When I started a house church ministry in 2002, I chose to compile our very own hymnal, with a limited number of the most popular classic hymns of the faith. Our ministry plans to release a revised version, currently in progress, to the public under a libre license, most likely a copy-left Creative Commons license. In addition, we are considering offering a compilation of hymn tunes in Ogg-Vorbis format, to enable ministries to easily incorporate them into normal audio software.

The original hymnal consisted of 129 hymns crammed into an 88-page, comb-bound booklet. The new hymnal, which will likely be titled, "The Disciple's Hymnal", will contain nearly 250 hymns. Some of the new additions include German and Spanish equivalents for popular English hymns. The hymn text uses a 15-pt font, making it more readable for people with poor eyesight. The hymnal contains no musical scores, though someone who desires to do so could modify the hymnal to do so.

We have chosen to restrict our collection to those hymns that are in the public domain, rather than try to work through copyright issues, so we can publish something churches can really use. This means many popular contemporary hymns are not included. The Cyberhymnal website contains the largest collection of public domain hymns I know of, and is our primary source. Furthermore, they include midi files that churches can download, convert to other formats and play, burn CDs, etc. We plan to convert the corresponding midi files into Ogg-Vorbis and compile them into a single collection to accompany the hymnal. We will ensure the converted files remain in the public domain.

Ministries with a desire to do so will be able to modify and expand the Disciple's Hymnal. Thus, a ministry can incorporate more hymns, hymns in other languages, and so on, as desired. Or they can even replace our collection wholesale with their own, using our hymnal as a template. In order to ensure ministries can modify the material, we will distribute the source document using the OpenDocument Format. The published version intended for use will be in PDF format.

We will very likely seek to publish a hard copy of the hymnal through Lulu.com. We have not yet established a release date, but will keep everyone informed as to our progress.