The whole business started with hymns — or, more accurately, without them. When you work at one church and attend another Sunday mornings, inevitably, you start to draw comparisons between the two, and in my case, those comparisons mostly took the form of frustration with the lack of hymns at the church I attend. I knew that the worship, like everything else, was meant to cater to a contemporary crowd, but surely we could fit "Be Thou My Vision" or "A Mighty Fortress" in somewhere? Eventually, my frustration expanded into noticing something else: that we seemed to repeat the same songs with astonishing frequency, sometimes to the point where it seemed that the same songs reappeared every week or two. Meanwhile, the church were I work had hymns every week and, aside from the Choral Introit, seemed to repeat songs perhaps once every two or three months at most.

As I thought about (and grumbled about) this more, I began to wonder if the two things were connected. Was it possible that churches with more traditional worship styles — focusing mostly on hymns, possibly using hymnals, and led by a choir or a single instrument — tended to repeat songs less frequently than churches with a more modern worship style — marked by a focus on contemporary worship songs and led by a full band? There seemed to be only one way to find out.

It was time to do some statistics.

I've Heard This One Before: A Study in Church Music Repetition

Methods

Before I could do statistics, of course, I had to collect data to work with. Over a period from March 31, 2023 to March 31, 2024, I kept track of the music played at eight churches, plus the Bible study my family attends (which opens with worship like a church would). These churches included a Baptist church, a Lutheran church, two United Methodist churches, and four non-denominational churches, plus, again, the Bible study. The churches were chosen for a variety of reasons, mostly based on familiarity, location (I mostly chose churches located close to me), and whether or not they posted their bulletins on their websites or offered a livestream of their Sunday services. I also assigned each church a "modernity rating" on a scale of 1–5, with the levels as follows:

1. Highly Traditional (primarily uses hymns, led by a single instrument or choir)
2. Semi-Traditional (mixed hymns and contemporary songs, led by a single instrument or choir)
3. Neutral (mixed hymns and contemporary songs, led by an acoustic band)
4. Semi-Modern (mixed hymns and contemporary songs, led by a full band)
5. Highly Modern (primarily uses contemporary songs, led by a full band)

Each week, I recorded which songs each church had sung, either as a repeat of a past song or as a new entry on the list. I did miss a few weeks at some churches, either because the church didn't meet or because it didn't post a livestream or bulletin. I also didn't include midweek services, only Sunday services, and I treated identical services (such as Christmas Eve services offered at multiple times) as a single event.

Caveats

I will say before I get any further that this was a limited study with a small sample size. In order to do this really scientifically, I should have surveyed a larger group of churches and made sure to include multiple of every denomination. However, as this was a spare-time project and I am only human, nine churches was pretty much the limit of what I could track.

Also possibly skewing the data a little bit is the fact that some people in the Bible study found out about this survey midway through. Due to how the Bible study does worship (with songs being chosen during worship at the request of the participants), knowledge of my survey may have slightly affected how some people selected songs. However, I do not think enough people were aware of this for it to have a major impact on the chosen songs.

Now, with those grains of salt in mind, let's move on to my findings.

Data & Results

Because this is a blog post and not a full scientific report, I'm going to sum up the relevant data in the following chart. I've also created an Excel file of all my data, which you can get by clicking here, in case that interests you.

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Just from the chart, some trends should be noticeable. Notably, the church with the highest modernity rating has the lowest number of songs and the second-highest average repetition and probability of repetition, while the churches with the lowest modernity rating have higher numbers of individual songs and lower rates of repetition. (An additional fun fact: the church with the lowest average repetition and probability of repetition is the one where I work — is it any surprise that I felt like the church where I attend repeats a lot in comparison?)

However, a graphic is worth a thousand words (as the saying almost goes), and it's not statistics if you don't have a chart or two to compare some variables. I started out by comparing the churches' modernity ratings with the number of individual songs sung at each one.

As you can see, the number of individual songs generally decreases the higher the church's modernity rating is. The trendline isn't a perfect fit, but it's generally pretty close, and even the main outlier fits the overall trend.

Next, I compared the modernity rating to the average repetition. For purposes of this chart, "average" refers to the mean, rather than the median or mode.

