The music you listen to, or the songs you sing in church, say something about your relation to God and the body of Christ. It was no different with music in the early EMCC. The public music used reflects community life in the presence of God and among ourselves. It has to be functional, that is, it has to facilitate corporate worship and express recognizable Christian experience.¹ Private worship language or unsingable melodies are not welcome in a church service. That’s why collections of musical resources by church musicians, however humble or exalted are like flags in the wind of Christian life. In a different metaphor, we should reflect on the flavours of the music we use today as well. Some music is like fast food: full of tasty fat, sugar and salt. Eventually, time will tell.

Again, I confess I am not a music scholar, and this post merely surveys the donations to the Missionary Church Historical Trust.

Apart from Eldon Sherk’s large collection,² the Missionary Church Historical Trust has received smaller musical collections, notably from Herbert H Bock,³ Keith Cole (a soloist), the Hunking family,⁴ Ellis Lageer, the family of farmers Levi and Fannie Raymer,⁵ pastor Paul Storms,⁶ Eileen (Lageer) Warner, and Kenneth W Wideman, the MCHT’s second curator.⁷ There were other single or small donations made before comprehensive records were kept. Hugh Hill, the first curator of the MCHT and long time librarian at Emmanuel Bible College, collected good old books, and probably donated items. The copies we have sometimes record members from Ontario who owned them, for example, preacher Peter Geiger (Breslau), Peter Cober (a presiding elder from Puslinch), Amelia (Zeller) Conner (Breslau, Berlin), W F Deen (Clarksburg?), Mrs Myrtle Ritson (Stayner), Mrs O B Shoemaker (Wallace), Mrs Bery Greer (Gowanstown), and Laurene Carnahan (Stayner area). In Ken Wideman’s collection, some earlier owners recorded include Mrs Maurice B Eby/ Mt View/ Alberta, in a Mennonite hymnbook of 1902; Mrs Ernest Hoover, Gormley, ON, in a gospel song book; Mrs E Weber, in Gospel Choruses from around 1927; and Eli Rosenberger/ Brown City/ MI, Gospel Herald in Song from 1899. These books suggest people were singing Christian music in their homes.

The MBiC inherited its musical choices from its Mennonite roots and the Methodist-Wesleyan holiness-camp meeting tradition. Enthusiasm for revivals in the MBiC favoured holiness, evangelical and fundamentalist music over Mennonite sources.⁸ The church leaders did try to supply resources for their congregations.

In 1881, the young denomination compiled a words-only edition of hymns and gospel songs called A Choice Collection of Spiritual Hymns, made initially by Daniel Brenneman, Solomon Eby and Benjamin B Bowman published by the Evangelical United Mennonite Church. It had the amazing number of 834 texts, but no music.⁹ This went through a few revisions up to the end of the 19^th century.¹⁰ Janet Douglas, our first female preacher,¹¹ published in Berlin, ON, a small book suitable for the meetings she led, with the cover variously named Emmanuel Hymns or Immanuel Hymns in 1886.

The Gospel Banner editor from 1888 to 1908, Henry Schlichter Hallman, made his own gospel song book (words only), Songs of Glad Tidings for the Worship of God, which went through ten editions in his life time, and an 11^th by his nephew Wilford Gingrich, in 1934. This last edition had 328 songs, all in English.¹² Earlier editions contained selections in German. In Ontario, at least the Vineland, Breslau and Markham churches used Songs of Glad Tidings, and probably Owen Sound.¹³

In 1896 and again in 1900 there were calls in the MBiC General Conference to revise the 1881/1893 Choice Collection, partly to exclude or edit hymns with texts that did not reflect the holiness view of the Christian life. Hallman defended the use of hymns that fitted the experience of unbelievers, seekers and newly converted people, but he recognized some hymns stopped there and did not support the holiness interpretation of say, Romans 7:14-25.¹⁴

