Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father

This became one of the best-loved hymns of the 20th c in both the USA and Britain, crossing the Atlantic with the Billy Graham evangelistic crusades, notably that of 1954 in Harringay (now Haringey), London. Thomas Chisholm’s words were written in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1923, and published that same year in Wm Runyan’s Songs of Salvation and Service. It became the unofficial theme-song of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, thanks to its president Will H Houghton, who frequently chose it before it became widely known.

Even more clearly than 219, and certainly more fully, it enlarges on Lamentations 3:22–23 (see also 280). It also echoes Genesis 8:22 and James 1:17, among other texts. The version printed here is the original, and is one of the few examples in the book where ‘thy/thou’ (and corresponding verbs ‘changest’, ‘hast’ etc) are retained: see ‘About Praise!’, p7 of the Full Music edn. It was hoped that a conservative revision would be allowed by the copyright holders; their refusal was understandable in view of the permission already granted for the more radical Jubilate version now available. To allow yet another variation on their most popular hymn then seemed unwise; not until later was it noticed that just such a revision had apparently been allowed for the Australian Together in Song, around the same time as this matter was being pursued in 1999. A more curious change was made in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book, whose 11th-hour policy to avoid refrains (on musical grounds) led to the transmutation of the chorus into a 4th stz, to the confusion of many congregations. The refrain was restored in subsequent printings.

More important than a choice of versions, however, is the point made by Christopher Wright (who expects his readers to recognise the allusion), that ‘we sing songs about [God’s] great faithfulness … yet so often in real life we act as though we had no confidence in God at all for our future. Instead, we expend enormous amounts of material and emotional resources in fixing things up for ourselves’ (The Message of Ezekiel, 2001, p105).

The tune GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS (named simply FAITHFULNESS in 1956) was composed by William Runyan in Baldwin, Kansas, who had received the text from the author along with several others awaiting tunes, and it appeared with the words in 1923. Like him, Runyan was a Methodist minister, but produced some 30 hymns compared with Chisholm’s 1000. The 1999 Companion to Rejoice and Sing (whose editors also unsuccessfully requested changes) says that this ‘is a hymn of great tenderness and joy, and it does not need the belligerent treatment … which the refrain sometimes receives’. It adds, ‘The composer makes a small amount of material go a long way’.

b Franklin, rural Kentucky, USA 1866; d Ocean Grove, New Jersey, USA 1960. Raised on a small farm and educated in a small country school, at 16 he became a rural schoolteacher and at 21 the editor of a weekly paper The Franklin Favourite. Some of his many verses were published in The Louisville Courier- journal. At 27, while on a reporting assignment, he heard the evangelist Henry Clay Morrison (who founded the Methodist Asbury Coll), and soon became a converted Christian. Morrison persuaded him to move to Louisville, where he edited the Pentecostal Herald ; he was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1903. A short ministry at Scottsville, Kentucky, was dogged by ill health; with his family he then moved to Winona Lake, Indiana, and became an insurance salesman. In 1916 he moved again, to Vineland, New York, which is sometimes given as the place of his death, but in 1953, aged 87, he retired to a Methodist care home in Ocean Grove, where he lived for a further 7 years. He wrote some 1200 hymns, one of which became known world-wide and is found in most English-language evangelical books and some others. The N American Hymns for the Living Church (1974) also included 3 more of his texts. He strongly disliked his middle name, so that in many earlier books it is represented only by the initial ‘O’. No.258.