Here, we see that as the church's modernity rating goes up, so does the average repetition. The most traditional churches all have an average repetition of less than twice in fifty or fifty-two services, while the most modern church has an average repetition of 3.08, the second-highest here. Again, it's not a perfect fit — the highest average repetition actually goes to a Neutral-rated church — but the hypothesis generally holds.

Finally, just for fun, I compared the churches' modernity rating to the probability that any given song will be repeated.

This one looks a lot like the chart showing the average repetition, though here the numbers are a lot more spread out. Notably, there's a much greater difference between the probability of repetition at the most traditional churches, with two up in the area of 42% or 46% chance of repetition and one all the way down at a 1% chance of repetition (the lowest on the chart). Why? For one thing, Baptist A and Lutheran A (the two very traditional churches with a high probability of repetition) both have a much higher total number of songs sung (228 and 327, respectively) in comparison with the number of individual songs they sing. Additionally, both churches seem to have specific songs that they sing a lot at certain times of year or during particular parts of the service, which raises the overall probability that songs will be repeated.

It's also notable that the two Methodist churches have both the lowest average repetition and the lowest probability of repetition. Apparently, if you don't want to sing the same songs over and over, you should become a Methodist . . .

Also, just for fun, here's the most repeated song from each church.

• Baptist A: "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" (7 times)
• Bible Study: "The River" (11 times)
• Lutheran A: "Lamb of God" (35 times — but they rarely repeated songs otherwise!)
• Non-Denominational A: "Glorious Ruins" and "Rest on Us" (10 times)
• Non-Denominational B: "Holy Forever" (7 times)
• Non-Denominational C: "Be Glad" and "I've Witnessed It" (8 times)
• Non-Denominational D: "Holy Forever" and "King of Glory" (8 times)
• UMC A: "Holy, Holy, Holy" (6 times)
• UMC B: "Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed" (3 times)

Potential Further Studies

While my comment about becoming a Methodist to avoid repeating songs was mostly a joke, it would be interesting to do a larger version of this study and see how denominational differences affect how often songs are repeated. Do all Methodist churches have a low average song repetition, or is it just the two that I happen to have chosen? Would other Baptist and Lutheran churches behave similarly to the ones I studied, or are those two actually outliers?

Additionally, my study didn't really get into why more traditional churches repeat songs less and why more modern churches repeat more. (That's not a question statistics can answer.) I have some guesses about why the two correlate — including the churches' goals of worship, observation of the liturgical calendar, and financial reasons — but nothing solid. (If any church worship leaders happen to be reading this and want to offer insight in the comments, feel free!)

Both of these would be interesting to pursue in future, but neither is a high priority for me at the moment.

Final Conclusions

The goal of this study was that I would either debunk my frustrations with the church I attend or prove myself justified in those frustrations. I ended up doing the latter; the data suggest that more modern churches often (though not always) draw from a smaller pool of songs and tend to repeat songs more. That said, the repetition isn't nearly as much as I thought when I started doing the study — at the most, songs typically appear once every month and a half or two months, not every other week.

What are your thoughts on this study? Do you have any insights of your own to add? Please feel free to share them in the comments.
Thanks for reading!

October 2024 Doings!

Hello, friends! October was a weird month — the first half was honestly fairly chill aside from work stress, and then we hit the weekend of the 19th and everything happened at once. As of a result, I have been very tired. But the blog must go on, so let's review this month's Doings!

Writing!

• I intended for my writing time this month to go towards two short stories and the next Bastian Dennel book. That . . . did not go as planned. I was still very productive! Just not on the projects I intended to write!
• I spent the first week and a half of the month sorting through ideas for the two short stories, even going so far as to outline one fairly extensively and start a different one. Then I was reminded of another project that I had semi-committed to in the past and needed to make up my mind about, so I started poking at ideas for that . . .
• And, thanks to a comment from a friend, I stumbled upon a particular concept, fell in love, and decided to chase the plot rabbit until it stopped running, as I had to write the thing eventually, and the more I do now, the less I had to do later.
• The plot rabbit is still running, and it's produced several more bunnies . . . one of which did turn into a short story for the writing challenge I was doing this month, so there's that. I haven't started writing the book yet, but I've been doing a lot of brainstorming and planning of character, worldbuilding, and plot stuff. It's a Chinese-inspired setting, but not ancient China, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
• Otherwise, I continued writing my just-for-fun side project in my spare time, and I wrote a bit more of my D&D tournament arc. It's still not finished, but I've managed to stay a couple sessions' worth of material ahead of the game, so I count that as a win.
• The other big writing news of the month was that I once more had a table at Eat Local, Read Local, an author event held by one of the libraries in the area. That was tiring, but fun. I enjoyed meeting readers and potential readers, and I particularly loved that a few people who bought Song of the Selkies previously came back for Illusion's Reign. That was a definite win!

