Article: Celebrating Grace Hymnal — Five Years Later
In the summer of 2014, I gave a presentation at the annual meeting of the Hymn Society in North America and Canada where I compared the contents of the Celebrating Grace Hymnal and the Baptist Hymnal (2008). This project emerged from the work I have done in examining the available hymnals to allow First Baptist Church Keller, where I serve as Associate Pastor of Worship & Creative Arts, to select a new hymnal for worship. While that hymnal selection process is not yet complete, the research turned into a scholarly paper.
The resulting article, “Celebrating Grace Hymnal: Five Years Later,” can be found in the Winter 2015 issue of The Hymn. The complete article can be found below, but here is the summary paragraph.
This article will examine Celebrating Grace Hymnal published in 2010 by Celebrating Grace, Inc., founded out of Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. I will explore the musical and textual contents of the hymnal, compare it with its immediate predecessor, Baptist Hymnal (1991), place it in its historical context within twenty-first century Southern Baptist life, and highlight several important contributions it makes to the study of hymnody. I will also reflect on its reception and adoption as a resource for congregational worship within its first five years of publication.
