1 Methods

Since this is a somewhat technical post, let me take a moment to explain my methods. First, I start off with my entire dataset, which contains data from over 95,000 sacrament meetings.

To check co-occurrence of all hymns, here’s my procedure. I started with The Morning Breaks (#1) and found how many times it occurred in my dataset (662 times). I then looked at The Spirit of God (#2) and looked at how many times it occurred (1,886 times). I then looked at those two lists of meetings and identified any where both of them occurred (17 times). I can now get some interesting numbers. Of the meetings that The Morning Breaks (#1) occured, of them also contained The Spirit of God (#2). Similarly, of the meetings that The Spirit of God (#2) is sung in, of them also contained The Morning Breaks (#1).

I then repeated this procedure for every pair of hymns, all the way until Little Baby in a Manger (#1209) and Long Ago, Within a Garden (#1210). That’s something like 138,000 unique combinations of hymns.

Most combinations—100,007 or 72.1% of them—were actually not attested in my dataset. Some of these include pairs of sacrament hymns, such as As Now We Take the Sacrament (#169) and There Is a Green Hill Far Away (#194). That makes sense since we usually don’t see two sacrament hymns in the same meeting. Others were between hymns from two different holidays, like Joy to the World (#201) and America the Beautiful (#338). Still others were between holiday hymns and certain non-holiday hymns, like Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful (#202) and How Firm a Foundation (#85). Some pairs of common enough non-holiday hymns that didn’t occur in the same meeting in my dataset, purely due to chance, include Now Let Us Rejoice (#3) and Come, Sing to the Lord (#10), On This Day of Joy and Gladness (#64) and Did You Think to Pray? (#140), and They, the Builders of the Nation (#36) and Testimony (#137). Of course the list goes on and on for other pairs that weren’t attested in my dataset.

But that means I did see 38,594 different combinations, which is a lot. It’s obviously way too large of a task to try and go through or explain all those pairs. So, I needed to find some sort of cutoff point between the most strongly paired hymns and others that happened to occur together.

2 Distribution of co-occurrences

Figure 1 shows the distribution of these 38,594 pairs of hymns and how often they occur in the same meeting.

The x-axis in this plot is log10 transformed because there were many pairs that didn’t occur in very many meetings and a few pairs that occurred in a lot; transforming it like this makes it easier to see the distribution. For example, on the far left of the plot, we see some very short bars. This means that a few pairs of hymns rarely occurred together. In this case, all of of these very short bars were combinations of two sacrament hymns. It is pretty rare for a sacrament hymn to be sung during a different slot in the meeting, so to divide that small number by the very large number of times that those sacrament hymns are otherwise sung results in a small co-occurrence rate.

The middle of the plot shows where the majority of the data lies. The most frequent co-occurrences by sheer number of meetings were actually not very interesting because they usually involve a sacrament hymn. In some cases, the pairs are between somewhat less frequent hymns like Guide Me to Thee (#101) (which is only sung about every 8.2 years) and sacrament hymns like God, Our Father, Hear Us Pray (#170). So, while there’s no inherent connection between the two, the sheer fact that one of them isn’t sung very often just means that whatever it happens to show up with will seem like a lot. In other cases, they’re between a sacrament hymn and a common hymn, like O God, the Eternal Father (#175) and Be Thou Humble (#130). Again, not very interesting because there doesn’t seem to be a clear connection between the hymns.

But then we get to the far right of Figure 1. There were a few pairs of hymns that maybe didn’t occur in too many meetings, but when one of them did the other one tended to as well. This is what I’m most interested in. As mentioned above, the strongest pair was He Is Risen! (#199) and Christ the Lord Is Risen Today (#200). If you sing one of those in church, there’s a 57% chance you’ll sing the other. The next two most tightly paired hymns are between those two and That Easter Morn (#198)! So, there’s certainly something up with the three Easter hymns! I’ll talk more about that below. Other pairs that were strongly connected were between other holiday hymns like Thanksgiving hymns, New Year’s hymns, patriotic hymns, and some Christmas hymns.

Let’s further explore these pairs in a little more detail and in a way that’s a little more interesting to look at.

3 Clusters

Figure 2 is a network visualization of the most commonly co-occurring pairs of hymns. There are lots of decisions that go into creating a plot like this, so don’t take it as the absolute truth. For one, I couldn’t show every pair of hymns because it would be far too cluttered. So I had to decide on a cutoff point. Based on Figure 1, I knew that a cutoff of roughly 10% co-occurred would likely be a good starting point since pairs above that point were what I expected to see and many pairs below that were not. After toying around with it, I eventually settled on pairs of hymns that occurred with each other 7% of the time.

2 How popular have the new sacrament hymns been?

Let’s see how popular these new hymns have been compared to the other 1985 hymns. For this portion of the analysis, I’ll focus on the data since June 2024 when the new ones came out. Figure 1 shows this data. Note that this is the same as Figure 3 in my previous post on sacrament hymns, but with the new hymns overlaid. The hymns labeled “honorary” sacrament hymns are ones outside of the 169–196 range listed in the index, but are nevertheless sung often as sacrament hymns. See my previous post for more details.

For these new hymns, I’ve adjusted the calculation based on how long they’ve been out. Specifically, I’m looking at the number of times each hymn has been sung divided by the number of sacrament meetings I have data for since its release date. So, a hymn like Bread of Life, Living Water (#1008) has been sung a lot, but it’s also had many opportunities to be sung in the 21 months since its release. Meanwhile a hymn like Help Us Remember (#1043) has only been out for a few months, so while it has only been sung a relatively small number of times, its denominator is smaller because it’s only based on a few months of data.

The thing to notice here is that the most frequent new sacrament hymns (As Bread is Broken (#1007) and Bread of Life, Living Water (#1008)) are sung about as often as a mid-tier sacrament hymn in the 1985 hymnal. That’s not to say they’re not common—they’re still sung about 1.5 times a year on average per ward, or about once every eight months. Those two are currently the 16th and 17th most common hymns since June 2024.

As for the rest of the new sacrament hymns, they seem to be somewhat less common. These five sacrament hymns are as common as the least common seven sacrament hymns from the 1985 hymnal. Some are less common than even the “honorary” sacrament hymns.

Again, it hasn’t been that long since these came out, so I suspect they’ll become more common over time. In fact, as stated already, if when the new hymnal comes out we see that the sacrament hymns are all placed next to each other, I suspect we’ll see a spike in the frequency of these hymns, both because it’ll be clearer that they are sacrament hymns and because they’ll be included in the regular rotation that many wards do as they cycle through the sacrament hymns.

3 How have the 1985 sacrament hymns been affected?

Figure 2 is exactly the same as Figure 3 from my analysis of the 1985 sacrament hymns. This is based on all my data from before June 2024 when the new hymns came out. It offers a snapshot of how frequent each of the sacrament hymns were before we broke the status quo with the release of new hymns.

When comparing Figure 2 (which is based on pre June 2024) data to Figure 1 (which is based on data since June 2024), a keen eye may notice some slight differences. I noticed that Gently Raise the Sacred Strain (#146) has been more more popular than both Again We Meet Around the Board (#186) and O Thou, Before the World Began (#189) over the past 21 months compared to before. But generally, how often a sacrament hymn was sung before the new hymns came out is about as often as they are since. Let’s explore whether this is true.

To test this anecdotal claim that how common a hymn was before the new hymns came out compared to after, I ran a Pearson’s product-moment correlation test. The correlation is quite high and statistically significant, (). Figure 3 shows that correlation.

That correlation is interesting as it is, but I wanted to see what the difference is between the two time periods. A careful look at the axes in Figure 3 shows that the numbers from before 2024 are slightly lower than the numbers from after June 2024. New hymns are added to the rotation but the number of slots hasn’t changed, so they’ll all be sung a little less often. Figure 4 shows the same data across time periods but arranged a little differently to show that difference.

As you can see all hymns decrease in overall frequency. A one-tailed, paired t-test to accompany this plot suggests that the difference between the two groups is statistically significant (, , ).

A linear regression on these numbers (modeled as lm(times_per_year ~ before_vs_after)) suggests that the estimated number of times each sacrament hymn was sung per ward per year across all sacrament hymns before June 2024 is about 1.601 (about once every 30 weeks). This number makes sense since there were about 28–30 to choose from anyway. Since June 2024, the estimated value drops to 1.293 times per year, or about once every 37.1 weeks, which again makes sense since we have about eight new ones to choose from. According to the linear regression model, shift from before June 2024 to since June 2024 is statistically significant ().

