Five Leaders Honored as Fellows of The Hymn Society

Beverly Ann Howard, Mary Nelson Keithahn, J. Michael McMahon, Martin Tel, and Karen Westerfield Tucker were recently honored as Fellows of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada for outstanding leadership and significant contributions to congregational song. The new Fellows were recognized July 22 during the organization’s Annual Conference at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Beverly Ann Howard is a church musician, hymnologist, and scholar who spent forty years as organist for congregations in Riverside, California, and taught organ and hymnology at California Baptist University (1977-2017), chairing its Division of Fine Arts. She served as Editor of The Hymn (2003-2008) and was a longtime member of its Editorial Advisory Board. Howard was a committee member for two major hymnals, Celebrating Grace: Hymnal for Baptist Worship (2010) and Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal (2013), and is a contributing author to Sing with Understanding: An Introduction to the Theology of Christian Congregational Song (2022). She retired to Fort Worth, Texas, in 2017.

 

Mary Nelson Keithahn is a hymn text writer, church educator, and ordained minister whose forty-year collaboration with composer John Horman has produced five published collections of hymns, including Come Away with Me (1998) and Sing of All That Love Can Do (2026). A South Dakota UCC pastor ordained in 1987, she also wrote church school curricula and, with Horman, three volumes of children’s songs published by Augsburg Fortress. Her hymns appear in denominational hymnals including Voices United (1996). Keithahn credits her long association with The Hymn Society with providing the hymnology education missing from her seminary studies.

 

J. Michael McMahon will retire at the end of 2026 as Executive Director of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, a post he has held since 2018. An ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), he spent thirty years in church music ministry, most recently at National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., and served as President and CEO of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians from 2001 to 2013. For more than twenty-five years he was music editor of Celebration and advised the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in developing the liturgical music guidelines Sing to the Lord (2007).

 

Martin Tel is the C. F. Seabrook Director of Music at Princeton Theological Seminary, a post he has held since 1996. He served as senior editor of Psalms for All Seasons (2012) and as a contributing editor for the hymnals Lift Up Your Hearts (2013) and Santo, Santo, Santo / Holy, Holy, Holy (2019). A Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands (1995-96), he is currently co-editing a collection of Korean hymns in English translation. Tel has served on The Hymn Society’s editorial board and delivered a conference plenary address in 2021; he served as co-chair of the recently concluded 2026 Annual Conference in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

Karen Westerfield Tucker is Professor of Worship at the Boston University School of Theology, where she has taught since 2004 following fifteen years on the faculty of Duke University Divinity School. Her scholarship on congregational song and liturgy includes the monograph American Methodist Worship (Oxford, 2001) and numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. An ordained United Methodist elder, she has served as President of Societas Liturgica (2009-2011) and editor-in-chief of Studia Liturgica (2005-2013). In 2023 she received the Berakah Award from the North American Academy of Liturgy.