CC: What's the most verses for a hymn you've ever sung in church?

[forty-two]

Also, what's the usual or average number of verses your church tends to sing?  Do you tend to sing all the available verses in your hymnal?  Or does your church tend to just sing selected verses of longer hymns?  Or does your hymnal not tend to have too many verses per hymn in the first place?

My dh is our pastor, and he usually sings all the verses, but sometimes does selected verses to avoid going over 7 or so verses (he's been doing that less recently, possibly because I complain when he does <shifty>).  We just broke our record for most verses sung for a service: 15 verses of awesome for "O Dearest Jesus" (breaking the previous record of 10 verses of awesome for "Salvation Unto Us Has Come"), which accomplishment is the reason for this post ;).  Our current hymnal (Lutheran Service Book) has quite a lot of verses, more than the previous hymnal (Lutheran Worship), but on average less than the one before that (The Lutheran Hymnal).  Even so, most hymns are probably 3-5 verses; the ones we are doing this Sunday are 4, 4, 5, and 4 respectively.  (The following Sunday, though, is 4, 8, 4, and 6 respectively - so glad dh isn't shortening "Savior of the Nations, Come" <woo-hoo>.)

I'm curious for lots of reasons.  One, I've heard that my tradition (Lutheran) tends to have more verses in our hymnals than do other traditions.  A quick spot-check of Hymnary.org suggests that might well be true - most non-Lutheran sources don't go over 4 verses, and I didn't see any go over 5 on the two hymns I checked ("O Sacred Head" (10 or 11 possible verses) and "O Dearest Jesus"/"Ah Holy Jesus" (15 possible verses)).  (It also suggests that the LCMS hymnals have more verses on average than either ELCA or WELS.)  Even so, my sister complains that her church (also LCMS) rarely does more than 3-4 verses per hymn, so just having the verses available isn't enough. 

[alisoncooks]

I can’t think of a single hymn that has more than 5, maybe 6. And we usually sing 3-4. Well, my current church does worship music, not hymns…the above is typical for my parents’ church (non-denominational). 

[forty-two]

Just now, alisoncooks said:

I can’t think of a single hymn that has more than 5, maybe 6. And we usually sing 3-4. Well, my current church does worship music, not hymns…the above is typical for my parents’ church (non-denominational). 

WRT worship music, about how long per song, would you say?  (I know that's hard to quantify without measuring on purpose.)  I'm curious, because a common objection to "too many verses" is how much time it takes, but when you look up worship songs recorded live, many of them are 5-7 min long, and some are even 10-15min or more.  When I looked up Waymaker, the shortest was the original recorded version at 5min, the next shortest was 8min, and from there it went up to 15min and even 27min!?!  Given that we sang all 15 verses of O Dearest Jesus, counting the intro, in 9min (and that 5 min is enough for all 12 verses of "These Are the Holy Ten Commands"), some worship songs are at least in theory even longer wrt time spent.  But probably most churches don't actually spend that long per worship song, any more than most churches sing 15 verses of a hymn.  (And, of course, the effect is different.)  But in general worship songs seem to take more time than hymns, what with all the instrumentals and pauses and such - I was curious just how long actual churches in actual services spend per worship song.

[Jean in Newcastle]

We usually sing 3 verses.  Most hymns in our hymnal only list 4, even if there are extra verses out there "somewhere". 

[Laura Corin]

Around eight? CofE.

[Danae]

We once sang all 18 verses of “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”  There was a specific reason, though.  We generally sing all the verses that are printed inside the stanza and sometimes the extras that are printed as just lyrics below.  That means 3-6 with 4 being the most common. (UM Hymnal)

[athena1277]

We probably average 3.  I don’t know of any that we sing that have more than 5 verses.

[SKL]

The longest may be about 6?

Usually 3 or 4.

I prefer to sing the whole hymn, but maybe I'm in the minority!

[forty-two]

1 minute ago, Jean in Newcastle said:

We usually sing 3 verses.  Most hymns in our hymnal only list 4, even if there are extra verses out there "somewhere". 