These numbers match my intuition about what’s going on. A ward that has a habit of cycling through all the sacrament hymns, without repeating any before getting through all of them, might find it easiest to just add the new hymns to the rotation. A ward that does that would fit these numbers nearly perfectly. So, while relatively few wards may do that exact thing, it seems like that’s what many wards are doing collectively. Some wards are avoiding the new hymns while others are singing them a little more often. In the end, it balances out I think.

4 Conclusion

This post analyzes the sacrament hymns introduced since June 2024 and how their inclusion in church has affected how often the sacramnet in the 1985 hymnal have been sung. I found that the most common sacrament hymns are As Bread is Broken (#1007) and Bread of Life, Living Water (#1008), which are also almost exclusively sung during the sacrament slot of the meeting. They’re sung about as often as many other 1985 sacrament hymns. Most other new sacrament hymns are sung a fair amount, but are often found in other parts of the meeting as well. All 1985 sacrament hymns are sung a little less often than they used to be and they all seem to have been affected about the same.

I think we’re in an interesting transition phase with sacrament hymns. Once the new hymnal comes out, I think we’ll see a focusing process happen. There will be a clearer line drawn between hymns appropriate for the sacrament slot of the meeting and other hymns. I suspect then that we’ll see some o the less common ones now jump to be more common. It’ll be fun to see how these numbers chnage over the next few years.

What hymns are most popular?

The following table shows the hymns from the sixth batch in order of how popular they are.

The most popular one currently is Long Ago, Within a Garden (#1210). This is likely because of Easter. I suspect that that hymn won’t be sung all that much until next Easter, allowing the others to catch up. The next most popular one is Lord, Accept Our Humble Fast (#1062) and I suspect that one will jump up at the start of each month. So far I haven’t seen My Covenants (#1053) yet I don’t thinik, but otherwise I’ve seen all of them sung at least once.

When during meetings are these hymns sung?

This table shows when during sacrament meetings these hymns have been sung. Again, because I’ve only seen most of these hymns sung a few times, take these numbers with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

Even though the sixth batch has been out for two months, relatively few wards have sung any of those hymns. This makes it difficult to run stats (and indeed is the reason why it took until the end of April to finally publish this analysis). This is just a continuation of the trend seen since the second batch came out—newer batches are less popular. I’ve said this before in previous analyses, but it might be because the newness is losing its excitement. It might also be that the hymnal committee purposely chose hymns they anticipated being popular at the beginning. I’m thinking ahead to when the full hymnal gets released because presumably we’ll get a whole bunch of new ones then. I’m curious if those new ones will ever become as popular as the ones released in these batches.

Lowest alto notes

Typical lowest notes

So, we’ve established that G3 and A♭3 are unusually low. Looking at the distribution of the lowest notes across the hymnal in the plot above, let’s move now on to the typical low end of alto lines, which is around an A3, B♭3, or B3.

Highest lowest notes

Now we enter the territory of the confusingly named “highest lowest notes”. If we look at the lowest also notes across all hymns, some will be higher than others. This section looks at the ones that never go very low. If you’re a soprano and have trouble singing below a middle C, for example, this might give you an idea of what hymns you could sing alto on.

Conclusion

In this post, I looked on the lowest notes for just the altos. I’ve shown that the lowest note that an alto would need to be able to sing in the hymnal is a G3. Some hymns though never go below a D4. Generally though, the lowest notes for altos is between A3 and Bb3.

1 Revisiting the statistical model

In a previous post, I fit a statistical model to the first five batches. Specifically, I looked at what proportion of sacrament meetings each hymns was sung in since its respective release date. To help explain/predict that number, I had the model account for the following variables:

• what batch it’s in
• whether it’s arranged in SATB or in unison
• whether it’s a sacrament hymn
• whether it’s a Christmas hymn
• whether it’s an Easter hymn
• whether it has some “flow” like interludes, DS al Codas, or special endings
• whether it has been previously appeared in an LDS publication
• whether it’s an African American spiritual
• whether it’s a translation of a hymn in another language’s hymnal
• whether it’s otherwise an existing Christian hymn

I found that the batch was the strongest strong predictor. Other strong factors were whether it’s a sacrament hymn, whether it’s arranged in SATB format, and whether it’s an Easter hymn, whether it has already appeared in a Latter-day Saint publication. So, let’s see what that means for the sixth batch.

2 Coding the sixth batch of hymns

Here are the sixth batch of hymns and how I coded them. I’ll assume the most common configuration of properties (SATB, non-sacrament, non-Christmas, non-Easter, no special flow, not previously published, not an African American spiritual, not a translation, and not an otherwise existing Christian hymn) and will mention it only if it deviates from that.

• Joyfully Bound (#1052): This hymn is tagged as a sacrament hymn.
• My Covenants (#1053): This is not an SATB arrangement and has a non-traditional flow. While it was originally written in Swedish, it hasn’t previously appeared in the Swedish hymnal, so I haven’t tagged as being a new translation an existing hymn.
• When I Am Baptized (#1054): This is not an SATB arrangement and already existed in the Children’s Songbook.
• The Power of the Holy Ghost (#1055): This is coded for all default properties.
• Elijah and the Still, Small Voice (#1056): This not an SATB arrangement.
• Jesus Is My Shepherd (#1057): This is not an SATB arrangement and has a non-traditional flow.
• My Song in the Night (#1058): The text and tune of this hymn was borrowed from already-existing non–Latter-day Saint sources.
• This Is My Father’s World (#1059): The text and tune of this hymn was borrowed from already-existing non–Latter-day Saint sources.
• Build an Ark (#1060): This is not an SATB arrangement, has a non-traditional flow, and was previously published in the September 2010 issue of the Friend.
• Love Will Bless Our Home (#1061): This is coded for all default properties.
• Lord, Accept Our Humble Fast (#1062): This is coded for all default properties.
• Long Ago, Within a Garden (#1210): This is an Easter hymn.

3 Predictions for the sixth batch

So, what I’ve done is take this information about each hymn and used the model to make predictions about how popular each hymn will be. The result is this plot here. This plot shows the actual rate of frequency of the first five batches of hymns in sacrament meetings, after accounting for when they came out. Interspersed in yellow are the sixth batch hymns.

The sixth batch hymns are spread out over the bottom half of the plot. The hymn that is predicted to be most common is Joyfully Bound (#1052), probably because it’s coded as a sacrament hymn and sacrament hymns inherently tend to be more commonly sung. However, I feel like it’s a bit more upbeat than other sacrament hymns so I wonder if that’ll affect how much it’s sung.

The next most popular hymn is predicted to be Build an Ark (#1060). While it does have a non-traditional flow and it’s arranged for unison singing, I think the fact that it was previously published is what made it the most likely. Surprisingly, When I Am Baptized (#1054) which is also in unison and previously published but also has a traditional flow, and it’s interesting that that appears to be a strike against it. For what it’s worth, I think because that hymn is traditionally sung at baptisms or in primary, I think it is reasonable to expect it to be relatively uncommon as a congregational hymn in sacrament meeting, but you never know!

Next, we have Lord, Accept Our Humble Fast (#1062), Love Will Bless Our Home (#1061), and The Power of the Holy Ghost (#1055). These are all coded identically with the default properties, so they are predicted to have similar frequencies. A little bit further down is My Song in the Night (#1058) and This Is My Father’s World (#1059) which are borrowed hymns. Such borrowed hymns that were new in the 1985 hymnal tended to be more common than other kinds of new hymns.

Close to the bottom we have Jesus Is My Shepherd (#1057) and Elijah and the Still, Small Voice (#1056). They both are arranged in unison but the second one has a nontraditional flow to it. Unlike When I Am Baptized (#1054) though, it was not previously published, so that’s the strike against it.

Finally, we have My Covenants (#1053) and Long Ago, Within a Garden (#1210). The first is in unison and has a non-traditional flow, but it wasn’t previously published in an LDS publication (as far as I know). The last one is an Easter hymn, although, since Easter is coming up, we might see it more popular than expected.

Here is a summary of how popular I suspect the sixth batch hymns will be.

The cool thing about this prediction is that surely my guesses will be off. That means that there are idiosyncratic things about each hymn that was not accounted for in the model. Sometimes people just like certain hymns and don’t like others. The ones that show up right next to each other in the plot I think serve as interesting mini case studies because the actual numbers will diverge from these predicted values, which makes them useful points of comparison with each other and may help me figure out what those hidden predictor variables are.

