Unraveling the Local Hymnal: Artistic Creativity and Agency in Four Indonesian Christian Communities

Abstract

Local hymnals are cultural artifacts that express a community’s values, history, and identity and serve as vehicles for communal agency. This study investigates the role of local hymnals in shaping cultural identity and theological expression within four Indonesian Christian communities. Through interviews with church leaders, songwriters, and musicians, and an analysis of four hymnals from different communities in Indonesia, this study explores how these communities exercise agency in creating, perceiving, experiencing, and utilizing locally created songbooks. The research reveals that local hymnals are not only tools for shaping communal identity and transmitting theological understanding but also instruments through which communities assert their agency, fostering cultural dynamism. The study also considers the impact of colonialism and globalization on the development of local hymnody, highlighting how these communities have actively adapted and reinterpreted external influences to create unique and meaningful expressions of faith. The research concludes that local hymnals are not merely collections of songs but living artifacts embodying the agency of communities: the ongoing dialogue between tradition and innovation, faith and culture, and the individual and the community. By fostering autogenic cultural reflection and asserting communal agency, local hymnals fuel momentum and sustainability within a culture.

1. Introduction

Local hymnals are tapestries. Each hymn, with its unique melody and message created in a specific context, is a strand woven into a broader cloth, contributing to the strength and beauty of the overall design. As the hymns intertwine, they form patterns reflecting shared values, historical narratives, and collective identity. Communities continually engage with the collections, weaving a resilient tapestry that knits old and new, global and local, and past and present.

For fifteen years, I have worked alongside numerous Indonesian Christian communities interested in developing their local artistic communication genres for worship. Indonesia is diverse, and each situation is unique. Some local artistic expressions are tightly entwined into the life of the communities while others fray away. Some communities actively weave their language and local artistic genres in everyday life and for worship while others prefer languages of wider communication and global musical styles. These differences exist because of innumerable influences, but in every case, there is no black-and-white dichotomy; individual strands entwine to create myriad shades of gray.

Many communities use local songs for worship and then desire a published form—a local hymnal. For this study, “local hymnal” is defined as a collection of Christian songs created within a specific cultural or community context, embodying their chosen musical styles, theology, and linguistic elements. These hymnals are not translations or adaptations of foreign hymnody but, rather, compilations of original songs—the products of regional church denominations (defined by factors such as geography, ethnicity, and language) in Indonesia.

How do we understand local hymnals and their role in cultural tapestries? This paper investigates their function in the artistic–creative cultural milieu by surveying community perspectives via extensive interviews and consulting four local hymnals in Indonesia. This study first explores how communities perceive and experience their songbooks. The second section shows how postcolonialism interacts with localization to understand the role of hymnals in shaping identity. Finally, I use Brian Schrag’s stable/malleable dynamic alongside Greg Urban’s concept of metaculture to describe the hymnals’ energy and momentum. Using these theoretical perspectives, I consider local hymnals to be robust cultural artifacts in dialogue with the community that created them. I conclude that autogenic1 (self-generated) cultural reflection, embodied by local hymnals, fuels agency, momentum, and sustainability within a culture.

2. Background

All ethnomusicological research presupposes certain beliefs about society and music; it must critically analyze these assumptions (Berger 2012; Berger and Stone 2019, p. 2). There is danger in drawing conclusions based only on personal experience and assumptions about hymnals in communities, searching for confirmation in external theories. Therefore, this study intentionally foregrounds local voices. These include supporting documentation within the local hymnals alongside interviews with church leaders and songwriters.

The four local hymnals consulted for this study vary widely. The Nyanyian Jemaat Nuansa Etnik (Ethnically Nuanced Congregational Songs, hereafter referred to as the Torajan hymnal) is from Gereja Toraja (the Torajan church). It represents a return by the Torajan church to local musical styles in worship after primarily using Western hymns. I interviewed Rev. Elyaser Palondongan, a musician and pastor within the Torajan church, about two of their hymnals: the published Torajan hymnal and the forthcoming Pa’pudian Toraya, a collection of all 150 Psalms set to Torajan music.

The Nyanyian Jemaat (Congregational Songs, referred to as the Maluku hymnal) (Gereja Protestan Maluku 2015) from Gereja Protestan Maluku (the Protestant Church of Maluku, hereafter referred to as the Maluku church) contains a blend of local and Western-influenced song styles. For an additional perspective, I interviewed a longtime friend and musician, Rev. John Beay. Beay is a pastor within the Maluku church and contributed eight songs to the Maluku hymnal.

Doia Mem Musyamei Nya (Songs for the Congregation, referred to as the Hatam hymnal) (Dowansiba et al. 2017) is a hymnal from the Hatam ethnolinguistic group in Papua, Indonesia. Very early during contact with missionaries in the 1960s, the community chose to use their local musical styles for worship.2 I interviewed Rev. Simson Dowansiba, one of the three compilers of the Hatam hymnal, who is a pastor for Gereja Persekutuan Kristen Alkitab di Indonesia (the Christian Bible Fellowship Church in Indonesia). I also interviewed his son, Daniel Dowansiba, a recent seminary graduate and songwriter. The Hatam hymnal provides a contrast for this study, as the Papuan context differs significantly from most of Indonesia.