You know, I just learned today, messing around on Hymnary, that there are more verses to "O sacred head" than the seven in our current hymnal.  And for both the German and the most common English translation being in the public domain, the internet did *not* want to cough up those verses; it was hard enough to get a solid-ish answer on how many are there (either 10 or 11, it seems).  I was able to find ten verses in a translation of an older hymnal I own - it's usually my go-to for seeing if there are any missing verses - but otherwise I'd have been out of luck.  It's interesting how many verses in that hymnal were either dropped or combined in new hymnals (which I only know because the translator pointed it out, and usually the hymnal editors don't).

[Danae]

Also we sometimes won’t sing all the verses in one week but will over successive weeks.  Like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” during Advent.  

[forty-two]

6 minutes ago, Danae said:

We once sang all 18 verses of “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”  There was a specific reason, though.  We generally sing all the verses that are printed inside the stanza and sometimes the extras that are printed as just lyrics below.  That means 3-6 with 4 being the most common. (UM Hymnal)

That is so awesome - I had no idea there were so many verses to that hymn!

1 minute ago, SKL said:

I prefer to sing the whole hymn, but maybe I'm in the minority!

I strongly prefer it, too, and so do my kids - I've taught them well, lol.  Fortunately, so does my pastor dh, so we do as much as he thinks the congregation can bear 😉.

[forty-two]

1 minute ago, Danae said:

Also we sometimes won’t sing all the verses in one week but will over successive weeks.  Like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” during Advent.  

I think dh did that one Advent.  He's also broken up a hymn over a single service.  We've done each verse of O Sacred Head individually as responses to the seven Good Friday Gospel readings, and we've done half of O Dearest Jesus before the reading and half after.

[Jean in Newcastle]

4 minutes ago, forty-two said:

You know, I just learned today, messing around on Hymnary, that there are more verses to "O sacred head" than the seven in our current hymnal.  And for both the German and the most common English translation being in the public domain, the internet did *not* want to cough up those verses; it was hard enough to get a solid-ish answer on how many are there (either 10 or 11, it seems).  I was able to find ten verses in a translation of an older hymnal I own - it's usually my go-to for seeing if there are any missing verses - but otherwise I'd have been out of luck.  It's interesting how many verses in that hymnal were either dropped or combined in new hymnals (which I only know because the translator pointed it out, and usually the hymnal editors don't).

As a former choir director and music leader I've known that many hymns have "extra" verses that didn't make the cut for a particular hymnal.  I always chose verses based on their actual words - many hymns have (in my opinion) at least one verse that's a bit iffy theologically.  I always carefully chose the verses with content in mind.  And sometimes I would choose and print out an especially good verse from one of the other hymnals in my collection to sing in addition to those printed in our pew hymnal. 

[forty-two]

If anyone else is curious, I found the lyrics to all 18 verses of Oh, for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, along with a history of the hymn: https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/o-for-a-thousand-tongues-to-sing-18-original-stanzas

ETA: I looked up how many verses are in our hymnal - there are seven.  Might have to look and see which ones they are, and if any were combined.

~*~

And I've always wanted to sing through all 29 verses of "On My Heart Imprint Your Image" for a personal Lenten devotion: https://steadfastlutherans.org/2016/03/29-stanzas-of-greatness-for-our-readers/

Edited November 19, 2022 by forty-two

[forty-two]

4 minutes ago, Jean in Newcastle said:

As a former choir director and music leader I've known that many hymns have "extra" verses that didn't make the cut for a particular hymnal.  I always chose verses based on their actual words - many hymns have (in my opinion) at least one verse that's a bit iffy theologically.  I always carefully chose the verses with content in mind.  And sometimes I would choose and print out an especially good verse from one of the other hymnals in my collection to sing in addition to those printed in our pew hymnal. 

It's interesting how many of the hymns in our hymnal were altered from the original in some way or another.  (I do the slides for service, and in writing up the authorship info, I'm surprised by the number of times I type "alt.") 

