When I introduce myself as a hymn writer the usual response is ‘I thought they were dead’. Well I wasn’t last time I checked!

There are other current Methodist writers, three Local Preachers among them, Lillian Butler, Marjorie Dobson and Marguerite Kendrick. These are people I know personally. There are certainly others. So Hymn writing is still very much alive, though often what we sing from Sunday to Sunday doesn’t offer much evidence of the fact.

But why have new hymns? Aren’t there enough anyway? Well even many of the so-called new hymns and worship songs that are available use language which would not have been out of place fifty or even a hundred years ago. We live in a world of lasers and global warming, of inter-faith dialogue and terrorism. So the world has moved on and language changes. God may be timeless, but theology is dynamic. Those within, let alone outside the church, are not so familiar with religious language as was once the case.

So what does a writer today do? How can hymns for today be written? Let me share my own story and encourage you to explore hymns and songs that are really new, written for a new century and even to write your own.

My writing began over twenty five years ago. As I entered ministerial training with a scientific background I didn’t understand the theology, but I found if I re-expressed it in poetry it began to make sense. It was pretty awful poetry! I found that I could write in verse with rhyme. This had two consequences. The words could be sung but they tended to be archaic. I was asked by Bernard Braley, a Local Preacher, but also Director of Stainer & Bell Publishers if I had thought of writing in (then) twentieth century language. He began to teach me how to write. There were certain ground rules:

• The language I used should be language in everyday use today.
• ‘Thees’ and ‘thous’ were out.
• Inclusive language must be used when referring to people – ‘man’ in ordinary use no longer includes women, so that went
• Old truths should be expressed in new ways.
• New themes should be addressed

That provided a starting point. I began to write my first up to date hymn – you can find it on HymnQuest or in Blinded by the Dazzle – ‘When life’s crippled, flawed and faulted’. Some of the language in that feels dated now just 25 years on. At the time it was used by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland for World AIDS Day services.

That’s the starting point, but how do I write? Where does the inspiration come from?

When I was first asked these questions I didn’t really know the answers. I just wrote without thinking about the process. I began to analyse what I did. The starting points can vary greatly. Lots of different things have triggered me off: a phrase that someone has used in conversation, a line in a pop song, an image of devastation on the TV, a passage of scripture, part of the dialogue of a TV soap. Perhaps I should give you a few of examples.

Psalm 131, verse 2 goes like this: ‘...I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me’. The image is of Israel like a child on its mother’s knee. I first came across this not in the Bible but in a lovely worship song by John Michael Talbot. The image fascinated me. I began to think about images of childhood, the child learning to walk, taking its first shaky footsteps, then being let go, still within reach of mum. The words began to form:

God, you hold me like a mother,
Safely on her knee;
God, you hold me like a mother,
Close to you but free.
© 1995 Stainer & Bell Ltd & The Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes

Children can sing this as well as adults and George Bexon has written a lovely tune for it that you can find in Big Blue Planet. Why did I write it? Plain inspiration to begin with, but there is so little to sing about God’s parenthood in language for all ages; so little for Mothering Sunday.

An iconic moment for us all was 9/11. I don’t know how long we’ll go on saying that, but it is certainly still relevant today. I remember the images on TV, thinking that I was watching a disaster movie, then realising this was real. It became clear that terrorism had been involved and within hours there was an atmosphere of ‘them and us’ developing. This was written spontaneously:

God’s on our side, and God will grieve
at carnage, loss and death;
for Jesus wept, and we will weep,
with every grieving breath.

I imagined we would soon be hearing words like that and we did. But I wanted to provide a counter. We live in one world. Our neighbours are our sisters and brothers and without denying the enormity of what we had seen, I felt and wrote:

God’s on their side, the enemy,
the ones we would despise;
© Stainer & Bell Ltd 2001

The hymn, eventually four verses, was posted on the web-site of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada inside twenty four hours of the event. It was used extensively, appeared in the Methodist Prayer Handbook and was included in a commemorative collection in the USA the following year. This sort of writing is not new. Charles Wesley wrote hymns on the Lisbon earthquake, but until the writing of Fred Kaan, Brian Wren and, latterly, John Bell, we avoided such issues as being too dangerous or may be even too political. We like a cosy God. The Psalms point in another direction altogether.

How did these words come together, what processes were involved? Following the TV image the opening lines of the first and second verse came to me. I then had to build up the rest. The metre, pattern and rhythm were dictated by the words rather than chosen. Then the hymn was built up piecemeal by asking myself what sort of words fitted the circumstances: carnage, loss, grieving, weeping, vengeance. These were woven into the text making sure that the metre was maintained and that the flow of language made sense. The completed text could be sung to the tune of ‘Amazing Grace’ which made it immediately accessible.

On 23 June, 2004 the BBC reported that the ‘Birth cry’ of the cosmos had been heard as astronomers had recaptured the sounds of the early Universe, showing it was born, not with a bang, but with a quiet whisper that became a dull roar. Over the first million years, the music of the cosmos changed from a bright major chord to a sombre minor one.  My fascination with the stars started when I was a child. Later I read the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which Douglas Adams had invented a drink called a ‘pan-galactic gargle blaster’. These images, thoughts and words swirled around in my mind. Genesis 1 pictures the Spirit, in Hebrew ruach, breath of God moving over the face of the waters. I worked on the words beginning to form them into phrases, lines, verses beginning like this:

Whispers rippled through the cosmos,
pan-galactic breath of God;
marking paths of whirling planets,
stellar strings where stars first trod.
© Stainer & Bell Ltd 2006

These few chance words and remembered phrases had produced the opening lines of a hymn for my new collection (Reclaiming Praise, Stainer & Bell Ltd., 2006). The words and images, though rooted in Genesis, spoke in the language of the 21st century.

That’s why I write and how I write. The challenge is for you, people who work creatively week by week with images and words as preachers, to turn your hand to verse, to hymns. It’s clear that people remember Charles Wesley’s hymns better than John Wesley’s sermons, so let’s go on singing the gospel into people’s hearts and minds. After all, it’s more effective!

Rev Dr Andrew Pratt is a Methodist Minister and Tutor at Hartley College. He has written over 500 hymns and has three published collections, the most recent being Reclaiming Praise.  Andrew edits the Hymn Society Bulletin, is Deputy Chair of the Pratt Green Trust and a Director of Stainer & Bell Ltd.