4 Conclusion

In this post, I have taken frequency data from the first five batches to make predictions about the popularity of the sixth batch of hymns. The statistics suggest that Joyfully Bound (#1052) and Build an Ark (#1060) will be the most popular from this batch. My guesses will likely be really far off, and I look forward to exploring why those are and using that to make more accurate predictions later on.

3 Conclusion

In this post, I’ve done a deep dive into the hymns that were new in 1985 and compared their patterns to the new hymns in Hymns for Home and Church. There are perhaps eight different ways that a hymn can be new, and we see examples of most of them in 1985 and in the recent new hymns. I then ran some statistics to see whether the category of new hymn correlates with how popular the hymns are. After accounting for sacrament hymns and the arrangements in the back of the hymnal, I found that previously published hymn were the most common, which matches what was found for the recent new hymns.

Methods

To do this analysis, I had to make some methodological choices. In particular, I had to clearly delineate what counts as a hymn. If we include all hymns that I’ve ever seen in the 90,000 or so sacrament meetings I have data for, that about 512 unique entries. That includes anything from the 1985 hymnal, the new hymns that have come out, 93 different entries from the Children’s Songbook, and another 24 hymns that are either not in the English hymnal or are just other hymns that wards choose to sing. For the purposes of this post, I’ll just focus on the 1985 hymnal and the new hymns that have come out recently. Adding all the other ones increases the denominator in the calculations and when people talk about the 80:20 rule in the hymnal, I don’t think they’re thinking about them anyway.

Here’s the method to see how close we are to the 80:20 rule.

1. I started by taking all 284,216 individual data points I have. Each data point represents an instance of one congregation singing a hymn. So a single sacrament meeting usually contributes three or four observations.
2. After filtering out anything that isn’t in the green hymnal or one of the new hymns, I then counted how many times each hymn occurred in the dataset. For example, I Stand All Amazed (#193) is the most frequent hymn and occurs 4,714 times in my dataset.
3. I then took those numbers and converted them to proportions. So, for example, I took the 4,714 instances of I Stand All Amazed (#193), and divided it by the 284,216 total observations to get a proportion of 0.0166 So, that one hymn makes up 1.66% of all the hymns sung in my dataset.
4. From there, I put the hymns in order from most frequent to least frequent, and calculated the cumulative percent. So, the cumulative percent of the first two hymns is the percent from the most common plus the second most common hymn, As Now We Take the Sacrament (#169), which ends up being 3.16%. I then go down the spreadsheet, adding the percents to the total amount, until I get to the bottom where it equals 100%. In the following table, that column is called percent of hymns sung.
5. To get a percent of how much of the hymnal corresponds to the percent of hymns sung, I created a new column that is the rank of the hymn, from 1 to 401, which is how many hymns we have between the two collections. I then rescaled those numbers so that instead of going from 1 to 401, they go from 0 to 1. That column is called percent of hymns in the hymnal.

I know there are probably other ways of calculating this. The biggest factor is whether the new hymns should be included in the calculation. After going through multiple versions of this analysis, I think this method is the best one.

So, do we follow the 80:20 rule?

The full table was a little too long to show, so I’ve abbreviated it by highlighting ten or so landmarks. Here is that shortened table and the results of the analysis:

So, do we follow the 80:20 rule in our hymn singing? Not quite. I’ve highlighted the relevant row: about 80% of the hymns we sing in church come from 34.4% of the hymnal or 138 hymns. So a little over a third of them. The next row down shows that 90% of the hymns that we sing come from 46.9% of the hymnal, which is about 188 hymns.

So, we don’t follow the 80:20 rule exactly. We follow something like the 80:35 rule. Not as satisfying of a number, but that’s what is reflected in the data.

To get a feel for all the numbers and what the larger pattern is, here is a plot that shows the complete dataset. The green dots are the same numbers plotted on the table above and are positioned vertically at 10% intervals along the y-axis. The black line connects them and follows the rest of the points.

You can see that there’s a tapering off. A relatively small portion of the hymnal accounts for a large percentage of the hymns sung. But as we get into the infrequent hymns, since they’re sung so rarely, they contribute only a small amount to the hymns sung, so it takes many more of them to move the line up.

This plot shows that yes, about 90% of hymns that are actually sung make up less than half of the hymnal (including the new hymns). The remaining half of the hymnal (about 170 hymns), I’ve heard it jokingly called the “sealed portion.” So even though the “sealed portion” is just as big as the “unsealed” portion, it’s only makes up 10% of the hymns sung.

But that 10% isn’t nothing. On average, wards sing about 3.13 hymns per sacrament meeting. That means about once every four weeks you might expect a hymn from that “sealed portion.” You might sing 15 of these hymns a year. We can’t expect all hymns to be sung with equal frequency, and I’m glad we have the chance to change things up every few weeks and sing a less common hymn. Removing the “sealed portion” would only exacerbate the perceived problem of singing the same hymns all the time.

Does it change with the new hymns?

I was curious to see what the data looked like before the introduction of the new hymns. Here’s a table that is calculated in the same eway, but it only includes sacrament meetings from before June 2024.

So, prior to the introduction of the new hymns, 80% of the hymns sung came from 37.8% of the hymnal. So, a bit higher than the 34.4% we saw above. Granted, this is based on 341 hymns instead of 401 of them, and smaller denominators will result in a larger number if the numerator is the same. Higher numbers here reflect greater diversity in hymn selection. I don’t think that necessarily means we’re focusing on fewer hymns or that we’re singing the same hymns more so than we used to. I think people are excited about the new hymns and are choosing from that smaller pool rather than choosing from the 100 or so infrequent hymns in the 1985 hymnal.

Here’s a table that shows the same thing but since the introduction of the new hymns.

So the number drops a little bit to 33.9%. But, we’ve increased the denominator (total number of hymns), so the overall value will go up. Regardless of how I look at the data, the number is still right around 33%–38% of hymns. So I think it’s still safe to say that the pattern we follow is about 80:35, rather than 80:20.

Changes over time?

The above tables and plot are based on all my data pooled together. But I have data spanning many years. Is it possible that that 34.4% has changed over time?

The following plot shows the same calculation that I described above, but split up by year. I only show from 2015 onward since my data from before then is a bit sparse and therefore unreliable. And I won’t show 2026 quite yet since we’re not far enough into the year to get a good reading of it. The y-axis on this plot shows the percentage of the hymnal it takes to hit 80% of hymns sung.

The most obvious thing in this plot is the dip in 2020. Fewer wards were having in-person meetings. And if they were, not many were singing all three hymns. So since many were singing just sacrament hymns, there wasn’t opportunity to sing too many other ones. I’ve noticed too that the other hymns that wards were singing then tended to be familiar favorites. So, there wasn’t a lot of hymn diversity in 2020. It makes sense then why it took only about 20% of hymns (102 of them) to account for 80% of the hymns sung in church that year.

The other less obvious trend is the general decline in the past 10 years. Again, lower numbers suggest less hymn diversity in our meetings. However, I’m not 100% convinced this trend is real because the number is dependent on how much data I have and on how many hymns are available at that time, which is not consistent across the years represented in this chart. Maybe the trend in the church generall is indeed real, but if it is, it’s not a very strong pattern, certainly not strong enough to be percieved by people.

Conclusion

So that’s it. Not too much more I could say here. About 34.4% of the hymnal accounts for 80% of the hymns sung. So, not quite 80:20.

While this post is largely to satisfy my curiosity, there is one useful application for this. Pianists and organists, particularly new ones, may want to prepare a smaller set of hymns until they’re comfortable sight-reading from the hymnal. Knowing that they would only need to learn 34.4% of hymns to cover 80% of the hymns sung in church may be comforting thought. Or, going back to one of the plots above, learning only about 15% of the hymnal is enough to play half the time. Someone in this position may want to consult the overview page to see a list of hymns in order of frequency. They may find that by learning them in that order is an efficient way to quickly get involved in providing music for church meetings.

While 34.4% may seem low to some people, in fairness, I think lots of things in nature and in human behavior behave this way. Particularly categorical variables like hymns in a hymnal. I don’t see this as a flaw or a problem at all and I think we should enjoy the infrequent hymns when they come up and enjoy the frequent hymns when they are sung.