Reading!

• This month has been both a light and heavy reading month — light because I only finished three books; heavy because all those books were pretty hefty.
• Collusion by H.S.J. Williams was definitely my favorite read of the month. I started reading it literally the day it arrived at my house, setting aside Yumi and the Nightmare Painter to do so (the correct choice, for the record). I posted a couple weeks ago raving about it, so I won't repeat myself too much, but I absolutely loved this book. Getting to see Errance, Tryss, Coren, Tellie, the Daisha, and the rest again was so much fun, the new characters were interesting, the plot was amazing, and the themes of hope, healing, and the dangers of isolating yourself were all so, so good. I look forward to whenever I get to read this one; I know it's going to be just as amazing the second time around.
• Yumi and the Nightmare Painter was also good, though I'm not as in love with it as some of my friends seem to be. I liked the narrative and the themes, and Sanderson did an astonishing job of putting together a life-swap/bodyswap story that didn't give me constant secondhand embarrassment, and of course the worldbuilding was very cool. On the other hand, it took me a good third of the book to really connect with the protagonists, and I didn't always love the narrative voice? Both of those are really just me things, though.
• From there, we transition into spooky season reads with a reread of Black and Deep Desires and a new book that I'm currently reading, The Death of Clara Willenheim. Black and Deep Desires was just as delicious on the reread as it was the first time around, I'm happy to say. Clara Willenheim is a ghostly gothic murder mystery; I'm about halfway through and enjoying it so far, though it recently took a turn that was rather darker than I expected.
• And, of course, I continue to enjoy Dracula Daily, though I kind of dropped listening to Re: Dracula. One form of the story is enough for me this year, and with my head so full of brainstorming, I've been more in the mood for music than podcasts of late.

Watching & Playing!

• Wonder of wonders, I actually watched stuff this month!
• My friends who got me into Star Rail and Genshin convinced me that I needed to watch Yona of the Dawn with them, mostly by promising excellent character development and also the presence of certain archetypes that I absolutely adore. (They are excellent influences, obviously.) Scheduling that has been tricky, as we have three people in two different time zones, but we've managed five episodes, and I'm very much enjoying the show. Hak is my favorite character by a long shot, though we'll see if that changes once the dragons show up. I also like how the show is handling the development of Yona herself, how she's dealing with her grief and finding her strength in a way that seems very natural. Hopefully I'll get to watch the rest soon!
• I also rewatched True Grit with my family, which I didn't enjoy quite as much this time around . . . I feel like the sadness of the ending hit a lot harder this time? Though I also just might not have been in the mood for the story; it was a very spur-of-the-moment decision.
• As for what I'm playing, I'm two thirds of the way through the Liyue region main story in Genshin! This is one of the two regions I was most looking forward to when I got into the game, and I've enjoyed it so far. I am attempting to figure out what Zhongli's deal is, piecing together what the story tells me with bits of information gained from the fandom and my friends' conversations . . . I like him quite a lot (thankfully, as he's the character who my friends mainly used to convince me to start the game), but I am getting conflicting information about who or what he really is. Hopefully I'll find out in the next couple weeks, though.
• (I will also note that, while Genshin definitely has a steeper learning curve on combat than Star Rail did, I am less bad at that than I used to be! And I am getting better! I'm still not good by any means, but I die a lot less than I used to, and I remember to shield a lot more often.)
• The other fun thing about Genshin is the co-op mode, which currently mostly involves me running around after my more-experienced friends, picking up treasures and whatnot while they utterly destroy any enemies that show up (something that is satisfying for ALL of us, for the record). Exploring together is a lot more fun than exploring alone would be — especially since they can show me cool stuff that I wouldn't have found on my own for ages. Probably my favorite two co-op experiences so far were making it to the very top of a particularly dangerous mountain in the first region of the game and making the trek to the second region of the game together, but it's all been a lot of fun.
• This past week, though, I've mostly been playing Star Rail, specifically the version 2.6 story update, which was been a wild ride. I might be mildly traumatized by monkeys and bananas at this point, y'all, and I have definitely been fighting for my life against a particularly catchy earworm of a song. That's said, I enjoyed it — some of my favorite characters are very heavily involved in it, and we have the main Trailblaze trio together again for a lot of the story! The new characters were also cool, and one of my favorite couples in the game had some really nice interactions! I am also inordinately pleased that I was able to get one of my favorite characters (Dan Heng Lunae, for those who play) during his rerun; he has been very fun to play. (And he's narratively appropriate! At least somewhat! That makes me very happy.)

