On the 25th floor of the Church Office Building with the Salt Lake Valley sprawling below, David V. Een (’25) sang hymns.
“This really is the Lord’s glorious work of art,” Een says of his experience working on the new global hymnbook for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Een, a film major and music minor at BYU, sang bass in a quartet of vocalists recording hymns in English to help congregations familiarize themselves with the new hymns.
As they performed, the singers were guided by the question “How can we make this the best product for the whole congregation?” During one recording session the quartet felt the tempo of a song was too slow. “The congregation isn’t going to be able to perform this as unitedly,” Een thought. They sent the hymn back, and the tempo was adjusted to better suit a congregation.
Een joined hundreds of others—many with BYU connections—working on the new hymnbook, from translators and musicians to programmers and composers.
Sonja Sperling Poulter, director of BYU Women’s Chorus, serves as a member of the hymn selection committee. The committee’s decisions about which hymns to include, says Poulter, come after study and prayer. It’s “a very powerful experience to know that when the Lord has spoken, this is how it needs to be,” she says.
“The sacred music of the Church is one of the most powerful tools we have, of anything, to bear witness of Jesus,” says Poulter.
“In each step we see the Holy Ghost guide us,” says Calvin J. Westfall (BA ’20, MA ’22), a BYU alum who now works for the Church. Westfall works with translation teams to reproduce the essence of the songs into other languages. “The whole point of the new collection is to unify the Saints through music,” he says. “I love knowing that the song that I’m working on in Spanish will be the same one that I’ll be singing in English.”
The new hymnbook is expected to be available in 50 languages by 2030. Twenty-two songs have been released in English. “To do this in the way that we’ve been asked to do it at the speed we’ve been asked to do it would be impossible in any other organization,” Westfall adds. “Every day I feel the Spirit, and I know it’s the Lord’s work.”
