Lazy hymn writers

I realize some may read that title, cry blasphemy, and claim that those who penned the beautiful hymns sang in many churches today were anything but lazy. I also realize that the level of grammar being presented in many of the current songs leaves a lot to be desired. I know these things. I work with teenagers, and I fear for the future of the English language. As much as we would like to blame them, I think this problem has been going on for a while. This startling revelation was confirmed to me on my wedding night of all times.  

I had long wondered why hymn authors (in the spirit of poor grammar I'm going to call them "hymnists" henceforth) often took letters out of words in an apparent attempt to change the pronunciation. I thought maybe these were typos that nobody caught and eventually just became tradition in the church. But on that cool December night in a classroom in the basement of my home church, there it was. I literally saw the writing on the wall. I was drawing up a "play" for the groomsmen and myself on how we would make our glamorous entry into the church. Some of the guys obviously hadn't read the playbook, otherwise I would not have had to cover such basic information. Anyway, the room we were in was also used for the choir and on the whiteboard next to my x's and o's were some instructional notes from the music minister. Here is a picture of poor quality of what that looked like:

Turns out heaven is not heaven, but instead it is heav'n. If you have sang very many hymns you have seen this pattern before. Perhaps the most popular is pow'r, as in "there is pow'r in the blood." Other examples include: o'er, 'tis, and one of my favorites sanct'ry. You can write a four verse song but you are too lazy to include that extra 'e' in there? Ok, so they are trying to change the pronunciation and emphasize a word. I say get o'er yourself. There is pow'r in proper spelling and pronunciation believe it or not. Unfortunately, all of those hymnists are probably sitting around in heav'n and could care less about the slang bombs they dropped into your worship service. Are there others that I have missed? Let me know in the comments below.