 Life!

• October started off pretty quiet and chill, for which I was grateful — for several weeks, the most exciting thing that happened was that I made some rather excellent basil sourdough bread. It was my first time trying those mix-ins, and I'm quite pleased with how the loaf turned out.
• Then we hit the weekend of the 19th and everything became Very Busy.
• I've already talked about the 19th and Eat Local, Read Local. Again, that went well . . . but I was very tired the next few days, which wasn't ideal, as the following Monday was the first day back at online grad school classes. The class I'm currently taking is Advanced English Grammar, which I chose because I thought it would be mildly interesting and not too difficult. And it has indeed not been too difficult, mostly . . . but it is a lot more technical than I expected.
  • Fun fact: there is an official grammar term ("lexical phrases") for structures like "see you later" and "by the way" where the same words are regularly used for specific functions without being an idiom.
  • Another fun fact: when you start describing grammar rules in the abstract, you end up with formulas, and those formulas look way more like upper-level calculus than they do algebra.
• Anyway. That's happening. It's better than the last class, and therefore we will get through it.
• On a happier note, last weekend a friend and I went to the Renaissance Festival! The one we normally go to was sold out, so we ended up visiting a different one instead that's a little further away, requiring a full weekend trip. That was also tiring, but a lot of fun! I love wandering around the Faire, seeing everyone's costumes and outfits, visiting the shops, and, of course, watching the jousts! This Faire's joust still wasn't as realistic as the Ohio Ren Fest's joust, but it had the best story of any Faire I've gone to so far, and it concluded in a resounding triumph of good over evil. I was truly impressed!
• That brings us up to this past week, which has mostly consisted of grad school, story prep, gaming, work, and recovering from all the driving I did over the weekend. So, pretty quiet.
• Other than that . . . I'm still working on crafting Christmas presents; that's going fairly well (though I am starting to feel the pressure of Looming Deadlines). I also started work on a new fleece capelet, this one a lovely green-and-black plaid with a properly deep hood! It's going to be so cozy when it's done. That said, I'm hand-sewing a lot of it because I didn't feel like arguing with the sewing machine, so it's going to take a bit.
• And on the D&D front, we're still playing through the mini-campaign; I think we're probably about halfway through at this point. That continues to be fun, and I'm starting to get the hang of my character's mechanics. I didn't get much done on finishing up my character for the next campaign, but I still have time. (She's playable. I just need to figure out some extra backstory stuff.)
• I think that about covers it! Again, October was mostly a quiet month; it just got very exciting at the end there.

November Plans

• Grad school continues to exist and will also continue to dominate however much of my brainspace and free time I allow it to. Given what happened last winter and spring when I let myself stress over it a lot, I'm going to try to keep it to a more reasonable resource allocation this time around. We'll see if that works.
• Otherwise, I plan to start drafting the new story I mentioned up in the writing section (with a low daily wordcount goal), and I'll continue working on D&D writing and brainstorming a story for the DOSA Files (which I really need to figure out sooner rather than later).
• I also need to either speed up work on some of the Christmas presents I'm making or decide that some of those gifts will be slightly smaller than originally planned. We'll see which one wins.
• I don't have any author events planned; I was hoping to go to Doxacon, but they're meeting in DC this year, and I do not want to deal with that. Alas.
• Work will probably be busy for the next two months as we prepare for Advent and Christmas. Still, I'm hoping to do enough in advance that it won't be terribly stressful — and holidays do have the advantage of being very similar year to year, so I have a good idea what to expect.
• And, of course, I will continue to have D&D, reading (maybe delving into some mysteries this month), and gaming to help me relax and get my stress levels down. All in all, it should be a good month.

How was your October? Any plans for November? Do you prefer to watch shows and movies by yourself or with others? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!