme for trying out new material. Many recent hymns have been included, to strengthen the weaker sections of the present books; but earlier centuries have not been ignored - Bunyan, Herbert and Watts may still enrich our prayers and praises. It is hoped that the resulting, varied, collection may therefore be useful as a supplement to other standard hymnbooks besides those used in the United Reformed Church.
Many tunes here represented will be unfamiliar to users of The Church Hymnary or Congregational Praise, and where suitable alternative tunes may be recommended a cross-reference is provided. A special feature of this book, however, is the frequent interlining of at least the first verse below the melody, in both the full music and the melody editions, and users are encouraged to take advantage of this provision to add many new tunes to their repertoire.
A further feature of this book is the inclusion of an order of worship for the Lord's Supper (Holy Communion), with specially commissioned musical settings of some of the liturgical material. This order was prepared initially for the United Reformed Church by its Doctrine and Worship Committee, but its blend of the traditional and the contemporary may well commend it to Christians of other denominations.
The Committee offers this collection in the hope that it will make some contribution towards the relevance and vitality of the Church's worship for the coming years.
PETER CUTTS (Chairman)
DAVID GARDNER (Secretary)
It might have appeared natural that the United Reformed Church should celebrate the achievement of union by producing a new hymn book. The reasons why a Supplement was preferred to a full-size hymn book will be quite clear. In the first place, its production would have taken so long that by the time it appeared the United Reformed Church would be well past the stage of initial celebration. Secondly, a new hymn book was produced for one of our constituent bodies as recently as 1973. Thirdly, it would have been a very expensive business.
But a fourth reason for confining ourselves to a Supplement is more cogent than any of these. It is that at this particular time a Supplement is positively the right kind of book to produce. In this judgement we follow the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Proprietors of Hymns Ancient and Modern who in recent years have brought out Supplements all of which have great distinction and have proved to be exactly what their constituencies needed.
During the past twenty years or so the developments in hymnody, both in words and in music, have been so strenuous and fast-moving that the editors of a full-size hymnal are faced with problems of choice and judgment far more intricate than those which ever faced their predecessors. There is so much new material which appeals to widely differing tastes and interest and which clamours for inclusion that there would be a real danger of a new hymnal's omitting in undue haste much older material simply to make room for the new. Many classics might have been discarded in the zeal to celebrate the contemporary, so that a new generation of hymn singers would be robbed of much that had nourished their fathers. A Supplement, however, means that all that is in the parent book remains available, and that the repertory is simply enriched by a hundred fresh hymns; the only charge for this bonus is the need to provide two hymn books in church instead of one - and in practice other Christian bodies have not found this at all vexatious.
One thing remains to be said. Congregations will enjoy the book far more, and use it with greater profit, if arrangements can be made for congregational practices, an activity of which some local congregations are still shy. But, with a little planning, it can be done: sometimes briefly within a service at which a new hymn is to be sung; sometimes more extensively on a Sunday or a weekday; and sometimes, very effectively, by congregations gathered in a district or province for a communal introduction to the new material. Such occasions will be all the more valuable if they happen with reasonable regularity.
So we commend New Church Praise to the people of the United Reformed Church and to any others who care to use it. It was said in the Preface to Congregational Praise that every generation needs its own hymnal. This supplemental book is offered to the present generation in the hope that it will give new vitality and meaning to the parent books which it is designed to augment. May God be pleased to answer the endeavours of the editors in the cheerful, warm-hearted and adventurous singing of our congregations.
ERIK ROUTLEY
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