A couple of years ago, I was pretty much fed up with hymns. As a guitarist, I found them difficult and unpleasant to play, and very old-fashioned sounding. I was ready to dump them for good.

But, slowly, my thinking changed. I kept finding inspiring references to the hymns in the books I was reading. Great truths would be illustrated with a verse from a hymn. I’d think, “Those words are great!”, and I’d look up the whole hymn and be excited by it. I began to realise my own faith would be impoverished by the passing of these grand old songs.

But my musical difficulties remained. For a guitarist, hymns were almost always written in difficult keys, using difficult chords and unnatural rhythms. After searching fruitlessly for better chord charts, I set about “re-chording” some popular hymns myself. I shifted them into guitar friendly keys, spaced out the changes, and restricted myself to using the most basic, “open” chords only. I did this for about 40 hymns.

I was really pleased with the results - the hymns were now much easier to play, and they sounded better on the guitar too. Indeed, many of them sounded surprisingly modern.

And it seems I’m not the only one who appreciates this approach. Last year I put my charts up on a website which I called Guitar Chords for Hymns . Since then it has received nearly 100,000 hits, and Google consistently ranks it in the top one or two sites for hymn chords. And I regularly receive “thank you” notes from guitarists all over the world.

Church musos tell me their number one difficulty is sourcing good songs. If that’s your problem, perhaps it’s time to have another look at the old hymns…