In awe and wonder, Lord our God

While correctly credited to Michael Saward, this text has a more complex origin. The author had for years been a friendly critic of F W Faber’s My God, how wonderful thou art (1849), which expressed some valuable truths in baroque/romantic style while failing at crucial points, notably its conclusion. Even the ‘Jubilate’ revision from 1982 failed to satisfy him, so he produced a new hymn written, he says, on 19 Sept 1992 (‘the day of the Jubilate Hymns AGM’) at 1.00 am at home, 6 Amen Court near London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. This arose from the older one but offers a more biblical framework and more of the gospel. In the late 1990s he was chairing the ‘hymn texts’ committee of what became Jubilate’s Sing Glory, while Praise! was also in preparation; both groups debated whether to include this text (if at all) as a revision or a new hymn. In the event SG opted for the earlier revision of Faber while Canon Saward’s text appears here, following its first publication in Hymns for the People in 1993. His opening phrase follows the example of the PHRW adaptation of Watts’ Psalm 139, When I in awe and wonder stand, and also echoes 190 and 287.

The tune WESTMINSTER was in the author’s mind because of its associations with Faber’s text. Perhaps for the same reason the Praise! group (like HFP) looked for a new tune instead. Linda Mawson’s RAVENSBOURNE was composed for Faber’s words in the early 1980s and prepared for a small vocal group at the People’s Hall Evangelical Church (FIEC) at Plumstead in SE London, where it was first sung (cf 133B, note). It is published here to the composer’s double delight; that her tune is ‘set to these lovely words, which share some of the same sense of awe as we approach God’, and that we can draw near to ‘such a God, who actually wants [as Faber put it] “the love of my poor heart��?’. The river Ravensbourne runs through Bromley, giving its name to a former telephone exchange, a surviving railway station, a school, and the neighbourhood where the composer then lived.

b Blackheath, SE London 1932; d Switzerland 2015. Eltham Coll; Bristol Univ and Tyndale Hall Bristol (BA); ordained 1956. He ministered in Croydon, Edgware and Liverpool before becoming the C of E’s Radio and TV Officer 1967–72. From 1972 to 1991 he served W London incumbencies in Fulham and Ealing; during the latter he barely survived a vicious attack on himself and his family at the vicarage, by intruders high on drugs. He then became Canon Treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1991, providing one of the two evangelical voices heard throughout the decade from the cathedral pulpit; some sermons were published in 1997 as These are the Facts (a title from hymn 629). He retired to Wapping, E London, in 2000. He was a Church Commissioner and General Synod member; a prolific writer, speaker and broadcaster on the local and national church, doctrine, mission, liturgy, sexual ethics, baptism and hymnody. His book Signed, Sealed, Delivered: finding the key to the Bible (2004) explores the concept of ‘covenant’ as that key.

From early 1962 onwards he wrote over 100 hymn texts, his first ones including ‘Christ triumphant’ were published in Youth Praise (1966, 1969), followed by several in Psalm Praise (1973) and Hymns for Today’s Church (1982) of which he was words editor. He was a founding Director and later Chairman of Jubilate Hymns, with a leading role in other Jubilate collections including Sing Glory (1999) which features 23 of his hymns. 75 of them were published in 2006, with an introduction and brief notes, in Christ Triumphant and other hymns. In 2009 he initiated and edited Come Celebrate, a unique collection of 291 lesser-known hymn-texts by 20 living authors, 14 of whom are represented in Praise! He said of himself, ‘My style is deliberately punchy and I love to use strong, graphic illustration’. Nos.119D, 162, 166, 249, 291, 446, 525, 592, 629, 635, 656, 849, 865*.