Two Decades After a Merger, One Shared Hymnal

The Methodist Church and The Evangelical United Brethren Church merged in 1968 to form The United Methodist Church, but a merger of institutions is not the same thing as a merger of hymnody, and for more than twenty years the new denomination went on singing from whatever hymnals its two predecessor bodies had already been using. The United Methodist Hymnal, approved by the 1988 General Conference and published in 1989, was the first hymnal actually prepared for the merged church itself.

A twenty five member revision committee, led by editor Carlton R. Young and chaired by Bishop Rueben P. Job, built the volume that finally gave the denomination a single shared songbook rather than an inherited pair. Running to 960 pages, it carries the expected hymns alongside marriage and funeral rites, forms for morning and evening prayer and praise, and a Psalter drawn from the New Revised Standard Version, a complete worship resource rather than a hymn collection alone. That the project took two decades to arrive says something honest about how slowly institutional union actually reaches a congregation's Sunday singing, well behind the paperwork that first declared the merger complete, and well behind the point at which most members would have assumed the two predecessor traditions had already become one.