Participation in the singing of hymns is an opportunity for members of church congregations to lift their hearts, minds, and voices in unified expressions of pure joy, prayer, and praise to the God of the Christian gospel—divine Love. And since many hymnbooks include well-loved songs of the spirit that are found in a variety of denominations, their use in services may also provide a bond of fellowship felt by visitors from other Christian churches.
Hymnody owes its origins principally to the psalms of the Old Testament and to other Scriptural sources of religious song. In the Christian era, Martin Luther's heroic Protestant texts of the sixteenth century are usually seen as the beginning of modern hymnody. Intended for congregational singing, rather than for performance by trained clergy and choirs, as most hymns sung in the Christian Church had been up to that time, Luther's hymn texts were based on familiar liturgical or Scriptural themes and were set to memorable, melodious music that could be learned by untrained singers. Sung in the vernacular, rather than in the customary Latin, these hymns would inspire what would eventually become a great stream of church songs for the laity. The people in the pews would be the primary beneficiaries of this new genre, and their Christian convictions would be strengthened through the hearty unison singing of these paeans of praise to God.
Enriched by the prolific outpourings of hymnists such as Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, Philip Doddridge, John Newton, Anne Steele, and William Williams, this river of congregational song grew mightily in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, hymn writers like James Montgomery, John Bowring, Sarah Adams, Charlotte Elliott, Kate Hankey, Frances Havergal, and Annie Hawks added substantially to the vast pool of gospel-centered hymnody, from which editors have drawn as they complied their various hymnbooks. The New Testament declarations of God's love and care for everyone, the good news of a presently available salvation from sin, sickness, and death, and the Gospels' record of the ministry of Christ Jesus—as well as an urgent advocacy of Jesus' teachings and their application to the human condition—distinguish much of this hymnic writing.
