At Our Saviour the hymns are part of the worship itself. God speaks to us in His Word, and in the hymns we speak that Word back to Him in praise, in prayer, and in confession of sin and of the faith. A hymn is the whole congregation saying together what it believes.
We sing what we believe
The church has long held that the way we pray shapes what we believe (‘lex orandi, lex credendi’). What a congregation sings week after week is what it remembers long after the sermon has faded. For that reason we choose hymns that teach.
Many of our hymns were written for exactly that purpose. Martin Luther wrote hymns on the Commandments and the Creed so that ordinary Christians could sing the catechism at home and in church, and more than a decade later he wrote one on the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our Father, Who from Heaven Above’ gives a stanza to each petition, first quoting the prayer and then explaining it, so that the singer both prays and learns what he or she is praying. ‘Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice’ tells the whole account of sin and redemption in ten stanzas. Hymns like these carry more doctrine than most of us could recite from memory, and they carry it in a form we can keep.
Hymns chosen for the day
Our Saviour follows the historic one-year lectionary, and the hymns are chosen to match the readings appointed for each Sunday and festival. The center of this is the Hymn of the Day, sung after the readings, which takes up the theme of the Gospel. On Rogate Sunday, when the Gospel is Jesus’ teaching on prayer in His name, we sing Luther’s Lord’s Prayer hymn. On the Ascension we sing the Venerable Bede’s ‘A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing.’ In Advent we sing ‘Savior of the Nations, Come,’ which Luther translated from the fourth-century Latin of Ambrose of Milan. Over the course of a year, the hymns walk the congregation through the life of Christ alongside the readings.
One voice across the centuries
Our hymnal, Lutheran Service Book, gathers the songs of the whole church. In a single year we sing texts by Prudentius and Bede, by Luther and Paul Gerhardt, by the Danish bishop Thomas Kingo, by the English writers Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, and by hymn writers of our own day. Many of the ancient Latin hymns reached us through the translations of John Mason Neale. When we sing them, we join Christians who sang the same words centuries ago and Christians throughout the world who sing them still.
The hymns also belong to everyone in the pews. Sturdy tunes from a common book let a congregation sing with confidence, and the voice of the people carries the service.
What we leave out
Our choices leave out much of the music heard in other churches, particularly songs that repeat a single thin phrase and songs that dwell on the singer’s feelings more than on what God has done. Newness is not the reason; several hymns we sing were written within the last fifty years. The reason is that such songs rarely teach, and few of them can be matched to the appointed readings. The rule is the same one that governs the rest of the service: God’s Word comes first, and what we sing should give that Word back to Him faithfully.
Explore the hymns
Each hymn in our index has a short history of its author, the occasion for which it was written, and the Sundays on which we sang it this year.