When I was holding the meetings in a one-room country schoolhouse eight miles west of Eugene, Oregon, in July and August, 1933, which resulted in the start of the Philadelphia era of the Church of God, a local 80-year-old Bible student refused to join in singing the hymns.

 

       Having no hymnal of our own I was forced to use one of the somewhat thin paperback Protestant song books. The elderly Bible scholar said, "It is just as sinful to sing a lie as to tell one." I had to agree. For some time I had realized that many of the standard hymnals contained songs that were unscriptural.

       It is, however, scriptural to sing hymns. Jesus sang hymns. After His last Passover, it is recorded, "And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the Mount of Olives" (Matthew 26:30). I knew that the Psalms were, in fact, songs—or hymns. It was clear in my mind that God's people should sing God's inspired words, not man's uninspired and often unscriptural words. But the Bible has not preserved nor revealed to us the music. God has left it to us to compose the music.

 

       This was very much on my mind. One day I heard my youngest brother, Dwight, play on the piano a piece he had composed. It was not four-part harmony, but was in the style of a four-part harmony hymn. I was intrigued. It had quality and character. I had known from the time my brother was a small child that he had a special musical talent. I immediately asked him to compose two or three hymns, setting words from the Psalms to music. It took some little time, but they were good.

 

       When we moved to Pasadena to found Ambassador College, in 1947, I asked my brother to devote full time to setting the words of Psalms—and/or any other Scripture—to music in the four-part harmony style of hymns. For some little time the Church, then small, sang the first 12 or 15 hymns that had been composed. The Church grew, and so did the number of hymns sung with God's own inspired words.

 

       When we were able to print our first Church of God hymnal, not yet having a sufficient number of our own new hymns we filled out our comparatively small hymnals with well-known Protestant hymns whose words were not non-scriptural—even having to change the words in a few instances. Gradually through the years succeeding editions of our hymnal have contained fewer and fewer of the old Protestant hymns, and more and more of those composed by my brother. For the past few years our congregations have been singing our own hymns almost entirely.

 

       Now, at last, the time has come when we can omit the old Protestant hymns almost altogether, with more new hymns of our own added. We have retained two national hymns, and a few others whose words are proper, which we feel our congregations would want to sing occasionally.

 

       It is, indeed, a happy achievement to have, at last, God's own hymnal for God's own Church. It is a happy event, also, that we now produce the hymnal with hard covers, and make them available to members to have in their own homes. I feel this is another milestone for God's Church.