By Heart

Reach forward and pick it up. You have held it perhaps two thousand times, and you have never once looked at it.

Next to the Bible, the hymnal is the book a Lutheran congregation opens most often — and it is almost certainly the least examined object in the building. We argue about the budget. We interview the pastor for months. Then we hand every member a book that will put words in his mouth fifty Sundays a year for thirty years, and nobody asks what the words say.

What the book argues

The Ambassador Hymnal carries two different accounts of how a person comes to belong to God. One says God gives, in particular places — a font, a pulpit, bread and a cup — and the Christian’s part is to receive and give thanks. The other says the hinge is your response: whether you came, decided, yielded all the way.

Both are in your rack. Both are sung by your congregation. And a Christian who cannot tell them apart will reach, in a hard year, for whichever one he happens to know best — which will be whichever one his congregation sings most.

What it is not

It is not an attack on the hymnal. The committee that built it was not careless; it was alarmed. Congregations were trading Lutheran hymnals for evangelical songbooks, and a handful of volunteers spent six years and almost no money building something their people would keep. It worked. But a rescue of that kind has a cost, and this book is about the cost.

Nobody who worked on the hymnal is named anywhere in these pages. They signed the book anonymously; they can be discussed the same way.

What you get

• How to read the small print under a hymn — author, translator, tune, and why the meter numbers are the most useful thing on the page.
• A three-question test you can teach a fourteen-year-old in one sitting and use on any hymn in any book.
• Chapters on the chorales, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the invitation hymns, the consecration hymns, the hymns for the grave, and the church year.
• A nine-session plan for an adult class, keyed to hymn numbers, with a free Teacher’s Guide.

Read a chapter free

One Fold of Paper begins with one page opening of the hymnal and three hymns that do not agree with each other. It is the argument of the book in two thousand words, and it costs nothing.

The Teacher’s Guide

Nine sessions, forty-five minutes each, built entirely out of the hymnal already in your rack. No handouts, no photocopied stanzas, no permissions to obtain. Anyone who can read aloud and keep time can teach it. Download the free PDF below.