The fourth hymnal is Nyanyikanlah Nyanyian Baru bagi Tuhan (Sing a New Song to the Lord, referred to here as the Minahasa hymnal) (Badan Pekerja Majelis Sinode GMIM 2009, 2010, 2011) from Gereja Masehi Injili di Minahasa (the Christian Evangelical Church in Minahasa, hereafter referred to as the Minahasa church), a primarily Western-style hymnbook demonstrating limited engagement with local musical genres. I have lived in North Sulawesi for five years and have conducted ethnographic research with local musicians and the Minahasa church (Menger 2020, 2024; Connor and Menger 2021). To supplement those observations, I interviewed two local musicians, Christian Mamuaja and Renaldo Pongoh; Mamuaja wrote two songs in the Minahasa hymnal.

In addition to other studies of hymnals and song collections in different locations worldwide, I consulted the work of Marzanna Poplawska, a scholar who studied Catholic inculturation music in Indonesia on the islands of Java and Flores, for comparison to the Catholic context (Poplawska 2011, 2018, 2020).

3. Experiencing Hymnals

While worshippers can sing using words projected on a screen, printed in a church bulletin, or from memory, holding a physical book presents a different subjective experience, rich with symbolism and inherited meaning. This study begins by exploring how communities apprehend and experience hymnals—going beyond empirical assumptions to understand how humans create, interact with, and change culture through them. Phenomenology is an ideal starting point: it helps us uncover the actual experience of truth and substance in the world, which Husserl famously championed as a return “back to the things themselves.” It also allows us to study conscious experience from the subjective viewpoint and requires an unmediated look at what a hymnal is in all its possible appearances (Simmons 2010, p. 30; Dahl 2017b, p. 112). The interplay of various perspectives on hymnals exposes their thickness and complexity as objects.

Ideas are ephemeral, and sometimes people desire to preserve them. One critical element of Husserl’s phenomenology for this study is his consideration of ideal and real objects, subsequently expanded upon by others (Husserl and Hardy 1999; Benson 2003, p. 33; Brittingham 2016, p. 159; Dahl 2017a). In this manner of thinking, ideal objects are abstract and general entities that are grasped through thought, while real objects are concrete, individual entities perceived through the senses. A song presents a complex case with both ideal and real aspects. The musical and lyrical structures of the song are ideal; these are abstract things that exist apart from any particular performance or recording. They can be grasped intellectually and communicated through notation, description, or performance. Each actual performance or recording of a song is a real object. It is a concrete, singular event that occurs in time and space and can be perceived through the senses. Each performance or recording is unique and different from any other, even if they are of the same song.

The idea of a hymnal is also complex. Each physical hymnal is a real object, containing an idealized representation of an artistic expression; performance is “merely the physical embodiment of the ideal entity” (Benson 2003, p. 7). Notating a song idealizes it, and hymnals further that process by storing the ideal within a real, physical form. Individuals experience the book as a real object intended to be used for performance, held in their hands, with notation (words and possibly music) to be read. There is a distinction between each real performance, the real physical book, and the ideal entity of the hymnal and the songs within. The timelessness of ideal objects means that they can be repeated, performed, interpreted, and improvised endlessly and yet maintain their ideality (Benson 2003, pp. 6–7). There is a continuous, conscious negotiation between the external inputs (the hymnal, including the notation and text, and the sounds and visuals of the performance and environment) and the internal subjective analysis of the performance compared to the ideal object in the hymnal (Dahl 2017b, p. 109).

As part of his theory of semiology for music, Nattiez (1990) describes the esthesic process to refer to how listeners perceive, interpret, and understand music—here, the communities and individuals engaging with the local hymnals. The esthesic focuses on the act of perception itself—how the ideal is perceived, the real is experienced, and both are made meaningful. Nattiez’s model allows for how cultural and theological contexts influence the interpretation and perception of hymnals (ix). Different layers of meaning arise in the interaction between the hymnal and the community that engages with it. Nattiez notes that the “webs of interpretants” will differ for each individual or community involved (11). Meaning is not received directly from the composer but, rather, is actively constructed; it is dependent on the theological, communal, and individual contexts brought to the song (12). Users of hymnals will project ideas upon a song that do not always coincide with the intentions of the songwriter: they adapt and resignify hymns within their contexts (17).

3.1. Differing Origins

The process of codification into a hymnal transforms the subjective experience of a song; each hymn begins its journey differently, but performance brings them together.3 James Krabill (1995) describes a framework created by Maurice Houis that explains a similar process with texts. Houis divides them into two categories: oral texts (for hearing) and written texts (for solitary thinking). These lead to a middle ground as each type of text moves toward the other: oral texts can be written, and written texts can be read aloud (81). This concept applies to songs of differing origins as well, illustrated in Figure 1:

Some songs and songbooks are created in oral-preference cultures (such as Hatam), while others begin in cultures more comfortable with writing (Minahasa, Toraja, Maluku).4 No matter the origins, all cultures find ways to idealize songs, whether through notation or internalization. Building on the model in Figure 1, I have interwoven a phenomenology of ideal and real objects with Schrag’s (2021) concept of the stable and malleable dynamics in artistry to consider the origins and persistence of songs in culture, illustrated in Figure 2:

This structure depicts the movement from song creation to communication (vertical axis) on a spectrum of more malleable forms to more stable (horizontal axis). The diagram is not meant to define each item concretely but, rather, to describe some general tendencies.