4 Conclusion

In this post, I have analyzed congregational hymns during the six weeks of the 2025 Christmas season and compared them to the 2024 season and all the years before 2024. Here are some highlights:

• The number of “slots” to sing Christmas hymns hasn’t changed. A ward can really only sing about 16, unless they start earlier in November, end later in January, or sing multiple intermediate hymns. The number of Christmas hymns in the hymnal went from 14 to 21.
• Compared to before the new hymns came out, people are singing slightly fewer unique hymns. The average number of hymns per ward dropped from 8.92 before 2024 to 7.18 in 2025. I don’t have a good explanation for that drop.
• What Child is This? (#1203) is the most commonly sung new Christmas hymn. It was 5th most frequent and was sung by about half of wards in 2025. Little Baby in a Manger (#1209) was the least sung Christmas hymn (new or old).
• The other new hymns are about as frequent as the three least common older Christmas hymns.
• All older hymns were sung less in 2025 compared to before 2024 with the introduction of the new hymns.
• The more popular a hymn was before 2024, the less of a drop it experienced in 2025. This means that new hymns largely took the place of the less popular older hymns.

I imagine we’ll get some new Christmas hymns in the 2026 batches and perhaps even more in the full hymnal, so it’s interesting to see this snapshot right now. I look forward to doing another analysis in a year or two to see how the numbers have changed again.

Flow

The next variable I want to probe is what I’m calling the “flow” of the piece. Most hymns in the hymnal have straightforward structure: start at the top, sing to the bottom, and repeat. However, a few hymns have some slight modifications to this, such as Families Can Be Together Forever (#300) which has an introduction and a first and second ending (although the endings don’t affect what the congregation sings), or That Easter Morn (#198) which has different interludes between verses. But pretty much all the hymns are the same.

The latest batch has a few of these kinds of changes to the flow. Two of them (He Is Born, the Divine Christ Child (#1202) and Go Tell It on the Mountain (#1208)) have the chorus sung before the first verse in addition to after each verse. Were You There? (#1206) deviates a little more and has a written interlude between the third and fourth verses.

But there are four that stand out as having new kind of “flows” to them. Gethsemane (#1009) as a D.S. al coda, I Have Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (#1024) has a tag at the end of the last verse, Close as a Quiet Prayer (#1030) has some extra content between the second and third verses and a D.S. al coda, and Little Baby in a Manger (#1209) has an extra chorus with an optional obbligato at the end. I’ve seen chatter online about these (particularly Gethsemane (#1009)) saying that they’re too hard to follow for congregational singing. I wondered whether, all things being equal, these four hymns with more complex “flows” were sung less than hymns with more striaghtforward flows.

The statistics don’t support this hypothesis. Hymns with a new flow were indeed predicted to be less commonly sung than hymns with a more standard flow, all other things being equal. Specifically, new flow hymns were sung in about 0.16% fewer sacrament meetings per week. In other words, standard flow hymns were about 1.23 times more likely to be sung. This is not a statistically significant difference though. So it looks like the hesitancy that some music coordinators have hasn’t stopped too many of them from singing these hymns.

Sacrament hymns

I’ve written already that most of the most popular hymns are sacrament hymns. This makes sense because every sacrament meeting has to have one, so they collectively have to make up between a third and a quarter of all hymns sung. In these new batches we have eight hymns that are tagged as being appropriate for the sacrament. You can see which ones these are and how common they are in this plot.

As expected, most of the sacrament hymns are near the top of this plot, so they’re generally sung by a fair number of wards each Sunday. The two that stand out for being lower than the rest are O Lord, Who Gave Thy Life for Me (#1041) and Help Us Remember (#1043). But those are both from the fifth batch and, as seen above, the fifth batch is the least common so far, even after accounting for how recent it is. The question is whether a hymn, all things being equal, is sung more if it’s tagged as a sacrament hymn than if it’s not.

The statistics give mixed results. On the one hand, it appears that sacrament hymns are quite a bit more common. A hymn predicted to be sung in 0.97% more wards each Sunday if it’s tagged as a sacrament hymn than if not. That equates to it being about 2.37 times more common than it would have been. That seems like a big jump. But the statistics suggest that it’s perhaps not a significant difference (p = 0.0205). So, we’ll wait for a few more months to see if that changes. Perhaps with more data and more new sacrament hymns, we might see that change.

Conclusion

In this post, I took data from 62,081 sacrament meetings and looked at how many times new each hymn has been sung in sacrament meeting, on average, since its respective release date. The most common, unsurprisingly, is Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing (#1001), which has been sung by 3.2% sacrament meetings every week since it came out.

I then looked at whether certain properties of hymns had an influence on how popular they have been. Here’s what I found:

• The first batch is far and away the most common. All things being equal a hymn in that batch is sung 2 more often than one in the third batch, 3.32 times more often than one in the fourth batch, and 3.46 times more often than one in the fifth batch. The second batch was less popular, but not significantly so.
• A hymn that is arranged in an SATB format is sung 1.72 times more often than one arranged for unison singing, all other things being equal.
• Whether a hymn has a complex flow did not significantly affect how often it was sung.
• Sacrament hymns are sung 2.37 times more often than an equivalent non-sacrament hymn would be.
• Hymns that have existed within American Latter-day Saint culture for a while were 1.76 more likely to be sung. If a hymn existed in non-English Latter-day Saint hymnals, has been sung in other Christian denominations, or started among African Americans, it didn’t affect how often it was sung.

This has been one of my more technical blog posts. But, I think I’ve uncovered some pretty cool trends here. The most interesting is that there is a bias towards hymns that came out in the first batch or two. And there’s a clear preference for SATB hymns, rather than unison ones, being sung as congregational hymns in sacrament meeting. Again, the church only recently stated explicitly that both styles are appropriate, so we’ll see if the popularity of those unison hymns goes up.

If you can think of some potential predictors for what might make hymns more or less popular, let me know and I can upate my model!

Prophet hymns

I’ll start with the prophet-related hymns that spike the most around General Conference. The following plot shows the percentage of wards each year that sing each of the five most common prophet-related hymns on the last Sunday before October General Conference. I wish I had more data from several years before 2021 but I don’t right now, so I can’t make any long-term comparisons.

So, you’ll notice that each year on the last Sunday in September, no hymn was sung by more than 15% of wards. However, there is one exception that’s evident in the plot: We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet (#19) saw a huge spike in September 2025 (i.e. last Sunday). Between 2022 and 2024, about 12.9% of wards sang that hymn just before the October General Conference. In 2025, that jumped up to 34.3%. So, if we subtract the expected amount (about 13%) from this year (about 34%), we get a difference of 21.4%. This brings me to the main take-home message for this post:

As I said in my caveat above, this number may actually be lower than reality because many wards reportedly changed the hymn at the last minute, and that wouldn’t have been reflected in the data I gathered.

It’s interesting too to notice the other hymns here. God Bless Our Prophet Dear (#24) is not especially common, with only about 1% of wards singing it around this time each year. But this year, it jumped up to 2.7% of wards. The other three hymns were sung less than they have been. This is most evident in Come, Listen to a Prophet’s Voice (#21), which was about 40% less popular this year, and We Listen to a Prophet’s Voice (#22), which was 25% less popular. Perhaps people didn’t feel it was right to singing about listening to a prophet’s voice after his death.

Our Prayer to Thee

The other candidate hymn that was likely more popular this past Sunday is a brand new hymn, Our Prayer to Thee (#1048), which was written by President Nelson.

This is a tricky one to analyze. As seen in my post about the fifth batch of hymns, the number of wards singing from this latest batch is quite low. Furthermore, the batch was only released a week prior to President Nelson’s death. So, we really only have two weeks of data to go off of.

Basically, all I can say is this. On September 21, of the 435 wards I have data from, just one of them sang Our Prayer to Thee (#1048). However, of the 540 wards I have data from on September 28th, seven wards sang it, or about 1.2%. So, it hasn’t instantly become popular. But it is a noticeable increase.

Other hymns?

Are there other hymns that were more popular last Sunday? I decided to check all hymns in a more objective way to see if anything stood out. So, what I’ve done is I’ve taken all my data from just 2024 and 2025. For each hymn, I found what percent of wards sang it each week. I then averaged those percentages across all dates between January 2024 and September 21, 2025 and compared them to the numbers for September 28, 2025.

So as an example, Come, Follow Me (#116) is generally a popular hymn, but I don’t expect it to spike around General Conference time. On average, between January 2024 and September 21, 2025, it was sung in 2.8% of wards each week. On September 28th, 2025, it was sung in 2.2% of wards. So, about 20% less than normal.

These calculations favor some of the newer hymns. Not all wards sing General Conference–related hymns, so hymns will be higher on this list if they appear in Primary Programs or if they’re in the latest two batches of new hymns. For example, I Will Walk with Jesus (#1004) has been sung in about 2.2% of wards each week since it came out, but last week it was sung by 3.2%, so there’s a 40% increase, likely due to some wards having their Primary Programs last Sunday. As an extreme case, I didn’t see any wards singing Stand by Me (#1050) two weeks ago, but one ward sang it last Sunday. So that 0.1% divided by zero means it was infinitely more popular last Sunday than the week before. So, I’ve removed those hymns from this list so that we can focus on the ones that I think are indeed in response to President Nelson’s death.

