I think it is a step forward, for a number of reasons.
1) Hymnals require congregants to sing into a book, not too God.
In order to read from a hymnal, you have to be looking at the hymnal. Your focus, in a very real sense, is on the book, and not on the God you are worshipping. You are unaware of your fellow congregants, except perhaps to ensure that you are stilling singing the same verse and key as them.Your singing isn't out together with the congregation, but in towards your hymnal.2) Hymnals are individualistic, a projected screen is shared.
Every congregant has a hymnal, or at most shares with a couple of other people. The projector screen is shared between everyone. Everyone in the congregation is reading the same words from the same screen. It is a corporate action, not an individual one.
3) Hymnal restrict movement.
If you are reading from a hymnal, you cannot raise your hands, clap your hands, or dance. We are commanded in the bible to do all three in worship. It is a very sad thing that most churches do none of them, possibly in part due to the influence of hymnals.
4) Hymnals restrict song choices.
Once a church decides to sing out of a hymnal, and chooses a hymnal they have limited their choice of songs. They can only sing songs from that hymnal. Invariably, the committee that chose the songs in the hymnal will have different tastes, theologies, and inclinations than the congregation. The congregation will only end up singing some portion of the songs in the hymnal. As the congregation grows in the Lord, their desires will change as they may decided they wish to sing more psalms or fugues. But a church cannot readily change their hymnals without significant cost, and so they are stuck.
We are commanded to sign a new song to the Lord, but hymnals encourage us not to.
5) Hymnals reduce accessibility.
Operating a hymnal requires the ability to turn pages, identify the correct page, and in many cases turn pages while still singing. For the young and able-bodied this is not a problem. However, for the old or mentally challenged, this can actually be a very difficult task.
6) Hymnals are not friendly to jumping in.
If you enter a church which is in the middle of singing, it is not a trivial task to determine which song and verse they are singing. Of course, one can determine this from an already seated congregant, but this is a rather awkward for a newcomer to attempt. In contrast, a project makes it immediately apparent which song and verse are being song because it is the only verse on the screen.
Of course, we would rather people show up on time. But we should be welcoming to newcomers who at least showed up to the service if late. There are also legitimate reasons for entering a service late, such as dealing with an emergency, unruly child, etc.
7) Hymnals are too available.
Hymnals allow you to sing anywhere. However, this leads to a dependency on the hymnal. Churches which have sung out of hymnals for years may find themselves unable to sing anything without the hymnal. There is an undoubted benefit to the breadth of music available to the users of hymnals and projectors. But there is also value in actually having songs comitted to memory. Hymnals makes it to easy to never have to recalls songs, and allows us to simply get used to repeating the words in front of our face.
8) Hymnals don't distinguish between corporate and personal worship.
When we sing from a hymnal both at home and at church, family devotions and corporate worship begin to feel the same. They are not. While both are important, they are crucially different activities and we should seize the opportunity to differentiate them.
9) Hymnals homogenize family worship.
Every family is different, which shows up in many ways. One way that shows up is in the songs that family choses to sing. While it is good that a family sings songs from the sunday service, they should not feel restricted to that. However, a hymnal encourages the family to stick to the hymnal and not to explore over the whole range of songs available.
10) Hymnals are destructible.
Many hymnals shows the signs of prior mistreatment, whether in being ripped, having wine poured over the page sung during communion, or having gotten wet from being used in the rain. Pages can be missing, bindings snapped. All of these things serve as distractions from the point of the hymnal.
11) Hymnals grant false credibility to songs.
Every song in a hymnal gains credibility simply by being in the hymnal. It is in a book, along a great number of other hymns that have stood the test of time. But it is a false credibility. Being in the hymnal means it happens to have been liked by a committee. The songs haven't stood the test of time, aren't necessarily of good theology, and don't necessarily have appropriate tunes. Binding songs into a hymnal lends them a credibility they haven't earned.
Many of these points are items where hymnals took away from the way that the church has sung throughout its history. Aspects of worship were lost in the transition to hymnals. The benefits of singing from hymnals made it worth the loss. But technology has, once again, changed. We no longer need to sacrifice many of the aspects of pre-hymnal worship.
Honestly, there are certainly ways in which hymnals are better then a projector. It is a trade-off. I've been rather one sided in this post, because that's much more fun. But I do think there are a number of very valid reasons to prefer a projector. I do think that many of the arguments presented in favor of hymnals are elevating personal preference and what we are used to, to the level of moral superiority.
I really have no strong feelings on the subject of hymnals vs projectors. Do what you think is best. But I do think we are far too quick to label what we are used to as morally and theologically superior.
At any rate, that's what I think.