All songs are composed (box a): a real, malleable occurrence but with stability provided by the preexisting creative domain (thus placed near the center of the horizontal axis).5 Some songs are created in a more literate environment and are notated early in composition; composers or communities idealized them in a more stable form (c) sooner in their creative journey than oral-preference cultures, which idealize songs through internalization (b). The ideal forms reside in the middle of the diagram, in flux between creation/communication and stable/malleable; these songs are then realized and stabilized through publication and recording (d and e) and in performance (f). Each performance is less stable than the publications due to inherent improvisation and interpretation (Benson 2003; Connor 2022). The hymnals from locations with a more extended history of Western influence followed the literate (writing-preference) creative journey (a-c-d-e): The Maluku, Toraja, and Minahasa hymnals include Indonesian cipher notation, and the second edition of the Minahasa hymnal also includes Western staff notation.

Other songs come from oral-preference communities and are closely connected to performance (a to f), idealized not in writing and publication but through internalization over time (b), something more common in oral-preference cultures. Real performances (f), repeated and absorbed into the cultural milieu as songs are accepted into the creative domain, are idealized (b) in oral tradition. Sometimes, these songs are eventually documented and stabilized in writing (d) or recording (e) but they often maintain more malleability.6 The Hatam hymnal (Dowansiba et al. 2017) is an example of this process. Figure 3 is an example of a typical song. The musical notation is limited to ellipses (…), which break up lines into phrases for the call-and-response feature of the singing style. In instances where a phrase extends beyond the page margin, a forward slash (/) is placed at the beginning of the right-justified subsequent line to indicate that it is a continuation of the previous line. The final line has no special markings, so for singers, it is clear that they have reached the “refrain” to be repeated until the leader chooses to end the song.

These Hatam songs began life orally (a), became part of the accepted domain of worship (b), and were written down over time and gathered into booklets (d) beginning around 1963.7 The booklets were eventually collected and even more concretely preserved in the Hatam hymnal, now in its seventh edition, with the most recent printing in 2017. This publication process demonstrates a move from (b) to (c) as the songs were idealized in a more stable form. The form of the Hatam hymnal confirms the oral-ideal origins of the songs since singers need little performance information to understand how to transform the words and limited notation into songs.

In the subjective performance experience, the distinction between the songs’ origins appears to be less visible as the performance happens in the present and is a real, embodied experience for all participants (see Figure 1). However, the individual can be affected by the ideal version and the pathway toward performance represented in Figure 1 and Figure 2; the subjective experience changes because of the additional associated meanings, origins, and pathways to performance.

3.2. Digital Forms

Some of these hymnals also have a digital presence, another kind of real object. For the Toraja, Minahasa, and Ambon hymnals, numerous examples of songs are available on video sharing and social media websites, easily locatable with an online search. While some instances are performances and feature a singer, a general trend is toward instructional videos. Many videos display the lyrics and cipher notation so that viewers can follow along and learn the song. Others feature the lyrics and notation with musical accompaniment but no vocal parts and are intended for singing along.8 Notably, as of this writing, the Hatam hymnal has no readily available online presence. While an increasing number of Hatam community members have internet access (some interviews with Simson and Daniel Dowansiba were conducted online for this study), digital forms do not currently play a role in the communal experience of the Hatam hymnal.

Audiovisual digital forms represent another real, stabilizing element for the Toraja, Minahasa, and Ambon communities, emphasizing a different dimension in the interaction between real and ideal forms. By extending the reach of these hymnals beyond physical objects, digital platforms enable broader engagement in transmitting and preserving culture. These forms act as both educational tools and platforms for participation. However, the absence of the Hatam hymnal in the digital space is a reminder of the varying degrees of access and engagement across these four communities, reflecting the distinct historical and cultural contexts that shape their approaches to preserving and disseminating the ideal and real hymnals. This dimension accentuates the ongoing dialogue between local practices and global platforms, further emphasizing the role of hymnals as living artifacts that continue to evolve within their cultural milieus.9

3.3. Musical-Language

Hymns involve both musical sounds and words; they are heard and seen. They need a “conception which takes account of the interaction between what gets talked about as music and what gets talked about as language, these being quantities which are never wholly separable anyway” (Bowie 2003, p. 222). Music and language create a single communication event in the performance of a hymn. Following Faudree (2012), I use the term musical-language. Using this concept, we “move away from our own assumptions about the division between language and music. … Furthermore, viewing music and language as part of a full semiotic field will further ongoing conversations about how to decenter texts as a core unit of analysis, while providing the tools for examining them holistically and assessing their relative importance (and unimportance) by positioning texts alongside other collections of signs, sonic and otherwise” (520). Faudree stresses that “Language and music are not merely separate expressive channels but part of a seamless semiotic complex, one calling for an integrated, holistic, unified analytic framework that takes as its most basic unit of analysis the socially situated, relationally understood sign” (530).

Musical-language is a unique phenomenon that exists only in the performance of a hymn—whether in the mind (as an individual hums or imagines the song internally) or in the external act of singing. The song itself and how it is experienced are foregrounded, moving beyond correspondence or representation. Artistic truth in hymns is fully experienced only through interlacing language with musical sounds, form, rhythm, and the resonances fashioned therein. It is what Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art, calls the “setting up of a world” (Heidegger 2009, p. 44).

As repositories of songs and theological reflections, hymnals are not static objects with predetermined meanings but are subject to the ongoing process of what Derrida terms différance (Derrida 1982). Each time congregants sing a hymn, its meaning is renegotiated within the performance context. For Derrida, meaning is forever in flux, found between, before, and beyond the words. Language is flowing rather than ideally fixed. Différance points to several features that govern the production of musical-language meaning. Musical-language is not representational, although idealization allows it to correspond to another occurrence at a different time (Bowie 2003, p. 241). Musical-language and signs are not identical to what they signify and only acquire meaning through differentiation from other musical-language and signs. Meaning in musical-language is deferred and subjected to (re)negotiation, (re)interpretation, and (re)signification with every realization, always in conversation with experience, precluding it from being absolute (249).

