Can a Song Written Last Year Be a Hymn?

I love a lot of contemporary Christian music. I want to say that plainly before anything else, because it’s easy for a conversation about “what makes a real hymn” to sound like a put-down of everything written after 1900.

But that’s not where my head is. Some of the most theologically serious, congregation-shaping songs of the last few decades deserve to be called hymns in the fullest sense of the word — and some genuinely wonderful worship music was never trying to be a hymn at all. Both things can be true, and knowing the difference actually helps you appreciate each one on its own terms.

So what earns a song the title “hymn,” regardless of when it was written?

A hymn is built to be sung by everyone, not performed for anyone — written in a steady, repeating meter, with either a simply melody or four-part harmony that a whole room can manage. Hymns speak less about how I feel in this moment and more about who God is, always and for everyone. It’s poetry meant to teach as much as to move you. As my father, Rev. Dr. Ralph Milligan, wrote in his preface to the Hymnbook Treasures calendar, “It’s commonly known that most Christians learn more about the faith from hymn singing than from preaching or Bible study.”

There’s also something structural and formal about most hymns, compared to worship songs through the ages. With hymns, it’s all about the verse, even though some include a refrain. Many worship songs were intended for radio or streaming first, and so use popular structures like verse-chorus-bridge. As mentioned elsewhere, hymns usually have the formality of metrical poetry, which lends them to being paired with any tune that shares that meter. It’s the doctrine, not the arrangement, doing the heavy lifting. With most worship songs, the words and tune were built as an integral, inseparable pairing.

By that standard, plenty of songs written in your lifetime and mine genuinely qualify as hymns. Keith Getty and Stuart Townend have spent the last twenty-five years deliberately writing what they call “modern hymns” — songs like “In Christ Alone” and “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” built in strict meter, dense with Scripture, meant for a whole congregation to sing together rather than watch someone else perform. That’s not an accident. It’s the explicit goal of their songwriting.

In fact, “In Christ Alone” gave us a story that is so on point. In 2013, a hymnal committee for a major Protestant denomination wanted to include the song in their new hymnal — but asked Getty and Townend to change one line. The original reads, “Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The committee wanted “the love of God was magnified” instead.  It was theologically gentler and easier to sing without flinching at the horror of a crucifixion. In this case, Getty and Townend stuck with their convictions and said no. They believed the line was essential to the gospel the song was telling. So the committee rejected the hymn for their new hymnbook.

Sound familiar? It’s almost exactly what happened to Charles Wesley two and a half centuries earlier, when his own brother, John, left “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” out of the definitive Methodist hymnal because its language felt too intimate for public worship. Different centuries, different denominations, the same conviction on both sides of the disagreement: the exact, doctrinal words of a hymn matter enough to fight over. That, more than any date on a calendar, is a sign you’re looking at a real hymn.

Plenty of wonderful worship music, on the other hand, isn’t reaching for any of that, and it doesn’t need to. A contemporary worship song, meant to be listened to on the way to work or in a time of quiet reflection, as well as in worship, often works best when sung by one voice over a swelling instrumental track. Or sometimes they’re written and scored specifically to evoke an emotion or response, rather than focusing on a fixed meter or harmonies built for a choir. That’s a different work of art for a different moment.  Neither form of art is greater nor lesser. This kind of worship music is just not building toward the same thing a hymn is.

And that leaves us with the things that I appreciate about every hymn in the Hymnbook Treasures calendar: how was it built to carry a doctrinal truth about God, in a poetic form, and in words a whole room could sing together, long after the person who wrote them is gone. By that measure, many hymns are centuries years old, while other hymns are still youngsters.

The Hymnbook Treasures calendar makes it easy to enjoy a year's worth of hymns that have stood the test of time, one day at a time.