Mission Praise

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Mission Praise is a hymn book used in a wide variety of churches, especially in Britain, including the Church of England. It currently contains 1144 hymns.

It originated as Mission England Praise, prepared for Billy Graham's 1984 Mission England campaign. In its "words only" form, it was a thin booklet of 282 pieces, with a wide mixture of hymns and worship songs. Some conservative Christians saw it as a way of bringing what they perceived as charismatic choruses into mainstream church worship.

Mission Praise has been through a number of editions. The second booklet (Mission Praise 2), came out in 1987, and contained songs 283 to 647.

The various editions have owed much to The Jubilate Group for their copyright controlled hymnody.

A new edition Mission Praise Combined was released in 1993; featuring an extra two hundred songs; expanding the collection from 647 to 798 items and renumbering and reindexing all items in approximate alphabetical order.

In 1999, "Complete Mission Praise" was published, increasing the number of hymns to 1021.

The 2005 edition, produced under the Collins imprint, adds with a further 123 songs from the last few years. Both the 1999 and 2005 editions maintain the numeric sequence of the songs in the previous edition, resulting in three separate alphabetical sequences of songs in the latest edition.

In January 2008, Mission Praise became the first major hymnbook to be available online. The new website enables subscribers to access words, sheet music and MIDI files of the songs in Mission Praise and its sister products Carol Praise and Junior Praise.