As expected, We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet (#19) is at the top of this list, having been sung in 12.1 times as many wards this Sunday compared to the average of all previous Sundays for the past 20½ months. Normally, it’s about 3.5 times as popular around Conference time, so this is a noteworthy increase. The other prophet-related hymns and Our Prayer to Thee (#1048) show up on this table as well.

The new one on this table is God Be with You Till We Meet Again (#152). It was sung by 3% of wards, but that’s about 3.1 times as many as what we normally see each week. I’ll admit, if I had been in charge of the music in my ward, that would have been the one that I’d change to last minute. It looks like 2% of wards agree with me.

Conclusion

The passing of President Nelson triggers a handful of major events in our church. But the timing of it—less than a day before most wards held services—meant it was very fresh on our minds. I think that recency affected how people responded to it in the form of congregational hymns. The timing of it just before General Conference made it trickier to disentangle normal annual patterns from a spike this week, but I think I was able to do successfully separate them out. Finally, I’m not sure if it was coincidence or not, but I’m glad President Nelson got to see his own hymn be added to the hymanl before his passing. Besides being the church president who initiated the creation of the new hymnal, he leaves a legacy in our hymnal with his contribution.

What hymns are most popular?

The following table shows the hymns from the fifth batch in order of how popular they are.

The most popular hymn during this batch is Go Tell It on the Mountain (#1208). This is almost certainly because it is a Christmas hymn and we recently celebrated Christmas. Since it is a Christmas hymn, we likely won’t see it sung very often until the end of November 2026, which means other hymns will get a chance to be sung. We’ll have to wait a full 52 weeks to see how Go Tell It on the Mountain (#1208) compares to the other hymns in this batch, but I suspect it might lose its place as the most popular hymn in this batch.

In second is Our Prayer to Thee (#1048). There may be a few reasons for why this one is next in line. One, I think it’s just a good hymn. Two, it uses a tune that is well known in the Christian world and borrowed hymns tend to do well both in the 1985 hymnal and in these recent batches. In fact, we used this tune in the previous hymnal for O Home Beloved (#337), but in over 90,000 sacrament meetings I have not once seen that hymn being sung. So I’m glad they’re repurposing it for this hymn. And finally, President Russell M. Nelson wrote the lyrics to the hymn. Now, it might be a coincidence, but he passed away just after this hymn was released and I can’t help but wonder whether it’s as popular as it is because a fair number of wards sang it soon after that presumably in his honor. We’ll never know.

The next one, Help Us Remember (#1043) is the only sacrament hymn in this batch, and sacrament hymns tend to be sung more.

The rest of the hymns trail behind. I personally am a fan of This Day Is a Good Day, Lord (#1051), so I’m glad to see it as high as it is on this list. It is interesting that while Go Tell It on the Mountain (#1208) was popular during Christmas, Little Baby in a Manger (#1209) was not so much. Familiarity and prior exposure to the hymn likely is an influence, but also I think maybe some wards are uncomfortable with that style of melody in congregational singing still.

There is a clear least popular hymn, Joseph Prayed in Faith (#1049). My guess is that it’ll become more popular in the spring when people tend to sing Joseph Smith–related hymns. So, I don’t think it’s any worse of a hymn, but it’s just not the time of year for it.

When during meetings are these hymns sung?

This table shows when during sacrament meetings these hymns have been sung.

Like many other hymns and batches of hymns, each hymn here has their own story. So some hymns are more common as opening hymns while others are more common later in the meeting, and that’s true generally. The clearest pattern is Help Us Remember (#1043) which is almost always sung as a sacrament hymn. Again, that makes sense since it is about the sacrament. A general trend that I see here though is that most hymns are most common as opening hymns. This is an interesting insight into when during sacrament meetings people like to sing new hymns. It’s of course not a hard-and-fast rule of course, but it is a patterns shared among almost all these hymns.

Conclusion

That’s all for now. Overall, there are some cool things we learn from this batch. On the one hand, more wards are singing at least one new hymn each week. But, as seen in the first plot above, the first batch is where all the action is at. All batches are getting some attention, but the fifth batch is not doing any better than any of the other ones. In general, it seems like people are still enthusiastically singing new hymns, but not all the new hymns.

What hymns are most popular?

The following table shows the hymns from the fourth batch in order of how popular they are. On the right, I have an approximation of how many wards have sung that hymn during this period. I’ve seen all but Still, Still, Still (#1207) which makes sense since it’s a Christmas hymn.

It’s perhaps not too surprising that the most popular one is O Lord, Who Gave Thy Life for Me (#1041) since it’s a sacrament hymn. For a while, I’m a Pioneer Too (#1034) was the #1 hymn in this batch, but keep in mind that it came out just before Pioneer Day in Utah so it was briefly pretty popular. After a few weeks though, it sunk a little lower because I don’t think too many wards will be singing it “off-season.” I wonder if Oh, How Great Is Our Joy (#1033) is next most popular from this batch because the tune is (from what I understand) a well-known hymn in Spanish. I personally really like Look unto Christ (#1032) and am happy to see it near the top of this list because it means I’m likely to hear it every so often in the future. I’m also very pleased to see I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me (#1037) being sung as well. It’s great to incorporate music from different backgrounds into our meetings.

When during meetings are these hymns sung?

We can also see when during sacrament meetings these hymns have been sung. I include this table for every batch, but it’s tricky to get much meaningful information from it because every hymn has its own story. For reasons that are not always clear, some hymns just tend to be opening hymns, others tend to be closing, and others show some other perhaps more complicated pattern.

It makes sense that hymn>O Lord, Who Gave Thy Life for Me (#1041) is most commonly sung as a sacrament hymn because it is tagged as such. But, As I Keep the Sabbath Day (#1035) and Look unto Christ (#1032) were both occasionally sung as sacrament hymns.

The next clearest trend is that Read the Book of Mormon and Pray (#1036) seems to be most common as an intermediate hymn. The one most commonly sung as an opening hymn from this batch was As I Keep the Sabbath Day (#1035) and the one most commonly sung as a closing hymn was The Lord’s My Shepherd (#1038).

Conclusion

So, that’s it for the fourth batch of new hymns. The general pattern I see is that this batch has been less popular. It is true that it’s smaller than the third batch, but it is still bigger than the second batch, so we can’t blame numbers alone. We’ve also had some holidays here and there, like Father’s Day, 4th of July, and Pioneer Day, so those likely take precedent. It may also just be that the novelty of new hymns has worn off, although it’s important to note that almost half of wards are singing at least one new hymn each week. So maybe it’s that we’re still getting used to the hymns in the first batches before moving on to this latest one.

The Easter Season

Again, like I said in my previous post, since many of these sacrament hymns are commonly sung outside of the Easter season, we can’t assume that if a ward sings, say, As Bread is Broken (#1007), that they’re doing so in celebration of Easter. I found that around 20%–25% of wards sing at least one of those “Easter” hymns, so I decided that the Easter season was defined as the period around Easter when more than 25% of wards sing from that set.

Since some of these new hymns are generally pretty common, I’ll have to recalculate those numbers based on 2025 data. (See details below if you’d like.)

It turns out it’s around 36% of wards per week. That is quite a bit higher than the 27% I reported in my previous post. But, keep in mind that six new sacrament hymns were added (It Is Well with My Soul (#1003), As Bread is Broken (#1007), Bread of Life, Living Water (#1008), Gethsemane (#1009), Behold the Wounds in Jesus’ Hands (#1016), and This Is the Christ (#1017)), and those have been pretty popular. So, on average, we’re singing more Easter-adjacent hymns than before simply because of those six new ones, so we’ll have to adjust the number accordingly.

In Figure 1, I’ve highlighted all the weeks that have more than 36% of sacrament meetings:

Last year, three weeks before just barely made the cut for having more Easter hymns than usual. This year, it didn’t. So, it was only the week before, Easter itself, and the week after where we saw a significant number of Easter hymns beyond what is normally sung. The number of wards singing Easter hymns on Easter itself is comparable to last year (around 97%). But last year, about 45% of wards sang Easter hymns on Palm Sunday. This year, it was about 57%. So, it seems like the addition of the two new Easter hymns really made a difference! Looking back at previous years, the only time I’ve seen more wards singing Easter hymns on Palm Sunday is when General Conference falls on Easter.

