Lift Up Your Hearts: a hymnal review

From 1934 until quite recently, the Christian Reformed Church in North America worshipped with a succession of Psalter Hymnals, the most recent of which was published in 1989 and sported a grey cover. This volume sat in the pews of congregations until the grand shift to overhead slides with words, and in some cases music, projected onto screens, enabling parishioners to sing without books in their hands, as well as to sing songs not contained in the books.

Our own congregation replaced the grey Psalter Hymnals some years ago with a collection jointly produced by the CRC and the Reformed Church in America (RCA), called, Lift Up Your Hearts: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (LUYH). We read this on the hymnal's website:

The aim of this collection is to provide a resource for congregational song in the CRC and RCA which can give a common voice to our worship in the twenty-first century. This collection seeks to be broad enough to include music ranging from the traditional hymn repertoire to contemporary worship music and from Western music to the music of the global church. Our desire is also that this collection be deep enough to give voice to our praises and laments, be both sung prayer and proclamation, and play a significant role in the faith formation of Reformed Christians old and young alike.

The collection is organized topically, beginning with creation and taking us through the church year, with Christ's Second Coming notably meriting a section distinct from that of Advent. For those accustomed to the Psalter Hymnals of the past, one looks in vain for a section devoted to the Psalter. Here is an explanation from the hymnal's website:

The Psalter Hymnal included a representation of all 150 psalms in a psalter followed by hymns. Rejoice in the Lord captured most of its psalmody in a discrete psalter section. Sing! A New Creation (a joint CRC/RCA supplement) marked a noticeable shift by incorporating psalms where they would most naturally fit in the order of worship or part of the church year. It has become clear that this latest approach encouraged more consistent use of psalms in worship. For that reasons [sic] in Lift Up Your Hearts the psalms appear integrated within the hymnal. Songs and psalms taken from Scripture always include their Scripture reference under the title for easy identification and are listed in the Scripture and Title indexes.

This was also the case with the Trinity Hymnal from which I grew up singing: the psalms were integrated amongst the hymns. In LUYH, however, the Scripture Index indicates that every Psalm is covered in this collection. Yet a closer look at the numbers indicates that not every Psalm is actually rendered in its entirety in metrical form.

I am not altogether persuaded that scattering the Psalms amongst topically arranged hymns really encourages more congregational psalm singing. I was unaware of singing the Psalms as a boy. Moreover, as it turns out, my current congregation seldom sings the Psalms. In this respect, replacing the grey Psalter Hymnal with Lift Up Your Hearts represents a step backwards. However, we read this as well from the website:

The editorial committee was very committed to supporting the Reformed practice of psalm singing. In fact when looking at the psalms in preparation for the hymnal, we became so excited about them that we published a separate psalter as we couldn’t include everything in the new hymnal. Psalms for All Seasons: A Complete Psalter for Worship was released in January 2012 and is available through Faith Alive Christian Resources.

Obviously, the liturgical uniformity of the past now belongs to the past in the Christian Reformed Church. There is more of a diversity of liturgical resources for use in the denomination. Whether this will prove to be a positive or negative development remains to be seen. Sadly, both the CRC and the RCA are in the process of dividing for other reasons, and it is far from clear what the configuration of Reformed churches in the continental tradition will look like by mid century.

A brief side note: In 1989 I led a worship service to introduce the grey Psalter Hymnal to the congregation of which I am now a member. What happened to all these volumes I couldn't say, but I hope that Christians somewhere are making good use of them.