A Critique That Took Three Decades to Answer

The hymnal the Church of Sweden approved in 1986 exists because someone, decades earlier, said the previous one was not good enough. In 1958 the poet and critic Rune Par Olofsson published a public critique of the 1937 hymnal then in use, and that critique set in motion a project that would not reach a finished book for twenty eight years. A 1969 committee, led by the theologian and hymn writer Anders Frostenson, took up the work of reshaping both the form and content of the church's hymnody, and Frostenson's own influence on the finished collection was substantial enough that commentators treat him as the dominant force behind the entire undertaking.

That long gestation mattered to what the finished hymnal became. Rather than simply updating the 1937 book's selection with newer titles, the 1986 hymnal represented a genuine reworking of what a Church of Sweden hymnal should contain and how it should be organized, a book meant to function, in its own stated ambition, as more than a hymn collection alone, a broader resource for worship services generally. The Church of Sweden's General Synod gave it final approval on August 29, 1986, closing a process that had opened with one dissatisfied critic nearly thirty years before.