Thus, engaging with hymnals is not just a passive process of receiving culture but an active, reflexive dialogue between ideal and real. Translation issues underscore this. Poplawska (2020) observes that translated and adapted songs are “filtered through a group’s sensitivity and experience,” and “the final outcome may significantly differ from the one intended. … People feel estranged while performing music they do not really know. To familiarize it they perform in their ‘own’ way, in their local style” (193). Bhabha comments that the “translation of cultures” is a complex undertaking with myriad effects (Bhabha 1996, p. 54). Translation can distort the ideality of the hymn as it is taken from its context and realized by a new subject (community). When the ideal aligns with the real, however, the negotiation of meaning embodied in a local hymnal facilitates a process of autogenic reflexivity, contributing to cultural dynamism and vitality.

4. Hymnals in Society

Through encapsulating shared values, histories, and narratives, hymnals provide a framework for communities to engage with and reflect upon their identity. Each of the four hymnals explored for this paper was created by a community that experienced colonialism in some way. Although their reactions to colonial hegemony were unique, some common threads emerged in the research as well as some distinctive ones. As an American studying Indonesian communities, postcolonialism was a nonnegotiable aspect of my study, starting “from the premise that those in the West … should take what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘historically subjugated knowledges’ seriously and use them as a fulcrum from which to question their own assumptions” (Young 2020, p. 23). I use the term postcolonialism to refer to the theoretical framework that examines colonialism’s cultural, political, and social legacies, critically analyzing how formerly colonized societies have been shaped by, and continue to engage with, the cultural hegemony and power dynamics imposed by colonial rule (Rynkiewich 2012). Within that understanding, this study explores how these four Indonesian Christian communities have both resisted and transformed inherited colonial structures.

There is a long history of colonialism in Indonesia since the 16th century. Many communities in Indonesia inhabit a hybridized culture that still reflects some aspects of the colonial past. Colonialism can be a totalizing control over every aspect of life, beyond just the physical, and often includes “implicit judgments about all other areas of social construction” (Kang 2016, p. 2). The implicit judgments also apply to musical worship: colonialism imposed certain styles and forms on the societies studied for this paper. This history requires consideration of the hymnals’ origins—is their existence a relic of a colonial obligation? Globalization can have a similar hegemonic effect, with culture, theology, and aesthetic values flowing from Western cultural frameworks to the (presumed) passive, peripheral recipients in the non-West (Cheong 2018, p. 25).

These four songbooks, regardless of how the idea of a hymnal originated in their communities, are now incorporated into contemporary culture. Greg Urban (2001) notes a process applicable to hymnals such as these, used regularly for worship:

Repeated exposure to numerous objects emanating from a different cultural tradition—if those objects are of interest to people for their own local reasons—will result in the transmission of something. Moreover, over time, it will result … in the desire not only for the objects themselves, but for the ability to produce those objects.

(65)

These local hymnals fit this pattern. No matter the origins of the idea (even colonially imposed), hymnals became attractive to these four cultures. The new songbooks are not identical copies of what came before, however:

Confronted with a cultural element, modern recipients of culture do not (or, do not in this ideal world of narratives) simply replicate the element. Instead, they place it in relation to other elements, take strands from one and intertwine them with strands from others, thereby weaving something that, while a continuation of what has come before, is also arguably something new and different.

(176)

The four hymnals described in this paper are not replications. Their communities situated them within local culture and created something new. These societies have retaken control of their narratives, localizing music on their own terms, with their own changes, in their own books. The idea of a hymnal as a cultural artifact may have arrived from elsewhere, but now they are recreated as an assertion of identity. Since these are local or regional church denominations, supervision occurs at those levels without external guidance from national or international bodies. The following sections, primarily through the words of community members, explore two aspects of this: theology and musical localization.

4.1. Active Theologizing

In using the term “active theologizing,” I follow King (2019) in understanding it as “communities continually reflecting on God’s revelation—the biblical Scriptures” (111). This process is one of dynamic agency, in which communities engage with and interpret scripture within their local historical and cultural contexts.

We sing what we believe and believe what we sing. King also modified the well-known Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of what is prayed [is] the law of what is believed) to become lex canendi, lex credendi (the law of what is sung [is] the law of what is believed) to describe how African church theology is shaped by singing (King et al. 2008, p. 6). She later explored Alan Tippett’s study Solomon Islands Christianity (Tippett 1967) and affirmed how singing “underscores the shaping of a people’s theology through the selection of song texts for their content and the frequency of their use. Songs, then, not only serve as a storehouse of people’s beliefs but also help to form a people’s theological storehouse” (King 2009, p. 44).

Frank Burch Brown (2003) pondered something similar about African American music genres, musing that “we should be careful not to imply that music simply replicates in an audible medium the preexisting social and inner realities of our world. [These genres] constitute a new dimension of that life, and incarnate its pleasures and problems in ways never before heard or quite imagined” (162).

