Voices in My Head (The Rick Lee James Podcast) Episode 613: The Simple Hymnal with Jered McKenna

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James. I'm so glad for all of you who are here listening today. Thank you for coming back for another episode. Well, I am so glad to welcome this week Jared McKenna, the creator of The Simple Hymnal. Jared has been taking the old hymns of the church and making them more accessible to modern musicians and congregations, and I'm excited to talk with him today about where this where this project came from and why it matters so much. And I really do think it matters. So Jared, welcome to Voices in My Head. So glad to have you here.

Absolutely. Great to be here.

Well, I wanted to let everybody in the, the listening audience know we planned on doing this a week earlier and it was my mistake because I let my computer run down and I didn't have enough charge last week for us to do our Zoom call together. But In doing that, it gave the hymnal actually a chance to arrive to me in the mail, and so I had a chance to actually try it out for myself and see what it was like. And I'm so glad I did because it really is a simple hymnal. It's wonderful. So I'm looking forward to getting to talk more about it. But just before we do, can you just take a minute or two and just maybe tell the audience just a little bit about who you are? I know they'd love to get to know you more.

Yeah, absolutely, man. So I am trying to think where to start. I'll start here where I'm in Greenville, South Carolina, with my 5 daughters and my wife. We attend a church here in town. It's a Presbyterian church. My wife loves to homeschool. That's her passion. She's doing that. And I do all kinds of things. I'm in the video production business, also in the music production and church music, and I have, uh, lots of different lines out and things that I love to do to help support my family. But I, uh, going backwards, I grew up as a little kid. I was born in Maine. Uh, yeah, Maine. It's, it's a state actually in the United States. Um, And then when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I remember I think it was the '95 or '96 Olympics in Atlanta. I can't remember the exact year, but that's when we moved to Georgia. I think taxes or the economy was a little better in the South or something like that. So I was a little kid, moved to Georgia, and then that's where I did most of my real growing up. Went to a private Christian school, attended a conservative Presbyterian church, and we had the giant red— it's a red hymnal, it's called the Trinity Hymnal. And we would sing every Sunday. I did not know growing up as a kid, I did not know there was such a thing as contemporary Christian music.

Wow.

No, I didn't know you could sing songs about Bible songs with guitars and drums. Um, but what's funny is the church I attended when I was really little was a, uh, a Church of God. It was a conservative charismatic Church of God when I was 5 or 6 years old. But for some reason, my brain didn't process that as, oh, this is American church culture. I was just so little, I didn't know what to think. But they had drums and guitars.

Mm-hmm.

And that was my mom. My mom really likes that sort of expression in Christian worship. But my dad started reading books about history and discovered the Presbyterian Church. So we— when we moved to Georgia, we started attending Presbyterian Church. They had the wooden pews and the pastor had a suit and the little lady was behind the organ. On the stage and I didn't know what it was. I was like, yeah, is this church? I don't know, where's the drums? I like watching the drummer, he was fun. So anyway, so I did, I did all that and then I guess I just kind of forgot that you could like sing worship songs that were with guitars and drums. I just kind of forgot. Um, and so, um, I got a degree in music composition at that college, Georgia Southern University, I met my wife and she was an English major. We got married in college. She suggested I look into church music, uh, as a job because I didn't— you know, as a music composition major, what are you going to do when you graduate, right?

Right.

Compose music.

Compose music. Great.

Um, but so, um, so yeah, I became a worship leader and had to, uh, rediscover the reality that one can lead worship with guitars and drums. The church that hired me in Greenville, South Carolina, they were looking for a musician who could help them add contemporary worship to their worship languages. So they had an organ and a choir, very conservative, very traditional feel. So I ended up being a good fit because of my classical background, especially with music composition. I was sure you know, Bach, uh, fugues and things like this. So I was a nice— I was able to softly introduce contemporary and kind of discover things along with the church. So we were a good fit. So did that for 15 years. I mean, that's been my, uh, full-time, fully immersed job here with my, my family. Had all my kids here in Greenville, South Carolina, uh, and then recently transitioned out because I realized that my personality is better suited, uh, to more of the entrepreneurial— I have all kinds of different things happening. I can publish my hymnal, all that. So just a better fit for me and my personality, my family, uh, to kind of be independent. Independent is what I call it.

