Ethos

Common Hymnal is the original imprint within the Common People ecosystem — the song library, storytelling hub, and theological anchor from which much of the wider work has grown. Common People now serves as the parent nonprofit and creative commons stewarding this broader ecosystem: discovering, developing, organizing, and platforming artists whose work carries enduring cultural, spiritual, and social value. Through this structure, we nurture art born in the margins — work that resists conventional systems, refuses easy categorization, and needs to be held with care rather than extracted for gain.

Our Complex Christian Roots

Institutionalized Christianity has been going through a massive shaking these past years. Escapism has been put to the challenge by realism. Sacred vs Secular dualism by a more integrated approach to life. Status quo by social activism. Judgmentalism by compassion. Exclusion by inclusion. Patriarchy by gender equality. Hierarchy by egalitarianism. Racism by the flourishing of BIPOC leadership. Colonization by the rise of former colonies, both geographic and spiritual. The building and the leveraging of ‘spiritual brands’ for scale-driven influence by a call to return to the way of Jesus, the way of servanthood.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we are witnessing the brash doubling down of White Christian Nationalism, its misrepresentation of the teachings of Jesus, its rabid pursuit of political power, and the polarity that it has created in our world. In all of this, an emerging generation of forward-thinking songwriters, artists and thought leaders have been experiencing an increasing estrangement from the religious industrial complex, the ‘overground’, and been finding respite in what we call the ‘spiritual underground’. They’ve concluded that it is not going to be possible to rewrite the narrative using the existing operating system, and have been digging deep in search of a theological imagination that could prevent Empire from being replaced with yet another version of Empire. Despite the challenges, their voices are crucial, helping us imagine a future that existing systems have not been able to hold.

From the beginning, this work has been shaped by BIPOC imagination, leadership, sound, theology, and lived experience. We are not trying to invite marginalized voices into a preexisting white-centered structure as decoration. In many essential ways, this project is the work of those voices — shaped by communities, histories, sounds, theologies, and lived experiences that have too often been pushed to the margins, yet continue to carry essential wisdom for the wider church and culture.

Common Hymnal As Living Library

With all of this in mind, Common Hymnal was created as a digital hymnal — a living library to help people navigate uncertain times, offering safe passage into the future through songs, stories, and ideas from the spiritual underground. It was the first step forward, the seed from which the wider commons has grown. That commons now takes shape through related expressions: Common Hymnal, our original Christian-facing song library and theological anchor; Common Exchange, our record label and distribution arm; Common Thread, our storytelling imprint; and Common People, our flagship band formed around a culture, not a genre. Each carries a different part of the same commitment.

At the heart of the work is Christian imagination: the capacity to see the world through worship, lament, justice, repair, resurrection, and the surprising deliverances of God.

We believe songs can do more than express ideas. Songs help people remember, grieve, worship, imagine, resist despair, and encounter God in ways explanation alone often cannot. At their best, they give language to something people already feel but have not yet been able to say.

The work began with a series of songwriting camps that gathered displaced creatives whose voices had often been overlooked or silenced. Strangers became collaborators, conversations became songs, and songs became shared experiences. In those gatherings, a new creative ecology began to take root — reshaping how art, faith, and justice could intersect.

That spark gave birth to this site: part hymnal, part storytelling hub. While the songs lit the way, the ideas and cross-currents among these creatives were too rich not to blog.

As the movement grew, the music needed a broader container. This led to the launch of Common Exchange, our record label, and the distribution of our catalog across a wider array of digital platforms. Still, this site remains the central archive, charting the journey from those first get togethers to a fully realized platform where the work can live, evolve, and keep speaking to the world.

We are also beginning to imagine Common Hymnal beyond the digital environment — as a physical resource that gathers songs, stories, Scripture, reflection, prayer, and practice into a form that can be held, marked, shared, and returned to.

Along the way, we’ve been able to curate a catalog that centers life, repair, and spiritual imagination; embodies love, dignity, honesty, and empathy; comforts the disheartened and emboldens the courageous; and carries both praise and protest. To be clear, we see protest as love-driven resistance that exposes and disrupts injustice, and not the petty hostility of online discourse. True justice work requires depth, maturity and a vision that seeks transformation and dignity for everyone, including those who cause harm.