In my interview with Rev. John Beay, a songwriter and pastor in Ambon, he described the importance of theological reflection behind creating the Maluku hymnal:

Putting songs in a book is part of our responsibility as the church. People sing about their relationship with God and all kinds of theological topics in church. The songs we sing need to be carefully selected for their theology and philosophy so that people are in a right relationship with God, self, others, and creation. These songs in the book are acceptable and excellent choices for people to use.^10,11

For Beay, the book is a means to protect the church’s beliefs from errant doctrine and provide a way to worship in local styles. His perspective aligns with John Wilson’s research as he comments how “hymns, readily memorized, become an effective way of communicating Christian teaching and scripture, both within the community of the church and in society as a whole. The participatory nature of indigenous hymns, often antiphonal or responsorial, aids memorization and transmission, and also internalizes the message” (Wilson 1988, p. 55).

A group of Minahasa theology professors reflected on how connected the arts are to feelings and how the Minahasa hymnal is significant to them as a local artistic expression. They described how the Minahasa church did not eliminate outside ideas but recognized that they, too, could theologize.12 One professor noted the church’s demonstration of its ability to elevate local culture and integrate it into their theology as a significant strength of the book.13

In compiling the Hatam hymnal, the Hatam team looked for songs with “good spiritual character” and biblical principles to teach believers how to live. Rev. Dowansiba described how “some songs were to encourage people to do something, and others were for encouraging people to progress in their faith—spiritual songs. Other songs forbade something or reminded people what not to do”.14

Four different communities created these hymnals with varying motivations, each containing expressions of worship, doctrine, and teaching. In each case, the songbooks not only serve as repositories of local musical traditions but also as powerful tools for shaping and transmitting theological understanding within the communities. Religious beliefs are woven into the fabric of local musical traditions, shaping communal identity and spiritual life. The books represent ideal, living embodiments of the churches’ values, beliefs, and aspirations.

4.2. Musical Localization

Ingalls et al. (2018) observe the need for a nuanced understanding of change and identity, which they find in the concept of musical localization, defined as “the process whereby Christian communities take a variety of musical practices—some considered ‘indigenous,’ some ‘foreign,’ some shared across spatial and cultural divides; some linked to past practice, some innovative—and make them locally meaningful and useful in the construction of Christian beliefs, theology, practice, and identity” (3). The four communities discussed in this paper each have their own journey of musical localization connected to colonial history. Somewhat different from the Catholic context, none are now connected to an international or national institution guiding the process; these are local and regional denominations. They are not seeking a unifying, national hymnody, as Poplawska (2020) observed in the Indonesian Catholic context. They are negotiating something similar to what Bhabha (1996) calls the “recurrence of the image of the past while keeping open the question of the future. The importance of such retroaction lies in its ability to reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it, resignify it” (59). A root issue is the expression of communal identity in response to both historical and current hegemony (colonialism and globalization). The following paragraphs describe how these four hymnals are elements of musical localization and communal responses to change.

The creative process of the Torajan Church in producing their hymnal was an intentional move away from Western musical styles toward a renewed interest in local musical styles contextualized for Christian worship. The Torajan hymnal contains songs with local melodies based on Torajan musical principles, “born from a desire in the church for new songs to sing in worship services. Generally, the congregants were asking for ‘community singing’ that was simple, short, repeatable, and easy to memorize”. The Torajan church is also producing a forthcoming hymnal of all one hundred and fifty Psalms set to Torajan music. Palondongan commented that these hymns are “beautiful, memorable, and singable.” He described how the church created the hymnal “to return and unearth our melodies and original Torajan ethnic songs, with lyrics based scripture. … The Papudian Toraya [Torajan Psalms songs] … are compositions using the ethnic Torajan scale and melody.” Later, he added how congregants have “returned to experiencing and enjoying original Torajan songs”.15

For Hatam, the journey has been conservative, keeping form stable by adapting existing singing styles to new scriptural subjects. The connection between Hatam culture and Christian belief was a recurring theme in interviews. Rev. Simson reflected on the 1960s, noting “We had several singing styles back then. All the ministers and evangelists had meetings to decide which ones were appropriate for Christian worship, and that’s what we still use”.16 His son, Daniel, describes what he knows about that time:

In the beginning, I heard how a few people created our hymnal as songs were gathered to become one book. I heard [the missionaries] first tried using Western songs, but it was challenging. From the beginning, they had the idea to use our language, but then everyone decided to use our singing rhythm for worship, too. Using outside songs was just impossible. So they decided, “Why don’t we make new songs, make them spiritual, and use our singing style?” The singing style is Hatam, and so is the language. Now, people can understand God’s word through songs.17

Daniel repeatedly mentioned the hymnal as a source of pride, reflecting “I’m really happy and thankful for our book. Finally, we have a hymnal in our language. I’m thankful to God for it. Maybe other people don’t yet have the opportunity [to have their own hymnal]; it is a grace, and we’re thankful. We’re proud to have it”. For the Hatam community, the hymnal is part of a hybrid Hatam–Christian identity reflecting a core part of their beliefs.

For the Minahasa and Maluku hymnals, localization is a more complex conversation involving an extended colonial history replete with imported musical styles and worship patterns as Dutch traditions were translated into subordinated local cultures. These two hymnals aim to resolve cultural tension—an artifact of the decolonizing process—through musical localization. As Ingalls et al. put it,

Musical localization … is capable of encompassing the ecumenical aspirations of the concepts of inculturation and contextualization and the emphasis on local agency signified by indigenization without succumbing to their pitfalls, especially those of ethnocentrism and essentialized notions of authenticity. … The process of localization as we define it here is inherently relational; through it, a community positions itself in historical and cultural relationship with—not just in distinction from—often multiple others.