So, well, that's great. And yeah, yeah, well, um, I didn't mean to cut you off. Um, you sound like—

no, I'm just saying, here I am. I'm here.

Okay.

Here and, uh, loving it.

Well, good. Well, thank you for sharing that. That actually helps to, to hear some of that background. And as one who recently also went through a transition after nearly 25 years as a music pastor at a church into hospital chaplaincy, transitions can be challenging and fun and full of loss. And I mean, there's just all kinds of things, emotions that go with that. And, and honestly, talking about transitions is actually a good way to talk about hymnals and worship styles and music and things like that, because I think the church is always sort of in a transition mode. We're learning how to create new ways to speak our praise to God and to speak in worship, and sometimes we go backwards a little bit in order to find fresh new things, and so that's one thing that I really appreciate about hymns of the church. Oftentimes they're so old they're new again. There's something there that is rich that we're missing, and it doesn't take too long for people to realize The depth that is found in most hymns are not found in most contemporary worship songs, for better or for worse. They're written to a much more broad audience, and so because of that, they're less focused in on, you know, particular topics, and they're much more general a lot of times, whereas hymns are really trying to do some heavy theological lifting whenever they're being sung. So I was excited when— I'm certain it was probably either Instagram or Facebook— one, they knew what my algorithm was and what I was interested in. And I came across one of your ads actually online, and I was like, that is cool. I'm glad somebody finally thought of that. For years I've thought— because that's, that's what I did as a music pastor so often. I would take hymns that had become a little dusty, I guess I would say, you know, maybe hard for churches to sing, and I would work on writing new arrangements for them in ways that could help people sing and, and help rediscover, and when I saw your ad, I thought, oh wow, uh, somebody did this and put it— a bunch of them together, you know, in a book, and it makes it easily accessible. So after actually having it now for a week or so and actually being able to use it both at the piano and on guitar, it's really great. It's— it really is living up to the name of the Simple Hymnal. Um, so maybe you could just describe it for our listeners. I, I could do it myself, but I'd love to hear from you because you're the one that compiled it put it all together the way it is. It's a great layout, and I, I actually have the one that is the spiral bound, but there are actual like hardcover hymnals as well. But I wanted the spiral so that I could easily set it open on my guitar stand or whatever I was using that day to lead music with. But just tell everybody, if you could, a little bit about the content of the Simple Hymnal and what makes it different from other hymnals that a person might see.

Yeah, no, that's great. You mentioned the spiral bound. That kind of captures the essence. A spiral bound is the way a musician is thinking. A musician is thinking, don't give me that book bound thing. It's not going to stay open, right? So that already tells you a lot about where I'm coming from. I'm a— so over the years, I would take the hymns and I would, like you were saying, I want to make them accessible and something that is— that musically works in a modern contemporary space, but also respects the hymn and isn't trying to make it too foreign or weird or something. So the hymnal, the Simple Hymnal, I think it's around— I think it's around 200 pages, but it's got all the— in my— I guess all of this comes down to my opinion, I suppose, but the strongest hymns with rich biblical theology and historical significance. And it has them in their real key, and then it has a capo key for every hymn, so that you have the one resource you can just pass around. You don't have to go, oh, where's the capo edition or whatever. And then the keys, I, for most of them, I keyed them down for a more, uh, I guess, comfortably singable range for people. Because I'm picturing a, uh, a guy in his living room with his wife and kids, or, or a mom at home with her kids, uh, grabbing a guitar and, and singing some hymns with her kids. Uh, that's not going to be a, like, a strong performative thing. It's going to be more of a living room hymn sing. So I wanted the keys to be comfortable.

Comfortable.

Um, and so yeah, I just, I put them in alphabetical order. Um, and I included, uh, yeah, just all the hymns that really spoke to me over the years. Um, and, uh, and yeah, I made it, I made it spiral bound. That's the kind of the main, the main one that people are interested in because I think people like you find me, you're think, you're like a musician like me, you're thinking this would be handy, this will be really useful.

Yeah, very much so.

So that's it. I mean, it's just 200 pages of the great hymns and capo edition, uh, capo versions of each one.

