By Heart: A Layman Reads the Ambassador Hymnal

Reach forward and pick it up. Six hundred thirty-four hymns, a hundred and ten pages before the first hymn that you have never once turned to. You have held it perhaps two thousand times.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. And 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.By Heart is one layman's attempt to ask. Working page by page with the hymnal open on a kitchen table, it shows that the Ambassador Hymnal carries two different accounts of how a person comes to belong to God - the Reformation's confession that God gives, and the revival's insistence that the hinge is your response - printed a few pages apart, in the same book, under the same cover.This 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.Along the way you will learn to read the small print under a hymn - who wrote it, who translated it, what the tune is called, and why the meter numbers are the most useful thing on the page. You will get a three-question test you can teach a fourteen-year-old in one sitting and use on any hymn in any book, old or new. And you will find that the strongest baptismal texts in your hymnal are not filed under baptism, that a Fanny Crosby text is set to a Swedish folk tune, and that Edvard Grieg arranged something sitting in your pew rack right now.Includes a nine-session plan for an adult class, keyed to hymn numbers, with a free teacher's guide.Written for members of the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, and for any Christian who has ever wondered why the hymn he loves does not say quite what he believes.