A Word of Introduction

I served as a United Methodist pastor for thirty-four years, from 1964 until my retirement in 1998, in small churches across southern Colorado: two-point and three-point charges out on the plains, a mountain church that closed every winter when the pass did, and for my last eleven years a congregation of about ninety souls in the Arkansas Valley, where they grow onions and melons and very good tenors. My wife Donna and I live in Pueblo now. I preach when I'm asked, I fill in when a pastor is sick, and in the mornings, with my coffee, I write hymns.

I have been doing it, off and on, since seminary. For most of those years the hymns were written for one Sunday in one church and then put in a drawer. Our daughter, who teaches school in Colorado Springs and is good with computers, has convinced me that the drawer is not the best place for them. So here they are.

You May Use These

How I Write a Hymn

Meter first. I always start with the tune. A congregation will learn new words much more easily than a new tune, and every Methodist in America can already sing OLD HUNDREDTH and AZMON in their sleep (and some of them do). So I choose a tune the people know, and I write to its shape. If you write the words first and then hunt for a tune, you will end up with a beautiful line that nobody can sing.

Plain words. I write for farmers and teachers and children and the old man in the back pew whose hearing aid whistles. If a word needs explaining from the pulpit, it doesn't belong in the hymn. Most of the best hymns ever written are made almost entirely of one-syllable words. Look and see.

One image to a stanza. Each verse gets one picture: the frost going out of the ground, a font of water, a folding table. Two pictures in one stanza fight each other, and the people singing lose them both. If I have a second picture, it gets its own stanza or it waits for the next hymn.

Sing it out loud. Before I let a text out of the house, I sing every stanza at the kitchen table, all the way through, to the tune. Donna says this is the price of being married to me. If I trip on a word, the congregation will too.

Hymn Meters, for Beginners

Look at the bottom of almost any hymn in your hymnal and you'll see a set of numbers, or letters like C.M. or L.M. That is the meter. It tells you how many syllables are in each line of a stanza. Any text in a given meter can be sung to any tune in the same meter. That is why the same words show up to different tunes in different churches, and why a new hymn writer can borrow a tune that everyone already loves.

Two cautions for anyone who wants to try this. First, the count isn't everything; the stresses have to fall where the tune's strong beats fall, or the singers will be landing hard on "the" and "of" all morning. Second, check your syllables the way the people will sing them, not the way the dictionary says them. "Prayer" is one syllable in a hymn, and so is "our," and "every" is whatever the tune needs it to be, which is why I try not to use it.

The six hymns on the next page are labeled with their meters and with two or three tunes each that I know they fit. If your organist has a better idea, trust your organist.

Speaking of organists: The Organ Loft is a page by a church organist who has been at the console of the same church since 1959. He writes about how the organ works, the Sunday routine, weddings and funerals, the hymns, and the annual visit of the tuner. Every preacher who ever chose a hymn on Saturday night and handed it to the organist on Sunday morning should read it, and repent. I did.

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The Rev. Willard Godinez, Pueblo, Colorado
[email protected]

Last updated September 20, 1999