The Story Behind Amazing Grace

Around 10 years ago Steve Turner wrote a great book about the hymn Amazing Grace, probably the most popular Christian song in America. Most people don't realize that the hymn's current form took over 100 years to come together, and it has endured several periods of obscurity when it was rarely sung at all.

Like many of our most beloved hymns, the words and music for Amazing Grace were composed by different people at different times. John Newton penned the words to go with a sermon he preached in England on New Years Day in 1773. The tune we sing to those words came from somewhere in America during the late 19th century, and we still don't know who composed that haunting melody.

Newton was born in London in 1725. His father was a ship captain and therefore absent for most of his son's life. John's mother died when he was only seven years old. By all accounts Newton was a troubled young man. When the teen-aged boy went to sea himself, he was so disliked that his captains frequently traded him to other ships. At one point he was even enslaved on an island off of western Africa.

Newton was also a mess spiritually. Having rejected the Christian faith, Newton found himself grasping at any system of belief that could give him answers. According to Turner's book, he young sailor dabbled in African traditional religions that he found nearby during his sojourns on that continent.

Then one night at the age of 22 his ship encountered a terrible storm. At that point he experienced a "foxhole conversion" -- crying out to God to save his life. The change was genuine, and he began to live in a way that assumed the Christian message was true. When the ship docked in Ireland for repairs he took Communion for the first time, and he began to attend church twice a day.

Newton's conversion to Christianity did not immediately stop his involvement in the slave trade. In fact, he began his career captaining slave ships after he became a believer. That's not to question whether Newton was truly converted. Christian growth can happen quickly, and it can also take a period of time. It also shows how the culture in England changed over the course of Newton's life. Newton would eventually have a tremendous influence in the anti-slavery movement in England, especially through his relationship with William Wilberforce. But in the 1750s the average believer was not ready to campaign against a system that was so imbedded in the society's structures of power and wealth.

Newton did not serve as a captain for very long. He suffered a stroke in his late twenties and was advised not to go back to sea. It was then that he began a vocation as an Anglican priest. He was a popular leader, even if his lack of formal education made his ordination process more difficult. It was actually this "common touch" that drew the laity to him. According to Turner's account, Newton was well-suited to life as a parish priest.

In late December of 1772 Newton prepared a New Years Day sermon on 1 Chronicles 17:16-17:

Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said: ‘Who  am I, O Lord God, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? And as if this were not enough in your sight, O God, you have spoken about the future of your house of your servant. You have looked on me as thought I were the most exalted of men, O Lord God.

At the end of his life King David was reflecting on the "many dangers, toils, and snares" that he had gone through. Newton preached about David's sense of overwhelming grace, showing that none of us deserves the favor God has given us, especially the offer of salvation that comes through God's Son, Jesus Christ. Newton knew this from his own experience.

Newton also wove in several other scriptural allusions:

• Luke 15:24. The parable of the prodigal son : “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” 
• Romans 7:24 “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” 
• John 9:25. The blind man healed by Jesus. “One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.” 
• Eph 6:16. Shield of faith is mentioned in stanza 3.

It was not uncommon for pastors to compose a new hymn for each Sunday's sermon. John and Charles Wesley, who ministered at the same time as John Newton, did the same thing. It's important to understand that they were not composing new tunes each week. Rather, they would write words that fit a specific pattern, known as a meter -- the arrangement of the syllables in each stanza. (Not exactly the same thing as the meter or "time signature" written at the beginning of a piece of music.) If they wrote their words according to a familiar pattern of syllables, then this new hymn could be sung to a tune that the congregation already knew. That's how it was for Amazing Grace. Newton wrote the words in the "Common Meter" so that they could be sung with any hymn tune with that pattern. One of those tunes was called  ARLINGTON and is sung today to the hymn Am I a Soldier of the Cross. (You can read more about that process of mixing and matching hymn tunes at one of my previous posts here.)

The churches of Newton's day were strongly influenced by the theology and teaching of John Calvin, who was very suspicious of using "worldly" music. Calvin disliked using any songs that were not psalms, and he castigated the use of organs as instruments "of the devil." So hymns like Amazing Grace were not sung in the Sunday morning worship services. Instead, Newton would invite parishioners to his home on Sunday afternoons so they could sing their beloved hymns. These sessions were so popular that he had to sell tickets to keep the numbers down!

Amazing Grace virtually disappeared from England in the 1800s, with very little evidence that it was sung in churches there. But somehow it made it to America. Ira Sankey, the song leader for Dwight L. Moody's evangelistic campaigns, spread it around the American countryside. But it wasn't until 1900 that the current tune was paired with Newton's famous words for the first time in a hymnal. Some have speculated that the song was sung by slaves in the southern states. Others have guessed that the tune made its way from Britain to Appalachia as a folk song. Sometime before the US Civil War, the hymn had acquired the sixth stanza that is the favorite of many: "When we've been there ten thousand years..." No one knows who wrote this later add-on.

Newton's hymn has gone through several periods of obscurity throughout its long life. Even after it resurfaced in America in the late 19th-century, the song didn't enjoy sustained popularity in the churches or the wider society. But in 1970 folk singer Judy Collins released an acapella recording that got wide airplay on the radio. From that time on the song has remained a part of the American consciousness, and it is still often sung and/or played at funerals and memorial services.