Starting with the New Zealand Supplement to With One Voice in 1982, the New Zealand Hymnbook Trust has worked faithfully to make the best contemporary, local hymns available to churches and choirs in our country.

Their key music books - Alleluia Aotearoa (1993); Carol Our Christmas (1996); Faith Forever Singing (2000) and Hope Is Our Song (2009) - are all still popular and remain in print today.

In this Companion, world-renowned New Zealand hymn composer, Colin Gibson, tells the stories of how the hymns in these books came to be written and of the tunes to which they have been set, alongside biographies of the hymnwriters and composers.

Ministers, preachers, worship leaders, church musicians and choir members will find a wealth of material in the Companion to entertain and inform them, and to share with their congregations.

For ease of reference the Companion includes indexes of Hymn Names and First Lines, Scripture sources and Tune Names.

For the first time, Gibson has compiled a Finding List of New Zealand Hymn Writing which records the many hymnbooks and other publications that hymns by New Zealand composers have appeared in, both in this country and overseas.

Other appendices include a list of publications in which our hymnwriters and hymns are discussed, and a brief history of the Hymnbook Trust.