[Terabith]

Well, when I was a kid, there was a few times we sang verses until someone would come up and rededicate their life to Christ.  And sometimes we sang well over 15 verses before some poor soul would just go up and do it so we could stop singing "Just As I Am, Without One Plea" on repeat and get the heck over to Hardees to beat the Baptists.  (This was a Methodist church.  In Tennessee.  That also used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  It was weirdly eclectic.)

Edited November 19, 2022 by Terabith

[Farrar]

In the church I grew up in, we generally sang 3-4 verses and which ones were always printed in the bulletin if the hymnal had more than that - but most did not. 15 sounds utterly wild to me, honestly. Not that I've never seen that, but it's a rarity so it wouldn't have been an issue in the Baptist church I grew up in or the UU church I attended later with my kids or the Methodist church where my mom was the children's minister. In the church I grew up in, it was also super common to sing the first verse and then have alternates printed in the bulletin because they didn't agree with the verses theologically.

Edited November 19, 2022 by Farrar

[forty-two]

2 minutes ago, Farrar said:

In the church I grew up in, we generally sang 3-4 verses and which ones were always printed in the bulletin. But it was also super common to sing the first and then have alternates printed in the bulletin because they didn't agree with the verses theologically.

Did your church disagree with their denomination's theology?  Or were you using a hymnal not put out by your tradition?  (I'm so used to the idea of having an "official" hymnal, though churches sometimes also use others, but there do seem to be a lot of non-denomination-specific hymnals out there, so I guess they must fill a need somewhere.)

[Terabith]

1 hour ago, forty-two said:

Did your church disagree with their denomination's theology?  Or were you using a hymnal not put out by your tradition?  (I'm so used to the idea of having an "official" hymnal, though churches sometimes also use others, but there do seem to be a lot of non-denomination-specific hymnals out there, so I guess they must fill a need somewhere.)

It's pretty common in the Episcopal and ELCA churches that we have frequented recently for verses to be printed in the bulletin so that people don't have to fumble around with books.  It's not a statement of disagreement.  Sometimes they will say in the bulletin, "sing verses 1-3 and 5."  We rarely sing more than four verses of anything.  

ETA:  Both churches have their denomination's hymnal.  One service in ELCA church does a mixture of hymns and worship songs, while another service is just hymns from the hymnal.  But usually printed in bulletin.  They think it is more friendly to visitors; the font is bigger than in the hymnal for older people, and when covid was bad, it was viewed as a way to keep people from touching things.  (Also, this is the first week in three years that all the services will be indoors.  We've had at least one service held outside since the beginning of the pandemic.)

Edited November 19, 2022 by Terabith

[marbel]

We sing the entirety of the hymn as published in the Trinity Hymnal (Presbyterian Church in America, also Orthodox Presbyterian). 

[Dmmetler]

3 hours ago, Danae said:

We once sang all 18 verses of “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”  There was a specific reason, though.  We generally sing all the verses that are printed inside the stanza and sometimes the extras that are printed as just lyrics below.  That means 3-6 with 4 being the most common. (UM Hymnal)

That is my brother’s all time favorite hymn, and when we went through my mother’s notes on her planned funeral, which would have been an extremely long service of lessons and music, she included it with a note that DB would want to do all 18 verses :).

 

Usually if a verse is left out in my experience it’s because it’s specific to a season or day in the church calendar and it isn’t the right season/day for it. 

[Dmmetler]

3 hours ago, Terabith said:

Well, when I was a kid, there was a few times we sang verses until someone would come up and rededicate their life to Christ.  And sometimes we sang well over 15 verses before some poor soul would just go up and do it so we could stop singing "Just As I Am, Without One Plea" on repeat and get the heck over to Hardees to beat the Baptists.  (This was a Methodist church.  In Tennessee.  That also used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  It was weirdly eclectic.)

I attended a Baptist church for a time  which would do this with “I surrender all”. As a choir member, at times it felt like a hostage situation…

[Farrar]

2 hours ago, forty-two said:

Did your church disagree with their denomination's theology?  Or were you using a hymnal not put out by your tradition?  (I'm so used to the idea of having an "official" hymnal, though churches sometimes also use others, but there do seem to be a lot of non-denomination-specific hymnals out there, so I guess they must fill a need somewhere.)

