Church of God, elect and glorious

One morning in 1980 or thereabouts, around 10 o’clock, Jim Seddon came into an upstairs room at All Souls’ Langham Place in London, where the members of the HTC group were gathering for one of their regular meetings. He went straight to the piano, sat down and began to play a hymn he had recently completed at his home at Peldon in Essex. Before he reached half way the rector, Michael Baughen, burst in urging him to stop; BBC radio’s ‘Morning Service’ was being broadcast live from the church and the piano music was clearly audible through the wall, and thus across the nation and the world. So the first private and public hearing of this hymn coincided. The text is built around 1 Peter 2:9–10 and reflects the lifelong, heartfelt concerns of its mission-minded author. The senior member of that Jubilate group, he was humble enough to submit to his juniors the lines he knew needed further work. Thus emended and agreed, the text was published in HTC, then in several more collections. It is a small response to the occasional assertion that evangelicals care little for the church, as a body or as a doctrine. Though almost certainly without conscious imitation, the hymn echoes Francis Ridley Havergal’s Church of God, beloved and chosen, written just over a century earlier with the same theme, metre and length.

From the beginning, the words have been set to LUX EOI, for notes on which see 177.

b Lancs 1915; d London 1983. Tyndale Hall, Bristol 1936; Univ of Durham (LTh 1939). Ordained in 1939, he was curate of parishes in Everton, Toxteth and Southport, Lancs 1939–45. From 1945 to 1955 he served with the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Soc (BCMS, now Crosslinks) in Tangier and Demnat Marakesh, Morocco, becoming fluent in Arabic and French; here his first hymns were written for Arabicspeaking congregations. Then he returned to be Home Sec for BCMS to 1967; in preaching widely throughout UK, he felt increasingly the questionable features of the missionary hymns often chosen: ‘romantic and outdated language tending to unreal pictures and understanding of todays missionary task’—JES, 1983. So the first of several new texts were nos.616 and 866 in Praise! With 5 others, they appeared in a typewritten BCMS booklet A Collection of Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Some are included in Youth Praise (1966); Jim went on to serve on the editorial team for Psalm Praise, Keswick Praise and HTC (1973, 1975, 1982) and was for a time Sec (and senior member) of the fledgling Jubilate Hymns. 3 of his hymns feature in GH and 7 in the 2004 CH, overlapping with 7 in Praise! There are 8 in Keswick Praise and the same number in Baptist Praise and Worship (1991) and Sing Glory (1999). Until retirement he was Rector of Hawkwell, nr Southend, Essex 1967–74, then incumbent of the parishes of Peldon and Gt and Little Wigborough, nr Colchester, Essex. Nos.133A, 528, 568, 574, 616, 627, 866, 1043.