The Faces of the Central Eastern European Region in Hymnals of the Global Ecumenical Movement

Abstract

Motivated by the 2023 Kraków assembly of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the article offers an insight into the formation of global hymnals from a Central Eastern European (CEE) perspective. The author – the leader of the international worship team at the event – integrates pragmatic considerations in the fields of music making and church diplomacy with an academic hymnological approach. After looking at the theoretical framework that surrounds worship embedded in different cultures and the complex expression of Lutheran identities through words and music, the article presents a detailed description of musical material from the CEE region in LWF hymnals between 1947 and 2023. The LWF focus is complemented by a few parallels from ecumenical hymnals, drawing attention to the fact that certain musical items tend to overarch hymnals of different confessional families rather than act as distinctive features between them. The discussion centres on criteria defining Lutheran core hymns (Ger. Kernlied) of our time from a global perspective and in the CEE region and encourages further research on the decisive factors related to hymn choices during the editorial process of global and local hymnbooks.