They disagreed with the denomination. In fact, we were booted out of the church convention when I was in high school along with two other churches. 

[Rachel]

We sing a mix of worship music and traditional hymns. I’d say on average we sing 4 verses but know we have sung more. I can’t think of any hymns in our hymnal that have many more than that, but there could be and those happen to be songs we don’t sing often. 

I can’t ever remember singing 10+ verses to any song. 

[Terabith]

My favorite hymn "Come O Thou Traveler Unknown" has 14 verses, but nobody ever sings more than about four or five.  It's hardly ever sung though.  Somehow hymns on the theme of Jacob wrestling with God just don't get much sing time, even when it's very appropriate.

[Danae]

25 minutes ago, Terabith said:

My favorite hymn "Come O Thou Traveler Unknown" has 14 verses, but nobody ever sings more than about four or five.  It's hardly ever sung though.  Somehow hymns on the theme of Jacob wrestling with God just don't get much sing time, even when it's very appropriate.

I love that one.

[vonfirmath]

9 hours ago, forty-two said:

WRT worship music, about how long per song, would you say?  (I know that's hard to quantify without measuring on purpose.)  I'm curious, because a common objection to "too many verses" is how much time it takes, but when you look up worship songs recorded live, many of them are 5-7 min long, and some are even 10-15min or more.  When I looked up Waymaker, the shortest was the original recorded version at 5min, the next shortest was 8min, and from there it went up to 15min and even 27min!?!  Given that we sang all 15 verses of O Dearest Jesus, counting the intro, in 9min (and that 5 min is enough for all 12 verses of "These Are the Holy Ten Commands"), some worship songs are at least in theory even longer wrt time spent.  But probably most churches don't actually spend that long per worship song, any more than most churches sing 15 verses of a hymn.  (And, of course, the effect is different.)  But in general worship songs seem to take more time than hymns, what with all the instrumentals and pauses and such - I was curious just how long actual churches in actual services spend per worship song.

I know Waymaker as sung in our church does not take 15 minutes.

We don't have a hymnal anymore so I have no idea which verses of the hymns we are singing we are singing

When I grew up, the "typical" was 1,2, and 4. But at a singalong we'd sometimes do just the first and sometimes all the verses.

 

 

Edited November 20, 2022 by vonfirmath

[Clemsondana]

We rarely skip the verses printed in the hymnal (Methodist) although if there are extra verses written as a numbered 'paragraph' at the end we may  not sing them all.  That's fairly rare, though.  Most have 3-5 verses, although occasionally there will be 6-7.  Our music director does a fantastic job of choosing topical hymns.  

[Carol in Cal.]

We sing all the verses of most hymns.  We use the LSB straight, plus a very few hymns that our pastors have written over the years.

For All Saints’ Day, the choir took two of the verses of For All The Saints, which has 8 total.  I would have been annoyed except that I was *in* the choir.  

But, I grew up on TLH, which is the many verses champion of the LCMS, and we used to sing through I Come Oh Savior To Thy Table and/or Soul Adorn Thyself With Gladness until we ran out of communicants whenever we had communion (which was twice per month).  And there are hymns in TLH that were severely truncated in LSB, so I tend to feel a bit deprived a lot of the time now, LOL.

If you want the original version with many omitted verses of some of the longer hymns, I would suggest looking for the Handbook To The Lutheran Hymnal, which was published in the 1940s.  It has the original language version of most of the TLH hymns, and extra verses of a lot of them.  I got my copy on eBay, but I think it’s back in print from either Concordia Publishing House or Northwestern Publishing House on a print in demand order basis.  WEP for sure.

