30,000-Foot View
Once upon a time—probably for the first 22-23 years I was a member of the Church—whenever we sang hymns in General Conference, the lyrics would appear on the screen so everyone could sing along. Sometime in the last few years, this practice stopped. At first I thought it was a fluke, but it’s clear that this is now the new normal. So, I asked around online, wondering why. The answer I got was simple: in a worldwide church, it doesn't make sense to superimpose the English lyrics to a hymn that everyone is singing. (Of course, I seem to remember that when I was a full-time missionary in Spain, they superimposed Castilian subtitles over the English words, but that could just be a false memory.)
Regardless, it makes sense: for people who are watching Conference in a meetinghouse, a hymnal in their unit’s language is probably going to be readily available; and for those who are watching online, the lyrics are just as readily available in an app or on LDS.org. Either way, the lyrics don't really need to be on the screen, so why subject non–English speakers to English lyrics? It‘s just… logical.
Having considered this, my mind then turned to another issue that my wife, Anna, and I have lamented for years: hymn recycling. Between the six sessions of General Conference, the congregational hymns are obviously chosen from a very short list. It actually wouldn't surprise me if that list consists of only 10-12 hymns, because we really do sing the same hymns over and over and over again in General Conference. Given that the current hymnal—which the Church has been using since 1985—has 341 hymns, they could certainly cycle through more than tiny subset. But as I thought about it this morning, something occurred to me: the Castilian hymnal only has 209 hymns, a handful of which are either not in the English hymnal or have a different number of verses. This means that in a meeting where both languages are spoken, there are only about 200 hymns that could reasonably be sung. I suspect that one would find the same phenomenon with French, German, and many other hymnals; and there are probably many languages for which that number is much, smaller.
So, let's multiply the overlap by 90-100 languages. Then let’s cut out the hymns that nobody knows because they never get sung anyway. How many hymns are there that can reasonably be sung, pretty much off the cuff, by the average Latter-day Saint with no musical training? How many of these meet those criteria in any unit, speaking any language, anywhere in the world? Are there as many as 50? Are there even 20? It feels like Lot bargaining with God: the number has got to be significantly smaller than the number of hymns in any decent-sized hymnal. In fact, it’s probably similar to the number of hymns that get sung in General Conference!
The point is that this is a very obvious (and uncontroversial) example of how the average member of the Church has never even considered most of the information that the prophets and Apostles use as a catalyst for revelation. I’ve been a member of the Church for over 26 years, and until today, it never even crossed my mind that this monotony was anything but a commentary on the lowest common denominator of intelligence and ability. It never occurred to me that there might be a really good reason that we reuse congregational hymns so often! There is nothing unintelligent or incapable or even negative about a hymn that doesn’t happen to have been translated into, say, Mandarin or Swahili. Other hymns have, and I’m sure those hymns get sung in the congregations that speak those languages. But General Conference is about worldwide unity, and the fact that we worship the Lord in music is much more important than the size of our repertoire.
And of course, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve spend a lot more time than I do considering the needs of the entire Church.
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