Hymnwriters Conference
The LCMS' Worship ministry is pleased to announce a Lutheran Hymnwriters Conference Jan. 27-29, 2013, at Toddhall Retreat Center in Columbia, Ill. (1/2 hour from downtown St. Louis). This conference will educate, encourage and enlighten LCMS hymnwriters as they develop poetically sound and evangelically rich hymns for use in our churches. The conference will include opportunities for new hymnwriters to connect and collaborate and also receive feedback and instruction from published hymnwriters. Our time together will be framed according to the church’s orders for daily prayer with ample time for reflection, visiting and singing. Representatives of Concordia Publishing House (CPH) also will attend the conference.
Ideal candidates for this conference are hymnists who are:
- currently members in good standing of LCMS congregations;
- actively engaged in writing hymns;
- desiring to have hymns published that could be used in LCMS congregations to glorify the blessed Trinity and to build up the body of Christ;
- wanting to communicate with like-minded writers; and
- willing to share their God-given gifts with the church at large.
Prospective conference participants are asked to provide three hymn texts. A five-person team will review the works submitted in order to select up to 30 participants whose expenses will be underwritten by a generous grant from the Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation.
The process to submit work to be reviewed is as follows:
No later than Oct. 15, email your three hymns in separate PDFs to william.weedon@lcms.org. These are to be original works. One should be for a feast day from the church’s calendar and the other two hymns on any topic or pericope of your own choosing (for example, for occasions such as weddings, church anniversaries, ordinations; or for topics such as Christian education, the home, the Sacrament of the Altar; or a biblical text, particularly those without many hymns written for them).
Make sure your name and email address appear on all three hymns, and indicate the feast, occasion or pericope for which it is intended (example: for Nativity of St. John the Baptist, on 1 Kings 19, etc.).
Please share this conference information with aspiring hymnwriters!
The review team will contact all selected candidates no later than Dec. 11 to confirm attendance. The information submitted by those who are not selected to attend the conference will be deleted from our files in order to minimize any concerns about safeguarding original works as well as the personal information provided.
It is our prayer that this conference will be a blessing to all who attend and will be another step in the never-ending joy of expanding the church’s wondrous treasury of song.