A Hidden Treasure: The Red Book in Your Pew (Part 2: Indexes)
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
written by Ilona Kubiaczyk-Adler
Most people never make it to the back of our Glory to God hymnal.
And that is a shame, because the last sixty or so pages of Glory to God are where the treasure chest of hymnody opens up. There are eight indexes tucked back there, and together they turn the hymnal from a songbook you navigate by a hymn number in a Sunday bulletin into something you can explore on your own terms. Think of the indexes as eight different doors into the same building.
The First Lines and Common Titles Index is the one you'll reach for most often. If a melody surfaces in your head on a Tuesday morning and you can't quite place it, this is where you go. Every hymn is listed alphabetically by its first line and by any title it is commonly known by. Amazing Grace and Amazing grace, how sweet the sound both appear, and both lead you to the same place.
The Topical Index is where the hymnal becomes a pastoral companion. Organized by themes like Adoration, Baptism, Comfort, Grief, Justice, Peace, Stewardship, and dozens more, it lets you find a hymn for exactly what you are carrying. Hard week? Look up Lament. Grateful morning? Try Thanksgiving. Worried about the world? Justice and Reconciliation have more to say than you might expect.
The Scriptural Index is a quiet marvel. Every hymn with a significant connection to a biblical passage is listed here by book and verse. Which means you can take your daily Bible reading and find the hymn that has been singing that passage for centuries. Sit with Psalm 23 and its hymns together sometime, and listen to their conversation.
The Lectionary Index takes that idea further for those who follow the church's three-year cycle of lectionary readings. If you want to prepare for Sunday's scripture before you arrive, or reflect on it afterward, this index shows you which hymns have been paired with each week's readings. It is a remarkably simple way to let the hymnal deepen your engagement with worship, and it is also one of the tools a church music director uses to choose hymns for a given Sunday.
The Psalm Index deserves its own mention. This index gathers every psalm setting and every hymn drawn from the Psalms in one place. If you have ever wanted to pray the Psalms but found the language difficult to enter, try singing your way in instead.
The Index of Authors, Composers, and Sources is for the curious. Want to find everything Charles Wesley wrote? Every tune that came from the African-American tradition? This index is your guide. It is also a quiet reminder that the hymnal is not the work of one voice or one century, but a chorus assembled across an awe-inspiring breadth of time and place.
The Alphabetical Index of Tunes lists every tune by its name. We will talk more about tune names in a later post, but for now, it is enough to know this: tunes have their own identities, independent of the words they carry. This index lets you find them.
The Metrical Index of Tunes organizes those same tunes by their rhythmic pattern - the syllable shape that determines which words and which melodies can be paired together. It sounds technical, and we will unpack it fully in a later post. For now, just know it is there, and that it holds one of the most delightful surprises in the whole book.
Eight doors. All of them open.
The invitation this week is simple: before Sunday, pick one index and spend a few minutes with it. Start with the Topical Index if you are not sure where to begin. Look up something you are feeling or praying for. See what the hymnal offers you. You may be surprised how well it knows you.
Next time, we go inside the hymn itself and decode all the words and symbols at the bottom of every hymn page.