Yeah, and that, that is especially helpful because sometimes what is daunting to a lot of, uh, I would say probably the majority of like guitar-playing worship pastors, uh, a lot of us don't read music super duper well. Uh, we come to it, we want a chord chart and we want something, and we probably would do more of hymns if we had a way to actually plan. But so often hymn books, they don't have the chords above the staff. You just have the notation. And sometimes it can be challenging, especially if you don't have a lot of time and you want to just kind of pick up the guitar and play something. I think in some ways that might be why in a lot of locations hymns aren't used as much anymore, because they haven't been as accessible or easily played by people who don't have a deep understanding of musical notation and things like that. So It really— I just think it's a great idea the way that you've compiled it together and then given us the capo key and say, just put the capo on 3rd fret and play this same song along with it. So it's great, it really helps. Um, and, and so in, in saying all that, I actually have had a chance to use it, um, in, um, as, as a hospital chaplain now. We have chapel services every week and I'm always looking for easy ways because we don't have like screens to use in PowerPoint or, or Easy Worship or any of the Those are— I know those are old programs, but I can't think of the newer ones right now because I have— it's been a year since I've been doing a music pastor role. But we just don't have the technology in our little chapel at church. But we do have people that come for service every week, and I always am looking for ways to provide music for them. So just today I brought it and was showing it to our piano player, and we were just playing songs out of it at our chapel time, and it was just so easily accessible. So I can testify as somebody who's used it now, that it really is worth getting. And, and I just so appreciate what you've done. So I wanted to, to dive a little bit deeper. We've kind of dealt with the what the hymnal is, the Simple Hymnal, and, and I think people can understand on one side's the original key, the other side is the, the guitar key with the capo number and all that. So it's really simple to use. Um, I'm curious what your opinion is about this. A few years ago, um, I wrote an article called "Are Hymn Books the MySpace of the Church?" And basically the premise of the article was, um, MySpace was once all of a sudden this dominant platform on the internet, you know, before Facebook. It was like the way everybody communicated. There wasn't Facebook, there wasn't Twitter, there wasn't Instagram, there wasn't all this stuff that we now have. And so MySpace just exploded. Everybody had a MySpace page, it seemed like. Now, soon after, just a few years, while it being like the biggest thing on the planet, it seemed like, on the internet, it started to kind of slowly fade away and then was gone. And at the time I wrote the article, there was— MySpace was pretty much defunct. Like, it was still there, you could look at it, some people still went to it. I'm not sure why, but it was still there. And there was talk of, oh, maybe it's gonna make a resurgence, you know, maybe it'll come back. Somebody's, you know, Ashton Kutcher or somebody bought it, you know, years ago, and it's going to be this whole new thing. I think now it's completely defunct. I don't even think it exists, you know, at all in the form. But at the time, I had wondered— I'd heard a lot of rumbling about people are coming back to hymns, they're using hymn books more, partially because it's such an old idea. But the idea of actually being able to hold something in your hands, like when you're in a worship setting, like a hymn book, you know, so often the younger generation, they're used to seeing a screen. And one Sunday, whenever I was in a worship service, all our power went out at church on all of our screens and everything. And we did have hymnals in the rack, and so I just started calling out hymn numbers. And it was interesting to watch because kids had no idea what to do with them. And so parents are showing kids, you know, well, it's this page number he just called out, you got to turn here, and you got to open the book to the right page, because everything had been just given on the screen like that. And it was kind of neat to see their reaction to it. So my question to you is, are you sensing, is especially as you're putting the Simple Hymnal out, I'm curious about what kind of response you're getting to it. And if you're hearing some similar things that like our church is really embracing hymnals, not just hymns, but maybe even hymnals in a way that they haven't in the past, just because they're almost feeling like something new and something needed again. I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

Yeah, no, that's, that's a big, big fun and, and a powerful topic. Um, you know, it's funny, I, uh, one of the last things I did before I transitioned off staff at the church was I went with, uh, my, uh, assistant to the Getty— the Getty Music Conference. It's called Sing! It's called Sing! with an exclamation point, up in Nashville, Tennessee. And, uh, this was last year, maybe two years ago. They were pushing their hymnal. So Keith and Kristen Getty, um, big name in the contemporary church hymn, contemporary hymns world, uh, they, they released their big hymnal. So, um, they, and they do a great job. They have the 4 parts, they notated the 4 parts and put the chord symbols above for many, if maybe all, and they include, um their, you know, their songs that are, that they own the rights to. So I didn't think about that, but that's a huge testament to, I think, a really rich movement that's kind of signaling that people are hungry for the hymns. Now, I lead worship, help out now and lead worship for a couple of churches, and one of them sings mostly hymns, and the other one sings mostly modern contemporary. And modern contemporary worship music has a lot of great stuff, and I, and I love it, but I think there is a, a hole, an empty space being left if you know— if you're not singing one or two hymns at least. Um, not only do the old hymns, uh, resonate with with a massive portion of the population who sang the hymns and is longing to sing them again. They're also excellent, and they're very singable in a unique way that modern contemporary worship is not trying to do. And that's okay, no shade. I'm just saying it's a different thing.

