About Hymn Desk

Hymn Desk grew out of years spent working as a church musician — moving between hymnals, chasing down scripture connections, and building the kind of cross-referenced index I kept wishing already existed. What started as a simple browser-based planner for my own use slowly turned into a full reference database: thousands of hymn texts and tunes, cross-referenced across nineteen hymnals, tied to scripture, the church year, and the Lutheran confessions.

It's built like a wiki on purpose. Everyone already knows how to use one — click a link, land on a page, click another link, keep going — and that felt like the right shape for a resource like this: something a working church musician can fall into for five minutes or an hour, chasing one hymn to its tune, its translator, its scripture roots, and back out again.

There are other hymn reference tools out there. This one exists because, using those others, I kept thinking: I can make this better, or why is this missing? Hymn Desk is my attempt to build the tool I wanted to have.

This is a personal project, not a commercial product, and not affiliated with any publisher, denomination, or hymnal committee. It's a work in progress — new pages, corrections, and features are added regularly.

Acknowledgments

Hymn texts, tunes, and cross-references draw on public-domain sources and a wide range of published hymnals; individual hymn pages note hymnal cross-references where known. Theological and historical notes on the Psalter Hymnal Handbook (PHH) are paraphrased, not reproduced. Scripture references use public-domain translations. See the Resources page for the external sites this project regularly draws on and links out to.