While the General Conferences did not agree to revise the denominational hymnbook, in 1904 it allowed the conferences to publish their own hymnbooks if they would pay for it. The Ontario, Michigan, and Canada Northwest Conferences undertook to do that and Hallman produced a hymnbook (with music this time, a step up) called Church Hymnal of the MBC, in 1907 in Berlin, Ontario. A committee of Oliver Snyder and Ebenezer Anthony from Michigan, Peter Cober and Samuel Goudie from Ontario selected the texts. None of them were musically trained as far as I know, and the book oddly did not credit the authors of most of the song texts. Only one gospel song included was written by an MBiC member that I am aware of: Ella Rudy, of the Indiana and Ohio Conference.¹⁵

The Church Hymnal of the MBC saw only one edition, and although used by some congregations (MCHT’s collection includes copies from Bethany in Berlin, Stayner, Mt Joy in Markham and possibly Bethel in Toronto), it did not see universal adoption.¹⁶

Judging by the donations of hymnbooks with congregational stamps on them, the churches bought and used various other hymnbooks, those of other denominations as well as those provided by Christian music publishers. For example, the MCHT has Tabernacle Hymns No 2 (Moody Church-related, 1921) used at Mt Joy, Markham; Spiritual Songs and Hymns (Brethren in Christ, 1935), used by Bethany in Kitchener, and the Hespeler MBiC.¹⁷ Ken Wideman found a copy of the 1951 Free Methodist Hymns of the Living Faith stamped “United Missionary Church.” He also collected two Sacred Songs and Solos (1200 texts, Ira D Sankey, 1907 ed) and an 1890 edition with 888 songs. (Eldon Sherk also had a music edition of “SS&S.”) Paul Storms had his father’s copy of the music edition of SS&S, taken to Turkey and back 1912-1914.¹⁸ The evidence doesn’t yet show a congregation used SS&S coming out of D L Moody’s campaigns, however.

In Ontario, so far as I know, only Bethany church, the largest and most urban of the Conference, had members who were producers of new music. I would be happy to be corrected. Besides H S Hallman,¹⁹ who lived in Berlin much of his life, some of the others were Herbert Detwiler Huber and Peter Shupe (1850-1930).²⁰ Singing schools were a feature of the second half of the 19^th century,²¹ and Peter Shupe conducted many of them in Ontario MBiC. He published a leaflet in thousands of copies explaining how to read music for these lessons. The earlier copies were printed by William Briggs, the big Methodist Church publisher in Toronto, called A Pocket Edition of Rudiments of Music (1893).²² H D Huber, who led a youth choir in later years, arranged some lyrics in collaboration with Shupe, published by Hallman around the turn of the century.²³ Shupe also published a song supporting the doctrine of non-resistance.²⁴

It is ironic that 21st-century churches have largely ditched the four-part singing so much desired by the first generation of the EMCC, and fewer people sing at all while instrumentalists carry the sound. We are given words with no music and no punctuation. Copyright acknowledgements may be displayed (in tiny print for a few moments), but we may not know who is writing our music, as it was in the early EMCC!

1I learned this from Donald Hustad, Jubilate!: Church Music in the Evangelical Tradition (Carol Stream, IL: Hope Publishing, 1981) p 14-25.

2 See EMCC History Blog: “Music in the Early EMCC: Part 1.”

3 Box 6060 MCHT.

4 The Lageer family also donated songbooks used in Nigeria. Enikozi Be ‘mi Nupe Nyi [“Nupe Hymnbook”] (2nd ed 1920) was used in the United Missionary Society. UMS staff contributed many texts to this book. The Hausa hymnbook, Litaffin Wakoki [“Book of Songs”] (1^st ed 1936) seems to only have one contribution by a UMS missionary, Pheobe Ummel. Willis and Marion Hunking also produced a small Nupe chorus book Enya 4 Dana, [“4 Things”] (no date).

