Jeff Ehlers is a startup CFO and entrepreneur, having founded 4 companies. He lives in Meridian, Idaho with his wife and twin girls + 1 baby girl. Jeff also enjoys cheering on the San Francisco Giants and cycling. He’s served in a variety of church callings, including several bishoprics and is currently Young Men President. His first church calling ever was as a music conductor as a teenager.
Enter Jeff…
Having served twice in a Bishopric, I realized the challenge of ending sacrament meeting on time. Part of that is the selection of hymns. I created a tool to help inform you of hymn lengths.
This tool has 3 tabs:
- Alphabetical
- All. Sorted longest to shortest singing all verses plus the introduction. ·
- Traditional. Sorted longest to shortest as sung traditionally, meaning only the verses in the bars, plus the introduction.
In addition to using this as a resource for sacrament meetings, there are many uses for this tool: Seminary, choosing a closing hymn in Relief Society if you always run over, or essentially any church meeting involving a hymn where time is an important consideration.
I recognize this tool’s useful life is short lived – a few years max until the new hymnbook is released by the Church. At that point I hope to update it. Until then, enjoy.
A note on methodology:
The times are taken from the official recordings on LDS.org, which include introductions as written and generally follow the tempo as written. To obtain the times for as traditionally sung, I used the same recordings but subtracted out the time for written text of verses not in the bars. If there are any errors, please let me know so we can improve this tool.
I calculated the average length as 2:52 seconds for All Verses and 2:44 as Traditionally sung. That is a good rule of thumb to keep in mind. It is in Google Sheets so you can access it anytime & anywhere.
Thank you so much for creating this. I just had a discussion with my Bishop today about the importance of ending the meeting on time. This resource is just what we are looking for. I am grateful for the time and effort you put in to benefit those in music callings in the ward! Your talents are appreciated.
@Jeff Ehlers: Thanks, so much for being a difference-maker! I am a new ward music chairman/director, and was beginning to make one of these spreadsheets for myself. Blessings await!
This is awesome! To make it perfect, the only thing it would need is the hymn numbers to make look up even easier (I use it to add the times as I prepare Stake Conference agendas).
I have a slightly different perspective, to me a song is a prayer unto the Lord. I don’t think we should minimize them at all and I prefer to sing all of the verses of every song. I think we need to be much stricter on the speaking.
If you give a speaker only 6 minutes for a talk and tell them to take no more, he/she doesn’t have time to tell a starting joke or how the bishopric came to ask them to speak. They really have to focus their thoughts into a few basic main points and maybe one short story and end with a testimony. This has been a very good change in our ward.
Amen Brother ! Singing together, when done right and well, is part of the fellowship. And like the TabCaTS broadcast on Sunday mornings, is good church, and good preaching !
(Since calling it the MoTabs has been “outlawed” by the PTB, the Tab-ernacle C-hoir a-t T-emple S-quare…)
Very worthwhile, helpful effort. A new hymnbook is coming, so perhaps Jeff will be willing to do this again??
Thank you for this! I always try to plan a short hymn as the closing hymn for sacrament meeting on Fast Sunday, and this helped me identify several that are appropriate that I hadn’t considered before!
This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you! I think you are missing How Great Thou Art, but maybe I’m just not seeing it in the list. Hymn numbers would be a great addition to this tool. Thanks again!
I’m an organist by training and also admin a facebook group for LDS organists. This topic of closing hymns comes up frequently in our discussions, and we are generally pretty opinionated about it.
Most of us feel that the time constraints in sacrament meeting should never be managed by trying to shorten the music. I’m in favor of not programming really long hymns as closing hymns, but I’m also not in favor of purposely choosing only short hymns to close with. These hymns serve a worship function and are not just time-fillers. The singing of hymns is just as important as listening to speakers and is also the only time the congregation gets to worship together vocally. In my experience, church musicians are almost unanimous in feeling that what needs to be managed is keeping the speakers to their allotted assigned talk lengths. Either have fewer speakers or be more clear on how much time they can take and be willing to enforce it when their time is up, but don’t shortchange the few hymns we get to sing during each service.
There is a former general authority, Adam S. Bennion, that is often quoted in our groups as saying something to the effect that what the Church needs is better music and more of it and better speaking and less of it.
Many bishopric members are hesitant to hold speakers to time limits, either out of fear of embarrassing them or wanting to acknowledge the time and effort they spent preparing that talk. However, organists spend time and effort preparing the hymns, yet nothing is thought of cutting the closing hymn or omitting verses when the time is running over. Most hymns are short enough that in the time it takes a bishopric member to get up and announce that the hymn is going to be shortened, we could have sung at least one verse.
Lisa, what is the name of the Facebook group you admin for music? I would love to join and be a part of it.
Great idea!
This is helpful!
Thank you
I’ve just come across this and it’s great. I’m using it to plan stake conference sessions.
I agree with others that it would be great if the hymn numbers were added. Then I can easily sort the data by numerically.
Also, for my purpose, I need the durations to be correct. You’ve accidentally entered hours and minutes, not minutes and seconds. You can see this by clicking on any of the times (e.g. 1:52) and you’ll see that it’s displayed as 01:52:00, which is 1 hour 52 mins 0 seconds.
Thanks again!
I’ve managed to correct all the times. By doing this:
1. Download in CSV format.
2. Use Notepad++ to search the CSV file for the duration fields and replace them with “00:0” prefixed. (Use a regular expression) like this:
Find what: ([0-9]:[0-5][0-9])
00:0\1
3. Save.
4. Import into a google sheet.
5. Format the durations with m:ss
Perfect. I’m the final speaker in an upcoming Sacrament Meeting, and I’m also the Ward Music Chair. Might need to change the Opening, Sacrament, and Intermediate Hymns to the longest ones in the hymn book… 🙂
I have fixed the format issue and integrated the data in a set of spreadsheets that I am developing for managing sacrament meetings. There’s a calculator feature built-in to sum up up to four chosen hymns. The next big task is to enumerate all three and four hymn combinations and their corresponding length sums. The set of spreadsheets can be accessed from the below link.
https://sites.google.com/view/ldssheets