(Ingalls et al. 2018, p. 13)

Musical localization emphasizes interconnectedness—communities do not exist in isolation. It unearths value in all kinds of music in culture and finds richness in the relationships. Beay explained the motivation behind the Maluku hymnal: “[The Maluku church] made a hymnal because we were aware that we had these riches from all our traditions, and we could use them for praising God. Why do we always sing songs from other cultures to worship God? We have our own ways of worshipping God here, too. So, this created the desire to make a book of songs from Maluku.”18 Figure 4 is the first song in the hymnal, Akang Manis Lawang, composed by noted Moluccan composer and ethnomusicologist Christian Izaac Tamaela. He instructs the singers to “adapt the song to the soul of the tifa drum beat” (Gereja Protestan Maluku 2015).

The cover of Maluku hymnal, shown in Figure 5, contains a unique image:

The first page of the hymnal describes the meaning of the tripartite symbol made up of a cross, a music note, and a conch shell. The cross integrated into the music note’s stem symbolizes that the songs are integral to liturgical, ecclesiastical worship. The conch shell represents the Moluccan culture and musical styles used, “reflecting the enthusiasm of the Maluku church in building and developing church worship music and services which are contextual, constructive, and ecumenical in the music, theology, language, and local culture” (Gereja Protestan Maluku 2015).

Many church musicians and songwriters contributing to the Maluku, Toraja, and Minahasa hymnals are bi-musical and highly trained in local and Western musical traditions. The Minahasa hymnal even includes Western notation in the second edition (Badan Pekerja Majelis Sinode GMIM 2010). Beay describes using the seventh scale degree in new songs, while Moluccan music is typically pentatonic (using the scale degrees 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6). He explains how the Maluku church is rewriting the colonial narrative to assert its identity through sharing its hybridity with the global church:

We have received Western culture and now feel it is our own. Through contextualization, it’s like [our culture] is renewed as two things have fused. We can’t fault songwriters for using the seventh in their songs because now we like how it sounds. We tend to be so allergic to other sounds, but we can’t fault the seventh because it is a part of us now. … [The seventh] is in me now, but this doesn’t mean our local songs aren’t good. It just means we need to accommodate other musical traditions, too. It enhances our worship. We can perform all these kinds of songs, and our worship is enriched. Now, people worldwide can know how we Moluccans worship. Hearing our worship is how we spread the gospel. This enriches the global church.19

One perspective on the Minahasa and Maluku hymnals, particularly noting the Western-style hymns they contain, is that they represent a xenocentric narrative espousing a tacit acknowledgment of the superiority of the imported worship styles from the West. This essentializing viewpoint relies on neocolonial assumptions and denies the agency of the communities; it is not borne out through this research. Instead, the Minahasa and Maluku hymnals epitomize a process of musical localization in which a colonially imposed worship style has been reimagined. Ingalls et al. note the same pattern elsewhere, describing the perspective of contributors to their book: “Rather than viewing instances of rupture or the adoption of new styles precisely because they are perceived as ‘foreign’ as signs of local subjugation to hegemonic forces, many of our contributors interpret them as contextualized evidence of local agency” (Ingalls et al. 2018, p. 13).

The church cultures that published the Minahasa and Maluku hymnals have chosen to continue creating Western-style hymns, asserting their status and positioning themselves in relation to Western churches and their musical traditions. The hymnals represent a desire for knowing and being known; they were born out of colonial-era churches with centuries of history. The churches took Western hymn styles and reinterpreted them with local nuances and modifications as they rewrote the narrative and recreated their own identity. In many cases, churches “upped the ante” with Western choral styles, as choirs from Indonesia frequently compete in—and win—choir competitions worldwide, and Indonesia hosts its own choir festivals.20 Thus, the creative musical work conducted by the Maluku and Minahasa songwriters, including composing Western-style hymns, clarifies identity and asserts agency through the conscious, intentional decision to localize hegemonic musical forms.

5. The Once and Future Hymnal

The past defines culture—what Urban (2001) calls its “onceness.” However, culture is also perpetually moving forward. Focusing solely on the onceness of culture leads to viewing it as a memorialization that trails off into an increasingly obscure past. This ignorance overlooks the inherent dynamism in culture—its evolution and energy. Derrida’s concept of différance suggests a continuous reinterpretation of the hymnals, fueling momentum and sustainability by allowing for an autogenic reflexive process (Moran 2000). This futurity is crucial for cultural vitality.

Culture acquires momentum in objects, comprising whatever is socially learned and transmitted (Urban 2001, p. 2). Cultural artifacts, such as hymnals, spread through the community and are internalized, interpreted, and re-externalized. Their connections to rituals help them serve as agents of cultural stability. Local hymnals act as repositories of cultural symbolism, potentially embodying a community’s ideals, struggles, and aspirations. Through the repeated, habitual act of singing familiar songs, individuals and communities engage with and (re)interpret them in ways that reinforce cultural norms and values and contribute to cultural and religious vitality.

Urban’s concept of metaculture refers to an overarching framework that enables the movement and transformation of culture itself. It is the set of discourses people use to talk about, understand, and evaluate culture and serves as a medium through which ideas, practices, and innovations are critiqued and perpetuated. His work implies that culture is pliable, constantly in motion, and influenced by reflexivity and the exchange of ideas, thus highlighting the dynamic interplay between opposing forces. In the metacultural process, cultures can be self-aware and self-critical: this is essential for the evolution and sustainability of cultures because it allows for adaptation to new challenges and integration of new ideas. Urban studies this push-and-pull of metaculture, describing how it draws society toward cultural artifacts:

Metaculture is significant in part, at least, because it imparts an accelerative force to culture. It aids culture in its motion through space and time. It gives a boost to the culture that it is about, helping to propel it on its journey. The interpretation of culture that is intrinsic to metaculture, immaterial as it is, focuses attention on the cultural thing, helps to make it an object of interest, and, hence, facilitates its circulation.