5 Box 6050 MCHT.

6 Box 6070 MCHT.

7 Thirty-six items, some gathered from his father C Lloyd Wideman.

8 An excellent study of early music in the Pennsylvania Conference of the MBiC which overlaps the whole MBiC, is by Andrew J Geissinger, “The Hymnody of the Evangelical Mennonites of Pennsylvania and the Mennonite Brethren in Christ 1858-1917” (2008); https://bfchistory.org/author/andrewgeissinger/

9 The committee was set to work in 1879. Jasper Abraham Huffman, ed, History of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church (New Carlisle, OH: Bethel Publishing, 1920) p 176-177. There was a German edition published in 1882. No copy in the MCHT.

10 The MCHT has a photocopy of the 1881 edition and one copy from 1893. There were editions also in 1889 and possibly 1896. The 1892 revisers were W B Musselman, Daniel Brenneman and H S Hallman. They re-titled it The Standard Church Hymnal. No copy in the MCHT. The Gormley church around 1890 used a hymnbook so small that it was remembered 30 to 40 copies could be carried to cottage prayer meetings in a 6 quart basket; The Word for 100 Years: Gormley Missionary Church 1873-1973, p [10, 8]. Probably Hallman’s.

11 See EMCC History Blog: “Women Preachers…Part 1.”

12 The MCHT has 10 copies, originally used by the Breslau church, and a few earlier editions.

13 Skip Gillham, ed, The Church on the Hill: Vineland Missionary Church, Ontario 1881-1981 (Vineland, ON: Vineland Missionary Church, 1981) p 41; Clarence McDowell et al, Built in This Place: Markham Missionary Church Centennial 1877-1977 (Markham, ON: Markham Missionary Church, 1977) p 24. The Vineland church also used Haldor Lillenas’ Glorious Gospel Hymns (Nazarene Publishing, 1931).

14 Henry S Hallman, “Prone to Wander, Lord, I Feel It,” Gospel Banner (November 10 1896) p 2. The MBiC did not teach eradication of the ability to sin, but the possibility one’s heart could be purified so as not to inevitably sin.

15 Ella’s sister Cora Mae Rudy worked with Hallman in the Gospel Banner office. Ten years later, the Pennsylvania Conference published a hymnbook called Rose of Sharon Hymns. The MCHT does not have a copy yet.

16 Eldon Sherk collected 4 copies, three were rebound, so, well used. I found one in a used book shop in Stayner the summer of 1978.

17 Mt Joy in Markham also used the Brethren in Christ hymnbook, starting from 1943, as well as Pentecostal Hymns Nos. 3 & 4 (first printed in 1907), the Cokesbury Hymnal (a Methodist hymnal first printed 1923) and perhaps a 1928 New Cokesbury Hymnal; McDowell, p 24. Former MCHT trustee J Allan Shantz also donated Spiritual Songs and Hymns.

18 “SS&S” continues to be reprinted and widely used in Nigerian English- language church services. That’s why my family has its own set of copies for family worship.

19 At least two songs in the 11^th ed of Songs of Glad Tidings credit H S Hallman with his copyright.

20 Shupe is also associated with Breslau EM Church.

21 Samuel J Steiner, In Search of Promised Lands: A Religious History of Mennonites in Ontario (Kitchener, ON and Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2015) p 160. Byers mentions singing classes at Altona; Lillian Byers, ed, Altona Christian-Missionary Church 1875-1975 (Altona, ON: Altona Christian-Missionary Church, 1975) p 4. Elder C N Good taught singing at Bethel Chapel in Toronto 1906-1908; F Arthur Sherk, Keeping Faith: A Centennial History of Banfield Memorial Church (Willowdale, ON: Banfield Memorial Church, 1997) p 21. The song leader in Aylmer, Enoch Mills, also taught singing schools; Jean Pearce, ed, Aylmer Missionary Church 90 years 1900-1990 (Aylmer, ON: Aylmer Missionary Church, 1990) p 3.

22 The MCHT has 3 copies. The latest edition was part of the 22 thousandth printing.

23 W A Bradley, “Neglecting the Web,” arranged by Herbert D Huber, from soprano by Peter Shupe (1905).

24 Peter Shupe, “Oh Why Not Have Peace Instead Of War?” 2^nd ed, (nd).