Adapting a Shared Hymnal Rather Than Starting Over

The Progressive Baptist Hymnal was not built from scratch. It was issued as a special edition of the Broadman Hymnal, a widely used Baptist songbook already familiar to congregations across denominational lines, adapted and published under the Progressive National Baptist Convention's own name for its own member churches. That choice reflects a practical reality common to hymnal publishing generally: assembling an entirely new body of congregational song from nothing is a massive undertaking, and most denominations, new and old alike, have built their hymnals by selecting, arranging and supplementing from a shared pool of hymns rather than commissioning everything freshly.

What made the 1976 volume distinctly the Progressive National Baptist Convention's own was not that every hymn inside it was new, but that the selection, editing and publication were carried out under the convention's own authority, by its own editor, for its own congregations. A hymnal's significance to a denomination often lies less in the individual hymns it contains, most of which any given congregation may already know from elsewhere, than in the act of a body claiming a specific collection as its standard, in this case fifteen years into the convention's life, at a point when it had grown established enough to make that kind of claim.