I’ve been updating some of my records relating to the songs & hymns we sing in worship. And I thought I’d share the results with you.

This year so far in 24 services we have sung 137 songs or hymns. We've only sung repeats around 24 times. 43% were traditional hymns, and a further 23% were contemporary hymns - that is, they have several verses and tell a story. The remaining 34% were 'songs' - usually one verse, one idea.

If you create a 'Word Cloud' from the titles, where the size of each word represents its frequency of occurrence, then it looks like this:

(You can make Word Clouds like this at Wordle)

It looks pretty. And as it is only the titles that are used, it isn’t too revealing. But it does make me think – I would like to see a few words represented more – words like Justice, Peace, Joy, Hope, Light, Truth, Grace, World, Suffering – but this is how things are.

Anyone done anything similar for a different congregation? A discussion over at Musicademy last year raised the question ‘How many songs does an average church need’ – and there were very clearly two camps in the answers; one group (including me) that tends towards a very wide repertoire, and the other, usually more contemporary, that has a much smaller core list. Where do you fit?