Another fantastic resource is “Walther’s Hymnal”—Matthew Carver’s translation of the original German hymnal used in the LCMS.  You know how there are lengthy doctrinal hymns in our hymnal about a few key doctrines, like communion, justification, and Easter/Christmas?  Well, guess what—our great grandparents grew up on lengthy doctrinal hymns about just about everything, and they are all laid out in that hymnal.  No wonder those folks were so well catechized!  They sang about all this stuff for ages on end every single Sunday!

 

[Dmmetler]

19 hours ago, Terabith said:

My favorite hymn "Come O Thou Traveler Unknown" has 14 verses, but nobody ever sings more than about four or five.  It's hardly ever sung though.  Somehow hymns on the theme of Jacob wrestling with God just don't get much sing time, even when it's very appropriate.

I love that. I suspect the other reason it doesn't get sung much is that it's not an easy melody. 

[gardenmom5]

average is four,

most is seven

but - some hymns are a page and a half long - so one verse = one and a half verses (four verses would = six average verses).

don't usually sing all available verses.

[LucyStoner]

2-4.  Roman Catholic.  When the church is very full, more verses or a second hymn to get through communion.  

[J-rap]

I don't remember the most, but growing up in my ELCA church, we generally sang 3-4 verses.  If it was a song with more than that, we'd usually sing something like the first three and then the last one.  

[TravelingChris]

The most I have heard was 6 or 7.  It was recently and I was surprised that such s long hymn existed. I will have to look and see if the songs you all mentioned as being long are in my old hymnals.

[Tenaj]

My husband leads the music at our church and over the years I have encouraged him to sing all the verses that are written in our hymnal.  Quite often when you skip verses, you miss the progression of thought that goes through the song.  The longest song in our hymnal has six verses.  I think the only one that he still skips verses on is "The First Noel".  I'll have to sneak into his power point and add in the missing verses as a surprise for him this Christmas season - lol!

[wintermom]

10 hours ago, LucyStoner said:

2-4.  Roman Catholic.  When the church is very full, more verses or a second hymn to get through communion.  

This. There are usually 4 times hymns are sung during regular masses most of the year - procession (priest walks in), offering, communion and recession priest walks out). When I was involved in the music ministry, most priests preferred the hymns to "fit" the length of time it takes to complete the 4 activities. So if there are a lot of people at a particular mass, the offering and communion may take longer. Instead of lengthening the hymn, a second hymn was played. The time it takes for the procession and recession doesn't really change, so those hymns are pretty standard at about 3 versions.

These my memories of the practical side of the rolling out of a mass. There are often 2 or more masses on a Sunday morning, so the length of the mass has to be managed in order to have time to clear the church so that then next mass can take place.

[Dmmetler]

Charles Wesley was definitely a poet and enjoyed retelling stories in lyrics, so a lot of the Wesleyan hymns are very, very long, and several of the top 10 across Protestant denominations are Wesleyan. He also tended to write ones that fit in fairly common meters, meaning they can be used with a lot of common tunes, although they have fairly standard ones now. 

[Carol in Cal.]

To answer your question more specifically, I think 15 is the max I have sung. 

That’s how many verses I Come oh Savior To Thy Table had in TLH.

Also that is how many From Heav’n Above To Earth I Come had in TLH.

Here is a great resource on that ‘many verses are great’ hero, Paul Gerhardt:

https://zionmarshall.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Paul-Gerhardt-as-a-Teacher-of-Lutheran-Spirituality.pdf

[Carol in Cal.]

BTW, did you notice that there is a large print version of the LSB out now?  I have one.  It’s awesome.

Baby Got Book indeed though—I think I am going to need carrying straps or something.

[lauraw4321]

On 11/19/2022 at 12:57 PM, Danae said:

Also we sometimes won’t sing all the verses in one week but will over successive weeks.  Like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” during Advent.  

We sang all the verses today - 7 I think!

[ktgrok]

We sang the first 5 verses of Oh Come Emmanuel yesterday. I think most hymns we sing 3-5 versus, average being 4? We usually sing all of them, but sometimes will only sing 4 (not always the first 4, sometimes we skip one of the middle ones) on a longer hymn. 10 seems....a lot. 

Edited November 28, 2022 by ktgrok