What’s sung around Easter?

Now that we’ve established which hymns are Easter hymns and when those hymns are sung relative to Easter, let’s answer the questions of which of these Easter hymns are sung when.

We’ll first start off by looking at how common the Easter hymns were during this Easter season. The following plot shows the percentage of wards that sang each hymn at least some point within one week of Easter.

Superficially, relatively little has changed compared to last year, except with the addition of new hymns. He Is Risen! (#199) and Christ the Lord is Risen Today (#200) are far and away the most common still. They were a bit less common this year though, presumably because of the addition of the new hymns cutting in on some of the slots. Figure 3 below compares 2025 to all previous years, showing the number of wards that sing each hymn within a week of Easter.

As you can see, for all but one hymn, the big dot, which represents 2025, is further to the left than the smaller black dot, which represents everything before 2025. This means that basically every hymn was sung in fewer wards in 2025 than in previous years. The obvious explanation for this is the addition of the new hymns, and as you can see in the green dots, there were several that were sung around Easter this year. So, with more hymns to choose from, and the same number of slots to fill, something’s going to take a hit. It looks like proportionally, the two most popular ones, were affected the most.

The one teeny exception to this pattern is All Glory, Laud, and Honor (#69). Like I mentioned last time, this a Palm Sunday hymn, though relatively few wards sing it on Palm Sunday. I’m heartened to see that there was actually a very slight increase in how many wards sang it this year. I hope to see it sung more in the future, so this is an encouraging sign.

When are hymns sung within the Easter season?

Let’s dive into each of those hymns then and see when during that three-week period they were sung. Figure 4 shows how often each Easter hymn is sung across the Easter season. Here, the gray represents general tendencies before 2025 and the red represents the data from 2025.

Starting with the most popular hymns, He Is Risen (#199) and Christ the Lord Is Risen Today (#200) were basically the same this year as in previous years. Pretty much all the other hymns were more popular the week before Easter this year than they were last year, some of them drastically so. By that, I mean that some of them were previously most popular on Easter Sunday, but this year they were most popular on Palm Sunday. Among the new hymns, Gethsemane (#1009) and Let Easter Anthems Ring (#1205) had a clear peak in popularity on Easter Sunday. The others were about as popular on Palm Sunday as they were on Easter.

When during sacrament meeting?

The last thing I want to show is when during sacrament meeting these hymns are sung. By that, I mean I want to lok at whether hymns are sung as opening, intermediate, or closing hymns. (We’ll ignore sacrament hymns in this plot.) Last year, I only showed this plot for the two most common hymns but this time I’ll show the ones that are most directly related to Easter. Figure 5 shows those results. The gray is the general trend from before 2025 and the blue shows just the 2025 data.

The pattern shown here is one that I can’t quite make sense of. If we just focus on the hymns from the 1985 hymnal, we see that they are all more popular as opening hymns in 2025 than they were before this year. They’re also all less commonly sung as closing hymns in 2025. This suggests that there is a shift from the end of the meeting towards the beginning for these hymns. We would expect then that the new hymns take their place as closing hymns. But, if we now look at those three hymns, we see that they’re all about twice as commonly sung as opening hymns than closing hymns. So, every hymn is more likely an opening hymn than a closing hymn. What are people singing as closing hymns then? I’m not sure, but it’s a cool pattern to see!

Summary

Last year, I ended the analysis of Easter hymns by saying that I hope the new hymnal has Easter hymns. I’m grateful we have more so that we can sing more Easter hymns each year, especially beyond Easter Sunday itself. It seems like these new hymns have been incorporated quite well in Sacrament meeting. However, it seems like these new hymns are mostly taking the place of the old ones, rather than adding to them. We had a few more wards singing more Easter hymns on Palm Sunday, but I’d love to see that extended to more weeks before Easter. I guess we’ll see if we get more Easter hymns in later batches of new hymns!

What hymns are most popular?

The following table shows the hymns from the third batch in order of how popular they are. On the right, I have an approximation of how many wards have sung that hymn during this period.

The most common hymns in this batch was Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling (#1020), by a fair margin. It was followed by I Know That the Savior Loves Me (1021), This Little Light of Mine (#1028). Because this period included Easter, Let Easter Anthems Ring (1205) was among the top three in this batch. I’m honestly quite surprised that Faith in Every Footstep (1022) was not higher on this list. Other than Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing (#1001), that one is the one I expected the most from the new hymns.

(For a complete version of this table that includes all hymns, see here.)

When during meetings are these hymns sung?

We can now see when during sacrament meetings these hymns have been sung.

Again, like any plot like this, each hymn has its own story it seems. Some are simply more popular as opening hymns, or closing hymns, or intermediate hymns. We didn’t really get any sacrament hymns in this batch, but that didn’t stop people from singing some from this batch very occasionally. It seems like most of these hymns were pretty evenly spread out between being sung as opening, intermediate, and closing hymns.

Conclusion

It took longer for this third batch to catch on like the first and second batches did. In fact, it took right until before the fourth batch to come out for this one to become as popular as the first batch. I think it’s safe to say though that the novelty of a new batch of hymns has worn off a little bit and people aren’t quite as anxious to sing through every new hymn like they once might have been. We’ll see how this batch compares to the next one!

How many Christmas hymns have wards sung so far?

Turning the question on its head then, we can now focus on individual wards and see how many Christmas hymns wards have sung so far.

First off, there were 103 sacrament meetings in December that I have data from that did not include any congregational Christmas hymns. One example was from a ward in Nevada. On December 8th, they sang The Iron Rod (#274), I Stand All Amazed (#193), and I Believe in Christ (#134). I don’t know why they didn’t sing Christmas hymns well into December, but it just goes to show that it does happen very occasionally.

The following plot shows an estimate of the cumulative number of Christmas hymns a ward sings over the course of the month of December.

So, as expected, the more data I have from a ward, the more Christmas hymns I observe them singing. Currently, we’re four weeks into December, and the most common pattern is for a ward to have sung between 8 and 10 Christmas hymns this year.

What Christmas hymns have been most popular?

The following plot shows the estimated number of times each Christmas hymn is estimated to have been sung per ward this year. It’s estimated that almost every ward sang Joy to the World (#201). Meanwhile, less than about 20% of wards have sung While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks (#211).

Interspersed among these hymns are new hymns. Of them, What Child Is This? (#1203) is the most popular; it is estimated to have been sung 0.6 times per ward, which means about 60% of wards sang it. The other three are closer to the bottom, more popular than a few of the ones in the 1985 hymnal, although Come, Lord Jesus (#1018) appears to have dethroned While Shepherds Watched Their Glocks (#211) for least popular Christmas hymn. I’ve added Jesus, Once of Humble Birth (#196) in there as well because it is far and away the most popular sacrament hymn around Christmas. This year, it was more common than half of the Christmas hymns.

The following table shows the same data plotted above but in table format so you can see the exact numbers.

Comparison to previous years

This year, we introduced about four new Christmas hymns. Presumably, wards didn’t simply add them to their existing programs. There are, after all, a finite number of hymns a ward can sing in December. So, by incorporating new Christmas hymns, some hymns had to get cut. So, which hymns got cut and were some hymns cut more than others?

The following plot shows hymns in order of of how much more or less they were sung in 2024 compared to all the previous years I have data for. The way you read it is this: if the number is positive, it means the hymn was that much more common this year (e.g. “Away in a Manger was about 7% more common in 2024”) but if it’s negative, it means the hymn was that much less common this year (e.g. “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks was a little over 40% less common in 2024”).

This is a pretty cool look at the characteristics of the 2024 season. A few of the more common hymns were a little bit more common this year. But, keep in mind that these are congregational hymns. It may not simply be that the most popular ones are getting even more popular. I think what’s happening is that more wards choirs and other musical ensembles are singing/playing the new hymns, so in order to not hear the same Christmas hymn more than once per year, the music coordinator works around those. That means hymns that had been sung as choir pieces or as special musical numbers previously are now being shifted to the congregation. This is just speculation and since I haven’t been collecting data on the special musical numbers themselves, I’ll never know. But it’s plausible.

Most hymns were less common in 2024 than they were previously. They’re the ones towards the right and bottom of the plot in red. I think these are the ones that are being left out in favor of the new hymns. Given the choice between What Child Is This? (#1203) and While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks (#211), I’ll bet most music coordinators went with the former.

Conclusion

That’s it for now! Hopefully this analysis of the 2024 Christmas season has been interesting. This is a special year because of the introduction of new Christmas hymns, so it’s pretty cool to see how that has affected the trend for the past few years.