Yeah.

So that the song we sing for New Year's, Auld Lang Syne— should auld acquaintance be forgot— You know, when, when people start singing that on New Year's, everyone sings. It's easy, the melody's strong, it's got interesting deep words, and it's— it builds community and everyone just joins in and sings. Okay, that's the hymn. That's a hymn effect. That's the hymn effect. Um, so that's something that, uh, a lot of modern churches, I, I really think they would do well to start with one, maybe two hymns a Sunday work it into your set, because I think people are longing for that. The young folks, they're not thinking, oh, oh, an old hymn. There's a sliver of generation, maybe— I don't know what the ages would be— maybe there's a tiny sliver who thinks, ugh, these old hymns, I wish we only sang contemporary. Maybe it's a sliver of population, but the vast majority of people are looking for a good balance of rich, theologically rich robust melodies to sing, as well as more reflective and more contemporary sounds as well. Have a mix of those. So my hymnal, uh, as I was trying to do that myself, construct worship services that celebrated the old and the new, the traditional and the contemporary, I still wanted to encase them in a cohesive language, a sort of style or vibe that kind of brought it all together. Because, right, If you have a drum set and a guitar and then you switch over to an organ, it's a little jarring and it seems gimmicky, and there's no need for that because you just adapt. You can adapt the hymn to a contemporary feel and sound. So I think the people in the church that I was serving weren't desperately hungry to sing the bass part or the tenor part or the alto part. Right. That wasn't their big, big thing. It was the melody of the hymn and the rich words. That's what mattered.

Right.

So I said, okay, we can do this. Let's, let me take it back to college where I was, I was lead, I was reading lead sheet music for jazz ensemble. So in jazz ensemble, there's, everyone knows there's a book called The Fake Book, uh, that has melodies of famous jazz standards and the chords. And you just throw those books at jazz musicians and say, go play a 2-hour set at the coffee shop, right? And so it's just, you know, a million songs each on one page, and it's, it's everything you need. Because as a jazz musician, you're taught how to improvise around samba, you know, light jazz, different styles. You know how to comp, right? In my case, the piano or guitarist, how to strum to to play certain melodies, certain rhythms and styles. All you need is a chord and the melody and you're good. You could play for hours.

Mm-hmm.

So anyway, that's what inspired me to put together these hymns that I made arrangements over the past 15 years, and then I just decided to throw them all together and offer the church another resource to help facilitate the resurgence and the revitalization of hymns, like you were saying.

Well, yeah, and I wanted to actually bring up too, and I so appreciate that you did that for your congregations and are still doing that. One thing that surprises people when I talk to them about hymns is I'll talk to them about, you know, if you ever look in a hymn book, often you will see like the words were written in this year, and then maybe 75, 100, 150 years later you see the music. You know, come along. And in the back of most hymnals, they have these meter patterns. Like, you might see 8.6.8.6, you know, something like that.

Yes.

