What are the most and least common Sacrament Hymns?

In this post, I dive into just the canonical sacrament hymns (i.e. hymns 169–196).

We’ll start off by looking at sacrament hymns, or rather, the hymn sung immediately before the sacrament is blessed and passed to the congregation. As far as I can tell, §19.3.2 of the General Handbook has the only instruction about sacrament hymns, and it says that “[t]he sacrament hymn should refer to the sacrament itself or to the sacrifice of the Savior.” This instruction is repeated on page 380 of the hymnal.

In the hymnal, sacrament hymns go from 169 (As Now We Take the Sacrament) to 196 (Jesus, Once of Humble Birth), at least according to the Table of Contents. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t specifically state that the sacrament hymn must be one of the 28 within that range, but I think it’s a generally accepted that that’s what that phrase from the handbook means.

In fact, I’ve had church leaders enforce this constraint. I was in a ward where a newly-called music coordinator chose reverent hymns that were outside of that range. After about two weeks, the bishop announced that we’d be singing a different hymn than what was listed on the program and he changed it to a sacrament hymn. Presumably he later explained the policy to the chorister afterwards because we sang “true” sacrament hymns from then on.

As I’ve written already, I Stand All Amazed (193) is the most common hymn overall. So it should come as no surprise that a sacrament hymn is the most common hymn overall. It focuses less on the sacrament itself and more on the Atonement, so it could be used outside of sacrament contexts without feeling out of place. In fact, a quick look at the numbers suggests that it was, in fact, sung as opening and closing hymns at least three times more often than any other sacrament hymn. This may explain why it stands out as the most commonly sung hymn in sacrament meetings.

Frequency

Let’s take a closer look at the sacrament hymns themselves. In theory, if a ward were to systematically cycle through all the sacrament hymns, they’d make it through all of them in a little over six months. However, this plot shows that they’re definitely not all sung equally as often as each other.

Many plots throughout this blog are formatted just like this one here. Hymns that are less common are in the lower left and hymns that are more common are in the upper right. The numbers along the bottom refer to how many times, on average, a ward will sing that hymn within a given year.

Click to show the summarized data

Rank	Title	Number	n	Average per year	Every X years	Every X months	Every X weeks
1	I Stand All Amazed	193	1357	2.683	0.373	4.473	17.892
2	In Humility, Our Savior	172	1278	2.527	0.396	4.750	18.998
3	As Now We Take the Sacrament	169	1225	2.422	0.413	4.955	19.820
4	There Is a Green Hill Far Away	194	1179	2.331	0.429	5.148	20.594
5	Jesus, Once of Humble Birth	196	1178	2.329	0.429	5.153	20.611
6	How Great the Wisdom and the Love	195	1131	2.236	0.447	5.367	21.468
7	God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son	187	1108	2.190	0.457	5.478	21.913
8	God, Our Father, Hear Us Pray	170	1072	2.119	0.472	5.662	22.649
9	O God, the Eternal Father	175	1042	2.060	0.485	5.825	23.301
10	Jesus of Nazareth, Savior and King	181	1039	2.054	0.487	5.842	23.369
11	We’ll Sing All Hail to Jesus’ Name	182	1022	2.020	0.495	5.939	23.757
12	Father in Heaven, We Do Believe	180	1004	1.985	0.504	6.046	24.183
13	With Humble Heart	171	958	1.894	0.528	6.336	25.344
14	Reverently and Meekly Now	185	945	1.868	0.535	6.423	25.693
15	Behold the Great Redeemer Die	191	937	1.852	0.540	6.478	25.912
16	Upon the Cross of Calvary	184	934	1.846	0.542	6.499	25.996
17	In Memory of the Crucified	190	847	1.674	0.597	7.166	28.666
18	He Died! The Great Redeemer Died	192	841	1.663	0.601	7.218	28.870
19	While of These Emblems We Partake	174	837	1.655	0.604	7.252	29.008
20	’Tis Sweet to Sing the Matchless Love	177	783	1.548	0.646	7.752	31.009
21	Thy Will, O Lord, Be Done	188	693	1.370	0.730	8.759	35.036
22	In Remembrance of Thy Suffering	183	672	1.329	0.753	9.033	36.131
23	’Tis Sweet to Sing the Matchless Love	176	663	1.311	0.763	9.155	36.621
24	While of These Emblems We Partake	173	654	1.293	0.773	9.281	37.125
25	O Lord of Hosts	178	553	1.093	0.915	10.976	43.906
26	Again, Our Dear Redeeming Lord	179	472	0.933	1.072	12.860	51.441
27	Again We Meet Around the Board	186	438	0.866	1.155	13.858	55.434
28	O Thou, Before the World Began	189	342	0.676	1.479	17.749	70.994

Joining I Stand All Amazed (193) as the most common ones are In Humility, Our Savior (172), , As Now We Take the Sacrament (#169), There is a Green Hill Far Away (194), and Jesus, Once of Humble Birth (196). These and a few others are each sung around two or three times per year, on average, or once every 4–5 months.