Our contributors are not only attuned to the work of justice, restoration, and reparation, but they also hold to the conviction activism aims for a world where people can truly flourish - not merely survive. In this regard, celebrating joy, hope, and love is just as essential to this anthology as naming what is broken.

Spiritual Underground

To conceptualize the spiritual underground, it’s helpful to first envision the overground: the prominent network of churches, ministries, and institutions that define the public face of Christianity. In contrast, the underground exists in the borderlands - less visible, less formal - where unconventional and unlikely candidates live and serve together, finding common ground outside the mainstream.

Many of the artists in this community know something of wilderness — spiritually, socially, institutionally, and creatively. Their songs often emerge from that place: not as escape, but as formation.

The people gathered here do not all speak from the same denominational location or cultural vocabulary. What often binds the work together is a set of shared convictions: that God hears the cries of the oppressed, that worship forms people for love and justice, that lament and hope belong together, and that the arts can help communities imagine faithful life in the world.

Historically, these misfits have been pioneers - champions of moral clarity and original thought. Though their efforts have often seemed scrappy, they have been remarkably consequential, catalyzing new ideas and initiatives that have ultimately found their way into the overground.

In recent history, the term ‘underground’ has been used to describe the unregistered church in China, where believers must choose between joining the state-sanctioned church or building community outside that closely monitored system to avoid being forced into a constant state of compromise. More broadly, the distinction between overground and underground often hinges on how communities negotiate with authority and control.

For most of the last two thousand years, the overground has been shaped by theology. In a surprising turn in recent years, dogma has given way to personality and production. By contrast, the underground resists both rigid doctrine and flashy pop religion, leaning instead into the sociology of how people gather, relate, and create together.

Like athletics where you can run track or play team sports, creativity can be solo or collaborative. In the underground’s collaborative culture, most of our contributors are team players, fostering a vibrant community and an infectious, irrepressible ‘party spirit.’

As with everything human, few matters are purely black and white - nuance, contradiction, and compromise abound. Many who serve in the overground identify with the underground, and they are welcome here. That said, their involvement carries a potential vulnerability: with all the goodwill in the world, we cannot risk being drawn into a tug of war with them if their involvement with us creates relational tension for them with their home communities.

A Commons, Not A Talent Farm

We treasure-hunt the margins for creatives whose gifts have not yet found a durable home. Much of our work begins with the beautiful, difficult practice of paying attention — noticing people, listening for what is alive in them, and making room for work that might otherwise remain unseen, unsupported, or misunderstood.

Our goal is not only to discover these voices, but to build the support, relationships, agreements, recordings, resources, and pathways that allow what they carry to last.

For that reason, we have no desire to pluck people out of other projects, churches, communities, or ecosystems where they are already invested and being nurtured. We do not want to undermine another community’s story by treating the people they have formed as raw material for ours.

At the same time, we recognize that many people connected to existing organizations are still, in a deeper sense, underground. Some serve faithfully in environments that do not fully understand them, nurture them, or make room for what they carry. When we come into contact with artists in these situations, we move with particular care: not pressing in casually, and never wanting to place anyone — or ourselves — in a tug of war between loyalties, relationships, or ways of seeing the world. We usually step back unless there is clear mutuality, honest conversation, and a strong sense that they are pressing toward this work rather than being pulled away from something already holding them well.

We believe this moment needs hundreds of new creative initiatives, each with its own voice, culture, sound, and way of seeing the world. What we do not need is for every underground project to merge into one commercial powerhouse, for distinct communities to be flattened into a single pipeline of talent, or for the whole field to start looking and sounding the same. That kind of consolidation may appear efficient, but it drains away the very ingredients that give the work its depth, texture, and integrity.

The goal is not extraction. The goal is to cultivate what would otherwise be overlooked.

This is why we are building a commons, not a talent farm.

