I’m not going to actually reveal my favourites here; they change from day to day, and I also have some definite un-favourites!
We hosted an evening of ‘favourite hymns and the stories behind them’ led by Pam Rhodes, in aid of the Spafford Children’s Centre in Jerusalem. I was part of a small group of singers which led our audience and did a Cecil Frances Alexander medley and a couple of descants.
Reflecting on this afterwards, I realise that the category of ‘favourite hymns’ has split into at least two parts. There are the ones that are at least a century or so old, which were the type of hymn used at this church event. But if you are asked to sing at a wedding (and I now tend to avoid doing this, to avoid what I’m about to describe) you tend to get hymns that the couple remember from primary school. Perhaps not ‘favourite’ so much as ‘the only ones we knew’.
The stock of hymns known by different generations is sufficiently different that you can usually tell at funerals whether the hymns were chosen by the deceased themselves (these are usually the most interesting selections), by their spouse or another contemporary of theirs (these tend to be the older sort, and generic ‘favourite hymns’) or by their children. Whoever chooses them, the words are usually taken from some source used by funeral directors which contains variants I have never encountered in any hymnbook.