(Urban 2001, p. 4)

Metaculture provides a framework for understanding how hymnals facilitate the self-examination and dialogue crucial for a culture’s ability to adapt and thrive over time. The songbooks facilitate the autogenic reflection necessary for cultural momentum and sustainability.

5.1. Stable–Malleable

Brian Schrag developed the stable–malleable dynamic to describe the interaction between different features within Ngiembɔɔn artistic events (Schrag 2021). The stable elements provide a consistent framework (predictability), and the malleable elements allow for responsiveness in different performances and contexts (variability). Schrag suggested that the mastery of malleable artistic infrastructures can strengthen the stable ones, thereby energizing various domains of life. This dynamic interaction results in a feedback resonance and the generation of communal energy—an artistic dynamo—that invigorates many domains of life and contributes to economic and cultural vitality.

5.1.1. Stable–Malleable in Performance

At the performance level, the stable–malleable dynamic applies to artistic communication genres, such as a hymnal.21 As a stable object representing an artistic ideal, the hymnal serves as a medium for singers to realize a song in a malleable enactment. In performance, hymnals give way to malleability as performers improvise songs (Benson 2003), and each realization is unique. Church leaders choose which songs the congregation will sing and for what purpose. Hymnals even exert a cultural force when unused, as worshippers consider the songs within but choose to draw on other sources. The real book and the ideal it embodies encourage cultural reflexivity and recognize onceness—maintaining stability.

Whether communities created songs in an oral- or written-preference environment (see Figure 1 and Figure 2), in their notated form, they remain unchanging. Benson (2003) describes the ideality of notated music and how it contributes to stability:

What makes [notated music] ideal in another sense is that—in virtue of having an existence disconnected from the world of real objects—[the songs] would seem to be protected from the caprices of the real world and thus the dangers that threaten the existence of real objects.

(7)

Idealization through notation transmits performance practice. The Hatam hymnal only contains the text of the songs with minimal notation, but this is enough for the community. It contains all the needed information for a Hatam congregant to perform a song. The other hymnals’ contexts required more detailed musical instructions: the Maluku, Minahasa, and Toraja hymnals included Indonesian cipher notation. In those contexts, the churches needed additional information to realize the music.

5.1.2. Stable–Malleable in Culture

At the macro level, the stable–malleable dynamic helps explain the ongoing change process in cultural infrastructures. All culture is moving—as Schrag shows with his representation of the energy created by artistic dynamos (Schrag 2021, p. 147). Even stable, resisting elements in culture are advancing but in slower, geologic terms. The hymnals studied in this research fit into this dynamism, often acting as stable elements in a system, a reference point from which innovation can depart. Urban calls this a “metaculture of tradition” (Urban 2001, p. 5). Material culture, such as a hymnal, contributes to recirculation, acting as a steady background for a novel present.

The creation of hymnals is an attempt by the community to limit malleability. Benson (2003) describes objects like them—written artifacts—with the term “bound idealities,” as they “[have] a particular place in cultural history” (8). Paul Connerton (1989) describes how writing is transformative:

The transition from an oral culture to a literate culture is a transition from incorporating practices to inscribing practices. The impact of writing depends upon the fact that any account which is transmitted by means of inscriptions is unalterably fixed, the process of its composition being definitively closed. The standard edition and the canonic work are the emblems of this condition. This fixity is the spring that releases innovation.

(75)

Urban agrees:

The metaculture of tradition has been, first and foremost, concerned with the culture passing through words rather than with the culture passing through nonlinguistic things, such as pots and machetes. And it is the culture contained in spoken words that is the most mercurial, most in need of a metaculture of tradition for its stabilization or containment. … Writing, in some measure, fixes the disseminated object.

(Urban 2001, p. 69)

Earlier (in Section 4.1), I quoted Beay, emphasizing the security and stability found in the Maluku hymnal as congregants are assured of the sound theology found within the book. Writing stabilizes beliefs and theology in the songs and opens up culturally acceptable opportunities for malleability and innovation within a safe, established framework.

5.2. Onceness

Hymnals look back, reminding individuals and communities of their origins. Krabill studied the hymnody of the Harrist church, noting how their hymns represent the “struggles and victories of the scores of Dida communities who suddenly found themselves cut off from certain past practices and thrust by the Prophet Harris into a new reality” (Krabill 1995, p. 14). Hymnals embody a church’s history and doctrine and can be “the primary connector in transmitting the faith from one generation to another” (Eckhardt 2010, p. 7). Songs and the hymnals containing them also continue acquiring meaning and intricate connections to life events both at personal and communal levels. In discussing semiotics and music, Thomas Turino (2008, 2014) calls this “semantic snowballing.” Individuals can experience the same song “at different times and in different contexts,” thus increasing the song’s “emotional power” through increasingly numerous connections to meaningful experiences over time in the mind of the individual (9). Communities can experience the same phenomenon as a song acquires meaning through time.

Hymnals exert centripetal force on communities. Whereas some limitations on creativity can be found in the boundaries and the clear delineation of the edges of the creative domain, hymnals are a central anchor point, a reference around which the domain of acceptable worship practice revolves. For instance, the Catholic church in Indonesia desires ecclesial unity at the national level through singing songs from across the Indonesian archipelago (Poplawska 2018, 2020). Jacob Randolph (2021) wrote about how a Southern Baptist hymnal appealed to their “unifying heritage” and intended to encourage church members to consider their roots (41).