And so I was actually just explaining it to somebody today at one of our services. I said, you know, the interesting thing about hymnals that gets lost is they were intended to be versatile and used with multiple musical styles. And part of it is like the meter for that. So that 6.8.6.8, that was the number of syllables in each line. And then I showed him, I had a guitar in my hand, I said, look, I can take this tune, and I sang along. I said, now I'm going to sing it to the tune of Amazing Grace, and it fits exactly because it's got that same meter, you know. Um, and one thing that I really love about hymns and the way they were written, I think they were purposefully written and artfully written, um, to be versatile in so many different settings. And with that in mind, You can easily take many hymns and put them to very modern feeling music, and it's going to sound like it was just written this year, but it's actually a song that's probably 300, 400 years old sometimes, you know, or maybe even older than that. So I appreciate that. I think the Simple Hymnal is helping us to recapture that in some ways. I don't know that tones of music and particular arrangements of notes are necessarily sacred things. I think God lets us rearrange those to reflect what's on our heart, you know, in the moments. Um, and I was talking to somebody recently, we were having a discussion about the Book of Psalms and how they all were originally music, but we don't have the original music to the Psalms, we just have the words. And, and it seems like if God wanted to preserve the music for all time, God would have preserved that in some way. But what got preserved was these, these amazing Psalms that are songs, and it enables us as the people of God today, more than 2,000 years later, to put our own heart into the music that we're singing these words, you know. So I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say to you with my, my long, uh, explanation here is I feel like you're helping us to do that. I feel like you're helping us to sing more effectively, and I think you're helping us see that hymns really can be something very flexible musically and can actually breed a lot of creativity among younger musicians and people who want to try something innovative and new. You can still do that while using hymns. So, uh, all that is to say, thank you. Thank you for helping us in that journey. I just think it's really important, and I'm excited about this new hymnal. So I'm so glad we had a chance to share about it a little bit. Tonight. So now, um, before, uh, we end our time together this evening, and I want to let everybody know I'll be, uh, putting links in the, the show so they can find the Simple Hymnal online. So if you're listening to the podcast, you can just kind of click on it, and should the technology work the way it's supposed to, you'll go right to the web page where it's at. Um, you'll have to forgive me, I didn't look just before we started, but I was thinking of a couple things, two questions, uh, well, really one question and then one other thing. Is there a digital version of of the Simple Hymnal that if somebody didn't, uh, wanted to just use it on their tablet or something, is there a digital version? I, I can't honestly remember if that was an option on the site.

Yeah, absolutely. There's the spiral bound, which is the main flagship, I guess you could say, the most useful one. And then there's also a large PDF download you can do, because as a worship leader at church, I needed to print these things off. Yeah, uh, make marks on them and even maybe change a chord or two. And then there's a digital— there's a PDF plus online version where you get access to a website where each of the PDFs is available and searchable by, you know, index searchable and all that stuff. So there's, there's all kinds of— oh, there's a Christmas edition as well. So if you just want that, you can go, go for that as well. So yeah, lots of different, lots of different options.

Fantastic. That was the other thing I was going to bring up was I wanted to make sure you let everybody know about the Christmas edition as well, because sometimes Christmas hymns are kind of difficult to play. And it's good to have simple arrangements of things that can be kind of complicated sometimes. So I'm grateful for that. Well, is there anything that we have— we've left out tonight in our conversation that you'd just like our listeners to know about regarding the Simple Hymnal or just any other endeavors that you have going on? I know you're a very entrepreneurial-minded person.

Well, yeah, you know, I just want to say that a recurring comment I get on my Facebook ad, the video that I'm— that's on Facebook, you know, marketing my book, my hymnal, is sometimes people will say, are you saying, um, four-part hymns are bad, or are you trying to get rid of four-part singing? Something like that. I love the four-part hymnal, and I, I, again, like I was saying earlier, it's, it, it's something I love, and it can part of a broader buffet of ways that we express music. I sang in an a cappella Renaissance sacred music choir in college. We toured Europe.

I love—

there's nothing more beautiful than just voices singing in harmony, four-part harmony. Beautiful. I love it. But those hymn arrangements, even if they're really popular, are just one expression of what is essentially a melody and a harmony. And there are lots of ways that, that we can adapt these hymns, like you've been saying, so that they speak to a broader context of people, so more people can be reached with these wonderful truths that we sing about. So I love the old hymnals, I love singing four-part, and I love improvising over lead sheets. You can love them both.

Yeah, I get that. Yes, wonderful. Well, thank you for clarifying that too. So, well, thank you everybody for listening to Voices in My Head. I'm so glad to have you here this week. And, and Jared, I'm so glad we were able to work it out and that I didn't goof up and leave my computer uncharged, uh, before the conversation this week. I wish you all the best, and, and I hope we can do this again sometime. And I'll look forward to maybe another conversation when volume 2 comes out, you know, of the Simple Hymnal, because if there's one thing we know, there seems to be a bottomless supply of hymns for sure. So glad to have that. So thank you everybody for tuning in and being a part of this show, and we'll see you next time. God bless.

Thanks, Rick.