Other Come, Follow Me Hymns?

I happened to notice More Holiness Give Me (#131) this week because my own ward sang it. But, if it’s the case that the reason why this was so popular this week is because of Come, Follow Me, perhaps there were other spikes on other Sundays that specifically mention hymns. To test this hypothesis, I went through the manual and found that most weeks mention a hymn. So, the following plot shows all those weeks with those key hymns highlighted. You should notice a pretty apparent spike for almost all of them!

There is remarkable consistency in almost every panel. With only a few exceptions, there is a significant spike in the popularity of hymns mentioned in Come, Follow Me. On average, hymns are about 9–10 times more common during the weeks that they’re mentioned in Come, Follow Me compared to other times they’re sung since June 2, and More Holiness Give Me (#131) from October 27, which is the first time I noticed this trend, is right at that average.

The biggest jump was Help Me Teach with Inspiration (#281). Normally, it’s sung only about once every five years, but on June 23, around 10% of wards sang it; it was 45 times more popular that day than on other days. These big spikes are most apparent for other less-common hymns like Jesus, Lover of My Soul (#102), which was 21 times more popular that it usually is on July 14, and Oh Say, What Is Truth? (#272) which was 16 times more common on July 21.

Even Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy (#335) showed a small increase. As a men’s chorus arrangement, is extremely rare. In my 27,131 sacrament meetings, I’ve only seen it 49 times, meaning it’s sung maybe once every 11 years or so. But did show up once on July 7. (I would say it ousted a Fourth of July hymn, but it was actually in England that I saw this hymn.)

There are some exceptions. I Need Thee Every Hour (#98) spiked on June 16, but it had a larger spike on September 1 for some reason. The same can be said about I Know That My Redeemer Lives (#136) and Come Unto Jesus (#113) one June 13. Some of the sacrament hymns were less “spiky”, like As Now We Take the Sacrament (#169) and I Stand All Amazed (#193), but others showed a big spike like How Great the Wisdom and the Love (#195) and Reverently and Meekly Now (#185).

One interesting recent development is the hymn Come Unto Jesus (#117). It was mentioned in Come, Follow Me twice since June 2, once for June 30 and once for November 3. The number of wards that sang it was about the same both times (about 7%) making it at least three times as common as it normally is. Even more remarkably, the hymn is typically sung about once every 14 months, but here we have cases where it spiked twice in about five months. This suggests to me that this trend of using hymns mentioned in Come, Follow Me is pretty stable, even if it means potentially repeating a hymn more often than normal.

Conclusion

I initially started this post to just talk about More Holiness Give Me (#131) and to speculate about what the general church membership was thinking around that time. As it turns out, thanks to the insight by a student of mine (hi, Sydney!), I was able to find out that it’s just one instance of a pretty regular pattern of singing hymns mentioned in Come, Follow Me. I only looked at data since June 2 since that’s when I regularly have data from over 100 sacrament meetings, but I presume that this trend goes all the way back to the beginning of Come, Follow Me. It’s good to see that so manay ward music coordinators are reading Come, Follow Me. It’s also interesting to see that this schedule of gospel study not only applies to personal scripture reading, Sunday School, but also hymns in sacrament meeting.

Math on three-hymn Sundays

I’ll start off with math on Sundays like the one my brother noticed, those with just three hymns. The interesting constraint about this is the sacrament hymn. Because the second hymn is almost always in the 169–196 range, that really limits how often math can occur. Let’s take a look anyway. I have data from 26,030 sacrament meetings, but for now I’ll look at the 15,184 that have just three: an opening hymn, a sacrament hymn, and a closing hymn.

I want to first start of by considering how likely something like this is. I’m going to assume we’re only using the 341 hymns in the hymnal, that a ward sings one of the 28 hymns in the 169–196 range for the sacrament hymn, and not those hymns as the opening and closing hymns. It turns out there are 4,050 ways to have a subtraction problem displayed on the hymn board. The numbers are the same for addition problems, just with the opening and closing hymns swapped. But of those, which are most likely to happen?

I cross referenced the hymn numbers from all 4,050 possibilities with the overall frequency of the hymns based on the 26,030 I have. The most likely case is I Believe in Christ (#134) as the opening hymn, God, Our Father, Hear Us Pray (#170) as the sacrament hymn, and Teach Me to Walk in the Light (#304) as the closing hymn. It’s lightly more probable to see those as an addition equation than a subtraction one since Teach Me to Walk in the Light (#304) is more likely a closing hymn in general.

If we just consider the 341 hymns, there are actually two ways to see multiplication or division problems. It could happen by singing The Spirit of God (#2) with either As Now We Take the Sacrament (#169) and America the Beautiful (#338) or with God, Our Father, Hear Us Pray (#170) and The Star-Spangled Banner (#340). Both of these are not too improbable. The first is more common than 4,010 of the addition or subtraction ones and the second is still in the 97th percentile for most likely combinations. But, either one of them occurring would only happen about once every 43,200 sacrament meetings. So, still pretty rare.

I won’t bog you down with the details of other possibilities, but there are many that seem reasonably plausible. Let’s look at what actually did happen.

Math on four-hymn Sundays

When there are four numbers to work with, the number of possible ways math could happen goes up quite a bit. I’m not a mathematician or logician, so I’m not going to entertain every concievable possibility. Instead, I’ll just focus on these four possibilities

Opening + Sacrament + Intermediate = Closing

Opening + Sacrament = Intermediate + Closing

Opening = Sacrament + Intermediate + Closing

Opening = Sacrament - Intermediate - Closing

In other words, we’re looking at either adding hymn numbers together or subtracting them and then moving the equals sign to each of the three locations. Much to my surprise, all of these possibilities are attested in my data! Let’s look at each one.

The first two is where the opening, sacrament, and intermediate hymns equal the closing hymn. This was found three times in my data:

Next are cases where the opening plus the sacrament equal the intermediate plus the closing. This happened 25 times.

Last on the list additions are cases where the the opening equals the sum of the other three. This happened just once.

And finally, for a subtraction-based case that isn’t equal to the others, here are the two times when the opening minus the sacrament minus the intermediate equals the closing.

Increasing and Decreasing

The last pattern I want to look at is more just a pattern: how often are all the hymns in increasing order or in decreasing order. It turns out this is much more common than the math ones discussed above.

For Sundays with four hymns, I have 512 instances of all increasing numbers and 252 instances of all decreasing numbers. Combined, this occurs about 9% of the time, or once every 11 times you sing four hymns. So, really not too uncommon.

Just probability-wise, it’s far more likely to see all increasing numbers or all decreasing numbers on three-hymn Sundays because there are three numbers to work with instead of four. This makes sense if you think about it. The sacrament hymn will be close to the middle. (I think it’s by design so that the book is most often opened to the middle.) The opening hymn is going to be either lower than it or higher than it. As long as the closing hymn is the opposite, then we’re good. So far, I’ve seen 2,934 instances of three increasing numbers and 2,202 instances of three decreasing numbers. Combined, this occurs about 34% of the time, or once every 3 times you sing three hymns. So, really actually quite common.

For what it’s worth, the odds of this happening has gone up a little bit recently because the new hymns’ numbers are all greater than the old hymns’ numbers. It seems to occur about 3.8% more often with three-hymn Sundays and 1.2% more often with four-hymn Sundays.

Conclusion

This just a silly post that says nothing about hymns and who or why they’re chosen. But it is fun to think about possible math that could be done on the hymn numbers diplayed on the hymn board.

What hymns are most popular?

The following table shows the hymns from the second batch in order of how popular they are. On the right, I have an approximation of how many wards have sung that hymn since its release.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazing Grace (#1010) was far and away the most popular in this batch. Next was Behold the Wounds in Jesus’ Hands (#1016) and My Shepherd Will Supply My Need (#1014). The least popular hymn from this batch was Anytime, Anywhere (#1012), which was only sung by about 10% of wards during this time. Personally, I hoped that Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus (#1015) would be more popular than it was (it’s one of my favorites from this batch).

(For a complete version of this table that includes all hymns, see here.)

What hymns are most popular each week?

Now that we’re several weeks past the release, we can start to see a glimpse of how the adoption of these new hymns has ebbed and flowed and how each hymn has been introduced. The figure below shows what proportion of wards sang what hymns each week, given that they sang a new hymn that week. So, we’re only focused on wards that have used these hymns.