People are not resources to be recruited; they come with histories, loyalties, relationships, and existing commitments. We have no interest in treating the trust, formation, or accomplishments of other communities as shortcuts for our own growth.

As artists gain visibility through this commons, the same ethic applies. Visibility can open doors, but it can also attract systems eager to separate people from the communities, relationships, and stories that made their emergence possible.

This is especially painful when an artist formed in our ecosystem is actively courted away without real consideration for the relationships, investment, and trust that helped shape them. Exposure can create opportunity, but it can also confuse the story, pulling artists into narratives that are louder, thinner, and less rooted than the one that made their work matter.

We try to hold this without possessiveness, but also without pretending it does not matter. Our hope is to protect the integrity of the story — ensuring that the people we help find, nurture, and develop are not simply rebranded, relocated, or absorbed into systems that distort the work that formed them.

Construct And Culture

A great deal of thought has gone into the building of this enterprise, and it usually takes time, proximity, and curiosity to fully comprehend the quirks and idiosyncrasies of our culture. We’ve spelled out as much as we can in this backstory, but some things are simply better ‘felt than telt.’ Hence our resolve to build new relationships carefully and patiently.

Over time, the work has taken shape around three recurring practices: creating songs and stories, forming artists and communities through shared theological imagination, and strengthening a network of people who carry this work in their own places, relationships, and contexts.

What has emerged is not simply a catalog of songs, but a kind of relational infrastructure — a way of helping meaningful work move through the world without losing the integrity of the communities that formed it.

In practice, the commons now takes shape through songwriting camps, recordings, music videos, live gatherings, storytelling projects, commissioned songs, physical resource development, and experiments in carrying songs into visual media and public witness.

These gatherings are not simply content-generation exercises. They are spaces of formation, theological reflection, artistic risk, mutual listening, and community building. Collaboration is not only how the songs get written; it is part of what the songs are trying to make possible.

We named the project a hymnal intentionally, rooted in its beginnings as a song initiative within the spiritual space. From the start, however, we never intended the name to confine us to worship music or any single genre. Our gaze has always been wider - on the full scope of life and struggle - and on the work required to honor it with heart, courage, and fidelity.

That said, we do receive invitations to send teams to events, including to lead worship. While live events were not part of the original plan, they have become a vital extension of our work. We approach these invites seriously, aware that we steward a catalog of songs that can not only help people navigate life’s complexities but also help broaden the communal worship experience. From a song publisher’s perspective, there is no better way to share music than in person, where songs can be felt, breathed and experienced.

A key aim is to help Christianly formed songs and stories travel beyond narrow or familiar church contexts into wider public life, while retaining the theological imagination, artistic integrity, and community accountability that formed them. Some of this work is being shaped for visual storytelling — film, documentary, television, and other media contexts where songs can carry grief, dignity, repair, hope, and moral imagination into public life.

Our role as an aggregator is deliberately blurry. Think of us like any other curator in your life: your favorite coffee bar hosting a weekly open mic, your local library presenting a monthly reading, or a tastemaker compiling your favorite playlist.

The edges, too, are blurry, and often messy - just like life itself. Our contributors’ lives, art and interpretations of scripture do not always fit neatly within mainstream Christianity. They are all at different points in their faith journeys, lifestyles, and efforts to address the world’s injustices. Being a part of our community is not gated by orthodoxy, but by relationship, shared vision, and courage.

The conception of this project dates back to the 1980s South African anti-apartheid struggle, making anti-racism and anti-colonialism our guiding ‘true north’. Yet our contributors also engage a broader range of harms: xenophobia, homophobia, sexual abuse, war, gun violence, institutional oppression, exploitative capitalism, mass incarceration, capital punishment, and environmental destruction.

In any initiative like this, certain styles, genres, and emphases naturally rise to the surface. Over time, we have developed our own personality and subculture, shaped by our journeys, shared experiences, and collective taste. A quick browse of this site will make clear the kind of art we value.

