How do they introduce the hymns at your church?
I write from memory, but someone made a list of some possible ways of doing it. They included the numerical, the historical and the anecdotal. Numerical? 'Hymn number two eight four, two eight four, ten thousand times ten thousand verses one, two and four, one two and four.'
Or historical. 'The writer of our next hymn was born of humble but godly parents in a small village in the Cotswolds where her father was the blacksmith and her mother the schoolmistress. She was the fifth of their ten children and by the age of three was writing sonnets and could play the trombone, double bass and bagpipes.' And so on.
Or anecdotal. 'A wonderful story is told about this next hymn. An American soldier lay in hospital thousands of miles from his native land, suffering terrible pain from gunshot wounds.' Etc.
