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!