So, Amazing Grace (#1010) had a pretty interesting distribution. It started off strong—people are generally familiar with it and were excited to sing it when it first came out. As the weeks progressed, fewer wards sang it, either because they had already done so or because the novelty had worn off. This is similar to what we saw with Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing (#1001), though in a less extreme way. After Christmas, it had a resurgence in popularity and I think many wards sang it a second time.

Come, Lord Jesus (#1018) basically had an opposite pattern. Though it wasn’t listed in the holiday section of the new hymnal, it has become a new Christmas hymn. Outside of December, it was relatively unpopular, but during December it was far and the away the most common hymn from this batch.

The rest of the hymns roughly show the same general pattern. They started off with varying degrees of popularity. Over the next two months, they all got slightly more popular—presumably coinciding with the fall of So, Amazing Grace (#1010). Then they dipped again during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Since the New Year, they again have varying degrees of popularity, with those numbers mostly going up over the next six weeks (mirroring what happened between September and November).

When during meetings are these hymns sung?

We can see when these hymns tend to be sung and get an overall look at the popularity of the second batch of hymns. Again, it’s based on so little data, so take these results with a grain of salt.

What I see here is about three different patterns. Most hymns are of the first pattern: they’re typically not sacrament hymns and are roughly equally likely to be sung as opening, intermediate, or closing hymns. There is a little bit of variation among them, for example, Holding Hands Around the World (#1011) was a little more common as an opening hymn, Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus (#1015) was a little more common as an intermediate hymn, and Anytime, Anywhere (#1012) was a little more common as a closing hymn.

The second type of hymn is the one that was overwhelmingly sung as a sacrament hymn. In this batch Behold the Wounds in Jesus’ Hands (#1016) is of this type. 88% of the time it was sung, it was done so as a sacrament hymn. It was still very occasionally sung elsewhere in the meeting, but not too often.

Finally, we have This Is the Christ (#1017) whih was more or less equally likely to be sung anywhere in the meeting, including as a sacrament hymn. If we lump the opening, intermediate, and closing hymn frequencies together, then yes, it’s most likely going to not be a sacrament hymn, but it’s interesting still that it’s still sung a fair amount as a sacrament hymn.

Conclusion

With this second batch of hymns, there were some pretty interesting patterns. First, Amazing Grace (#1010) stole the show and was the most popular of this batch. It took this batch a few weeks to really get into the swing of things, but at its peak about 40% of wards sang at least one hymn. Unlike the first batch, this one was pushed aside by the end-of-year holidays, so for about six weeks, it wasn’t drawn from very much in sacrament meeting. But that made the timing even more interesting because in its second wave, the same kind of patterns were found as what I saw in the first wave.

Now that we have a third batch of hymns, I’m curious to see how this one will continue to be incorporated into sacrament meetings.

Number of digits on display

First, let’s take a look at the distribution of numbers across all the hymns in these sacrament meetings. This table shows what percentage of the cards displayed belonged to each number.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the most common digit is 1. After all, the sacrament hymns all include at least one of them. I guess what’s surprising is just how much more common it is. It’s almost five times as common as 5 for some reason. We can plot these numbers. Here’s a plot to show these visually, which highlights the difference between them. Interestingly, the numbers 7–9 are slightly more common, probably because they’re used in the sacrament hymns which are hymns 169–196.

Which digits are most common?

So now what we can do is rather than look at all the data at once, we could look at each sacrament meeting individually. If a quarter of the cards used are 1s, and the most number of cards used on a typical sacrament meeting is twelve (four hymns, each with three digits), then about three of them are predicted to be 1s. Let’s see what the data actually shows though.

First off, the following plot shows the distribution how many cards are used each week. About 37% of meetings have nine digits on display. You’d see this if you didn’t sing an intermediate hymn and all three hymns that were sung were hymn 100–341. Another 19% have eight digits, which would mean one of the three hymns is between 11 and 99. Just a few wards only displayed five digits, which happens when the opening and closing hymn are between 1 and 9 and a typical sacrament hymn.

The plot above shows that, once in a very great while, you might see a sacrament meeting with only four cards used. This happened twice in my dataset. Both from the same ward in American Fork in March 2021. On one week, they sang Dearest Children, God Is Near You (#96) as the sacrament hymn and on the next week, they sang For the Beauty of the Earth (#92) as the sacrament hymn. It is very unusual to sing anything outside of hymns 169–196. But, as rare as it is to do that, what makes these doubly unusual is that both the opening and closing hymns were one of the nine hymns between 1 and 9. That means only four digits were on display. Pretty cool. Not sure what was going on in that ward, but it’s pretty cool that I caught it happening.

Going back to the individual digits, we can now go back and see how many of each are on display each week in a ward. I looked through all the sacrament meetings I have data from, and counted up how many of each digit was on display. I then took the average across all meetings. Those averages are displayed in this plot below. I know it’s nonsensical to think of 2.2 cards, but these are averages after all.

How many cards of each digit do we need?

The above plot is the same as the one above that showed the proportion of numbers on display across all meetings. So, let’s make it more useful. What if we consider a different question. How many copies of each digit should come in a standard pack distributed by the church? You probably don’t need twelve of each number because you’re never going to sing hymn 111 four times. But you want more than what the numbers in the above plot show, because it means half the time you won’t have enough. The following plot shows how many cards you’d need to have enough to display the hymns used in the sacrament meetings I have data from.

For the 1s, yes, there was a sacrament meeting that used a whopping eight of them. It was a ward in Maryland in 2017 and they sang Rock of Ages (#111), Again, Our Dear Redeeming Lord (#179), I’m a Pilgrim, I’m a Stranger (#121), and Our Savior’s Love (#113). So, nothing out of the ordinary I don’t think, but it just so happens that they had a lot of 1s. They could theoretically have had a ninth 1 if they had sung With Humble Heart (#171), Jesus of Nazareth, Savior and King (#181), or Behold the Great Redeemer Die (#191) as the sacrament hymn. So I think the most you’d see for any number is nine.

Two sacrament meetings used seven 2s. This was mostly done by singing multiple hymns in the 220–229 range. But the most possible I suppose would be eight, if you sang the rather unusual hymn Hear Thou Our Hymn, O Lord (#222), a sacrament hymn ending in 2, and two others each with two 2s. I saw six threes one time; it was around the 4th of July and they sang America the Beautiful (#338) and My Country, ’Tis of Thee (#339), and both of the other hymns had one 3 in it. Unless you’re singing the Men’s Choir version of High on the Mountain Top (#333) or another hymn in the 330s, it’s only really possible to get just one more, for a maximum of seven.

Because we don’t have hymns 444, 555, etc., you can’t get as many of the other digits. For 4s–9s, you could in theory sing something like 44, 174, 144, and 244, which would be seven, but that would be pretty unusual. The closest I had to maxing out one of these other digits a ward in St. George that sang Redeemer of Israel (#6), As Now We Take the Sacrament (#169), Abide with Me! (#166), and Rejoice, the Lord Is King! (#66) for a total of six 6s. (No other ward has come close with even five 6s!) The other was a ward in 2022 in Maryland that had six 7s by singing As I Search the Holy Scriptures (#277), ’Tis Sweet to Sing the Matchless Love (#177), Oh, Holy Words of Truth and Love (#271) and The Iron Rod (#274). I have no instance of a sacrament meeting that had more than five 0s, 4s,5s,8s, or9`s.

So how many cards should we put in a pack?

In my building, there are six cards for each number. I don’t know if that’s a standard set you’d get from Distribution, but it’s probably similar to many other buildings. While it’s theoretically possible to use all six of the higher numbers, as we’ve seen so far, that is extremely rare. Less than one in 22,573 sacrament meetings. I’ll bet we could get away with putting only five cards for the numbers 4–9 and hardly anyone would ever need more than that. Even three just three of each card would be good 99.2% of the time, which means you’d run out of cards about once in two and a half years! With four, you’d be good except maybe one sacrament meeting every 25 years.

However, though still extremely rare, I do have instances of wards that would have run out of some numbers. In just 14 sacrament meetings (0.06%), a ward needed more than six 1s. And in two sacrament meetings (0.009%), they ran out of 2s.

So, I wonder if we should distribute maybe four 4–9s and 0s, five 3s, and seven 1-2s. That’d be a 13 fewer cards than what comes in a standard pack now and it would still cover almost everything that I’ve seen.

Of course all this goes out the window with the new hymns because they’re temporarily in the thousands, so we’ll need more 1s and 0s. And when the next hymnal comes out, all the numbers will be adjusted again depending on how many hymns we have (we’ll most likely have a hymn 444 for example) and where within the hymnal the sacrament hymns are (I’m thinking in the 200–250 range most likely).