Justice in Methodist Hymnody

Abstract The Report to the 2023 British Methodist Conference, A justice-seeking Church 1, contains a short section on ‘justice and Methodist hymns’. This article explores in more detail how the word justice is used and understood over time and argues that the notion of social justice as we currently understand it only entered our hymnody in the twentieth century. We outline reasons for this, offer some reflections on justice in Methodist hymns and suggest that we need to continue to create hymns that feed a justice-seeking church.