Hymn Crosswalk: Text & Meter

Every hymn app in this store opens the same way: by number, by title, by first line. That is the front of the book. This one opens the back of it: a scripture index, and a meter match. Enter the text you are preaching, and the hymns that cite it come back — most widely carried first. Isaiah 55. Thirty-one hymns cite it. Beside each one: how many hymnals carry it, which verses it draws on, who wrote it and when. Carried in 2,826 hymnals is not a review score. It is a count, and it is the closest honest answer to the question you are actually asking — will this congregation know it. Then the second index: metre. Hymn metre is a list of syllable counts, and two hymns that share one can be sung to each other's tune. So a text nobody knows can be sung to a tune everybody does. This app draws that metre as widths instead of digits. 8.6.8.6 becomes four bars — wide, narrow, wide, narrow. Put…