As hymnals facilitate worship, repetition forms habits and allows worshippers to settle into the expected and familiar, building symbolic capital that legitimizes and strengthens cultural artistic identity (Hardy 2012). James K. A. Smith, building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus, describes the concept as “a kind of compatibilism. As a social being acting in the world, I’m not an unconstrained ‘free’ creature ‘without inertia;’ neither am I the passive victim of external causes and determining forces” (Smith 2013, p. 83). Connerton notes how “the meaning of a social habit rests upon others’ conventional expectations such that it must be interpretable as a socially legitimate (or illegitimate) performance. Social habits are essentially legitimating performances. And if habit-memory is inherently performative, then social habit-memory must be distinctively social-performative” (Connerton 1989, p. 35). Thus, the hymnal acts as a powerful agent in forming a collective embodiment of cultural and spiritual practices that both shapes and is shaped by the community’s identity.

5.3. Optimal Distinctiveness and Futurity

Optimal distinctiveness theory explains the hymnals’ malleable elements and momentum—their futurity. As proposed by Marilynn Brewer (Brewer et al. 1993), optimal distinctiveness theory suggests that individuals must balance two opposing desires: the need for inclusion within some social groups and distinction from others. The core concept is that “the two identity needs (inclusion/assimilation and differentiation/distinctiveness) are independent and work in opposition to motivate group identification” (Leonardelli et al. 2010, p. 66).

Particularly in the cases of the Minahasa, Maluku, and Toraja hymnals, church denominations created the hymnals as assertions of agency and identity. Leaders and musicians considered inclusion and assimilation as they composed Western-style songs, creating something not unlike many existing hymnbooks from the Western world. Differentiation and distinctiveness live in the praxis of musical localization. Stable and malleable elements dwell within creativity as composers negotiate the acceptable boundaries of innovation within the existing domain, pushing the malleability of artistic expression as well as the boundaries of acceptability for worship while retaining the necessary stable theological and musical elements desired by the field of gatekeepers who seek to preserve the fidelity of the domain and the historical patterns of worship.22

In his study of Indonesian popular music, Wallach (2008) uncovers a dynamic of hybridity that also pertains to the hymnals:

The creation of musical hybrids results from the desire to move beyond the conventions of established forms, to add an “ethnic accent” (logat etnis) that emerges not from the inability to speak without one … but from a conscious effort to introduce “local” elements into a global form—to add something new and thus to participate in the replication of culture characteristic of the metaculture of modernity.

(259)

Whether hegemony is colonial or global, the communities I studied create momentum toward an imagined future through negotiation with a multiplicity of powerful others. They create through similarity but not sameness. In the Minahasa and Maluku hymnals, choices in harmony and form intentionally reimagined Western performance features.

The hymnals are boundary markers: attempts at decolonization through optimal distinctiveness. Bhabha asserts that this process is not “the determinism of historical inevitability, repetition without a difference. It makes it possible for us to confront that difficult borderline, the interstitial experience between what we take to be the image of the past and what is in fact involved in the passing of time and the passage of meaning” (Bhabha 1996, p. 60).

The stability of the hymnals allows for reflexivity, honoring the history of the places and cultures. The malleability is seen in musical localization, hybridity, and revitalization of older genres as communities express their agency and control over their future narrative. Local hymnals acknowledge the past in a present performance, which points toward a preferred future.

6. Conclusions

Artistic practices energize and sustain communities. Hymnals, a form of artistic expression, are cultural artifacts that embody a process of self-interpreting autogenic reflection in which the stable (traditional, cultural remembering, onceness) and malleable (improvisation, innovation, future) entwine. They are not just lifeless collections of culture but lively contributors to its creation. Connerton remarks,

To say that societies are self-interpreting communities is to indicate the nature of that deposit … among the most powerful of these self-interpretations are the images of themselves as continuously existing that societies create and preserve.

(Connerton 1989, p. 12)

Through interviews and studying four distinct local hymnals, I have described how different Indonesian communities “self-interpret” through their songbooks and knit their artistic communication genres into Christian worship in meaningful and sustainable ways. Individuals and communities subjectively interact with the ideal through experiencing real, physical hymnals, as the songs they contain are realized in singing. Whether hymns began life and were idealized through notation or internalization, performance realizes them all during worship. The four groups studied here continually and actively theologize through their hymns, and musical-language communicates that truth artistically. The Hatam, Toraja, Maluku, and Minahasa communities are not merely recipients of foreign religious worship practices but are active agents weaving a new pattern through musical localization.

Autogenic cultural reflection through local hymnals contributes to cultural momentum and sustainability. The four hymnals analyzed are metacultural artifacts, not just collections of songs but also stable reflections of their originating cultures. They are platforms for dialogue, encouraging malleability—tapestries where different interpretations and performances can coexist, compete, or complement. Communities discover how to optimally distinguish themselves from their neighbors and hegemonic forces and reclaim agency, asserting their identities in the face of globalization.

When communities experience the hymnals, participants perform songs and engage with the narrative, cultural knowledge and history woven within them. Through this process, individuals and groups question, reaffirm, and renegotiate their cultural identity. Performing and improvising the songs in these local hymnals reinvigorates culture, making them relevant to the current context and ensuring their transmission to future generations. Through this ongoing, reflexive conversation, individuals have agency, culture remains dynamic, and the tapestry grows ever longer.