Ethnology

The 1960s gave rise to two major spiritual movements in America: the Civil Rights movement and the Contemporary Worship movement. Both spread globally, yet largely ran along parallel tracks with very little meaningful integration. Common Hymnal was born from the conviction that these streams belong together. When worship brings us face to face with God, we begin to feel something of the divine ache — what is loved, what is grieved, and what longs to be repaired. We are not left facing upward only. Instead, we are turned back toward the world — toward its wounds, injustices, grief, and possibility — and sent out on holy errands: the work of love, mercy, and repair. That is where our slogan comes from: Praise and Protest.

The commission Jesus gave his followers was a bottom-up movement shaped by the Sermon on the Mount. Yet in practice, the spread of Christianity often became entangled with empire, colonialism, and racism — a top-down dynamic that compromised the very message it carried.

To our surprise, our early efforts helped anticipate a wider trend in Christianity: multicultural worship collectives. But while our work remained focused on supporting marginalized communities and advancing justice, most versions of that trend moved in a different direction — prioritizing spiritual intensity over social integrity, leveraging celebrity connections, and sidelining justice altogether. In some cases, the dissonance became even harder to ignore when leaders associated with these efforts had troubling records on racial equity, including public support for politicians marked by racist histories, rhetoric, and policies.

When Christianity promotes unity and diversity without confronting systemic inequity, it creates an unbearable dissonance for people of color and undermines the credibility of the faith. You will rarely hear us use words like unity and diversity; we are not pursuing a multicultural aesthetic but a just world.

Compounding this, white privilege — and its disregard for the history and weight of racial injustice — often pressures people of color to compromise deeply held convictions in order to access financially rewarding opportunities within white-led organizations. We are committed instead to cultivating spaces where BIPOC artists, writers, leaders, and communities can thrive without needing to make these concessions.

Who This Is For

This is for those who are paying attention — those who feel the tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be. It is for people drawn to work that carries weight artistically, socially, and spiritually; people who live somewhere between art and analysis, conviction and imagination; people whose cultures, histories, and communities have had to carry more than their share, and who continue to create anyway.

Trajectory

From the start, we deliberately avoided the easy allure of commercial conventions, choosing a path free from gimmicks, clichés, and contrived spirituality. We are driven by a belief in the transformative power of art that speaks truth to power, even when it does not promise quick financial return.

For nearly a decade, this has been slow-building work: gathering relationships, hosting songwriting camps, stewarding songs, producing recordings, and creating pathways for work shaped in the margins to move into public life without losing its integrity. The pace has not always been fast, but it has allowed substance, trust, and long-term stewardship to form beneath the surface.

The goal is not simply to produce more content. It is to create the conditions in which meaningful art can be made, stewarded, shared, and sustained. We are less interested in scale than depth, less concerned with visibility than trust, and more committed to continuity than trend.

We do not treat tradition as static nostalgia, or innovation as novelty for its own sake. The work is to ask how ancient Christian wisdom can be heard, sung, and embodied afresh in the present moment. That also means resisting cliché: refusing overgeneralized spiritual language, inherited formulas, and familiar phrases that no longer carry their full weight.

We are not pursuing influence in the Christian bubble. Neither are we positioning ourselves in opposition to the overground. Rather, we recognize a growing number of Christ followers who no longer inhabit an echo chamber. Some arrive at the margins through prophetic insight; others are pushed there by difficult experiences that leave them searching for a place of safety. Our vision is rooted in these spaces, where depth and coherence tend to thrive.

Underground believers are largely unmoved by trends, including narrow versions of communal worship where lyrical triumph is assumed, theatrical production is expected, and set lists mirror the priorities of well-branded worship movements. Their commitment to thoughtfulness, honesty, and originality makes imitation feel inadequate, especially when engaging something as weighty as worship.

This hymnal, then, is less about promoting a genre and more about documenting an evolving culture — one that embraces a wide spectrum of ideas, values, convictions, disciplines, expressions, styles, anomalies, quirks, and production sensibilities.

From the beginning, our work has pointed away from spectacle and toward the formation of communities shaped by truth, justice, and shared responsibility. It takes shape at the margins, attentive to history and clear-eyed about influence, unwilling to exchange integrity for access or justice for visibility. If this music carries weight, it is because it has been formed there.