Most sacrament hymns are sung at least once a year per ward, on average, but there were some that were less common. O Lord of Hosts (178), Again, Our Dear Redeeming Lord (179), and Again, We Meet around the Board (186) each averaged somewhere between once every 12 and 14 months. The least frequent sacrament hymn though was O Thou, Before the World Began (189), showing up a little more often than once every 18 months.

Non-sacrament hymns

Once in a while, a ward will indeed sing some other hymn as a sacrament hymn. Many hymns were selected by at least one ward at least one time. Besides the 28 hymns in the 169–196 range, I have attestations of 151 other hymns being sung at least once in the 25,638 sacrament meetings in my database. Of those, two stood out. They are O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown (197) and Gently Raise the Sacred Strain (146). There is good reason for why these two were sung as sacrament hymns: if you look up “Sacrament” in the topical index in the back of the hymnal, it is a list of all the hymns from 169–196, but it also includes these two.

Let’s start with O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown (197). It was sung as a sacrament hymn about once every two years per ward on average. Given that it feels like a sacrament hymn and like an Easter hymn, it is perfectly placed between the more on-the-nose sacrament hymns (i.e. those about the bread and water) and the more traditional Easter hymns (e.g. He is Risen! (199)). Perhaps some music coordinators noticed it in the Index and chose it because of that. But, I could see a music coordinator selecting it because they perhaps thought sacrament hymns went from 169–197 instead of 169–196.

The oddball though is Gently Raise the Sacred Strain (#146). In fact, it was sung as a sacrament hymn about once every 2.2 years per ward, which is only a little less often than O Thou, Before the World Began (189). It is not clear to me why this one is listed in the index as a sacrament hymn, but it’s not grouped together with the other sacrament hymns. The “Prayer and Supplication” category of hymns, which is what this is a part of (and rightfully so, in my opinion), is just before the “Sacrament” category. If it, like O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown (#197), fits into both categories, then I think it should be moved to hymn 168 so that it’s less out of left field. This one really should be thought of as an honorary sacrament hymn. Perhaps we’ll see it included in the “official” list of sacrament hymns in the next hymnal.

Recommendation for the next hymnal

Consider putting Gently Raise the Sacred Strain (#146) immediately before the list of sacrament hymns.

Sacrament hymns sung elsewhere

Finally, we can look at sacrament hymns that were sung at some other point in a sacrament meeting. Unsurprisingly, I Stand All Amazed (193) is at the top, being sung occasionally as an opening hymn and closing hymn. At only once every five years, it’s not particularly common to see it sung this way, but it’s still not unheard of. After that, there are a few others like ’Tis Sweet to Sing the Matchless Love (177) and There Is a Green Hill Far Away (#194) that were also used as one of the other hymns, but it was still quite unusual.

Overall, while singing a specific sacrament hymn elsewhere in the meeting is pretty unusual, the odds of singing any of the sacrament hymns is more common since their frequencies add together. It happened in 363 of the 25,638 sacrament meetings I have data from, or 1.4% of them. That means, on average, a ward might since hymn 169–196 at some other point in the meeting approximately once every year and 6 months.

Conclusion

The findings in this section suggest that were have a strong tradition of singing hymns 169 through 196 in our sacrament meetings immediately before the sacrament itself. Some wards systematically cycle through them, which I believe is a perfectly appropriate thing to do to include the widest variety of hymns to the ward. Other wards pick and choose, which inevitably leads to some favorites being sung more and some lesser-known ones falling through the cracks.

As we’ll see when we look at holidays, wards do not always stick to the table of contents at the beginning of the hymnal when choosing appropriate hymns. However, in the case of the sacrament—which is the most important part of our Sunday worship and the primary reason for Sunday gatherings—it’s clear that we adhere strongly to the recommendation. Nevertheless, the addition of Gently Raise the Sacred Strain (146) shows that there is at least some room for thinking out of the box when selecting sacrament hymns.