When the Roll is Called on Sunday…

I’ve been typing up the lyric sheets for next year’s hymn study (we learn a new hymn every seven week interval) and one of my children (who shall remain nameless) started complaining about how we never learn TRULY new ones that they’ve never heard before.

Now, Daniel and I have already chosen next year’s hymns – selected from songs that are personally meaningful, theologically rich, and a part of our church’s corporate worship – so I’m not planning on changing anything.

But I was a bit curious as to what said child thought we should be learning. So I started singing one after another, trying to find something that I knew that was unfamiliar to her. Strike after strike until I got to an old song I learned in Sunday school from a then elderly retired missionary couple who likely sang it in Sunday school in the 20s or 30s.

Everybody ought to go to Sunday school,
Sunday School, Sunday School
The mommies and the daddies and the girls and the boy
Everybody ought to go to Sunday school

So let’s get up on Sunday morning and get out to Sunday school
Though the weather be so cloudy or so gray
So today and every Sunday this will always be our prayer
When the roll is called on Sunday I’ll be there

And then into the chorus, sung just like “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder”

When the roll is called on Sunday
When the roll is called on Sunday
When the roll is called on Sunday
When the roll is called on Sunday I’ll be there

I finally found one that was unfamiliar! Curious, I started looking around to see if I could find any recordings of said “hymn”. Alas, none could be found on Spotify – and even Google struck out.

What about you? Have you heard this one before?