After 24 years, long awaited hymnal now available

The volunteer-produced church songbook Sing a New Creation is now available for congregations to order.

The Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) has produced a supplement to the 1998 hymnal, Common Praise, thanks to the help of volunteers who dedicated many years to the creation of Sing a New Creation. 

It has been common church practice since the 70s that a new hymnal is written after 25 to 30 years, and a supplement after 10 years. However, due to a lack of resources, the ACC took 24 years for the supplement to be published.

Kenneth Hull, a retired professor of music at Conrad Grebel University College, heard of the struggles that the church was facing and decided to volunteer his time toward the production of the new hymnal, along with the help of a team of other volunteers.

Hull had previously been part of the hymnbook task force that created Common Praise, the current hymnal used by the ACC. That had played a role in his interest in being involved in the creation of the supplement.

"The process of being on the Common Praise committee got me really interested in hymns and hymnology, and I ended up teaching courses in congregational song at the college," says Hull. "It was really my interest, my experience with the first hymnbook and my experience teaching about hymns and my awareness that the church would need something like this."

Production of the hymnbook, which contains a large range of music styles to it, started around eight years ago. To determine which hymns made it into the final book, Hull and his team contacted every diocese, a district under the charge of a Bishop, to figure out what kind of hymns each region needed.

"We asked them to either have meetings or to send questionnaires or somehow get information back to us about what particular needs they thought they had in terms of new songs for people to sing, particular subject matters like, it might be lament, or it might be healing what they wanted to see more of and we looked at that."

A major roadblock that the committee faced was the second phase, which was having the book published.

The Anglican Church in Canada does not have its own publishing house and they had to request help from other sources. In the end, the Episcopal Church in the U.S agreed to publish the book which was still a long process.

"Technically, the release date was May 17, so just this week, but I think there was a production delay and so they won't actually begin shipping books until, actually a week from today, the 26th of May. You can already order the book, but it won't actually begin shipping for about another week."

Even though Hull enjoyed the process, he does not think that he would lead such a project again but he would still take part in it.

"It's an enjoyable process, but it's also probably time for some younger people to do it next time."

For people who are interested in finding a copy of Sing a New Creation, they can check out the Anglican Church of Canada's website.