[The following lecture was delivered in December 8, 2003, at the Center's conference in Key West, Florida.]

In the fall of 1740, George Whitefield -- a young but already celebrated Anglican priest -- embarked upon a preaching tour of New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies that became paradigmatic for American evangelical Christianity. During this ten-work tour he preached at least 200 formal sermons, including Sunday, October 12, when over 20,000 people gathered to hear him on the Boston Commons, which was considerably more people than lived in the city at the time. The effect that Whitefield exerted on American Protestants arose from the combination of his message and his method. His message was single-minded: "My one desire is to bring poor souls to Jesus Christ." His method combined an extraordinary disregard for inherited church traditions and a breathtakingly entrepreneurial spirit.

But for his tour Whitefield did not enjoy completely clear sailing. On the morning of September 19, 1740, after he had enjoyed a friendly visit with the governor of Massachusetts Bay, he was summoned to meet with a committee of Massachusetts Anglican clergy, who bombarded him with pointed questions, for example:

--We have heard that when you were in Savannah, you allowed a Baptist minister to take part in a communion service that you led. Could this really be true? Whitefield replied that not only was this rumor true, but that he was actually prepared himself as a properly ordained minister of the Church of England to receive communion from the hand of a Baptist!

At this point, Whitefield then went on to make a most important general statement: "It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it."

Whitefield's fellow-Anglicans could not be convinced, but they had heard him articulate a defining principle of Protestant evangelicalism. In the evangelical movement that began with revivalists like Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, and that would spread over the course of the centuries to touch every continent of the globe, the foundation was unswerving belief in the need for conversion (the New Birth) and the necessity of a life of active holiness (the power of godliness).

The path that Whitefield marked out in the mid-eighteenth century is still the path that, despite many later twists and turns, American evangelicals still follow in the early twenty-first century. In order to illuminate that path today, I will try to do four things: (1) define what "evangelical" means, (2) sketch the history lying behind contemporary evangelical movements, (3) address the question of how many evangelicals there are, and (4) explain why historic evangelical hymnody offers a glimpse of evangelical Christianity at its best.

Definition The word "evangelical" has borne several different senses throughout history, but almost all are related to the etymological meaning of "good news." The English word "evangelical" comes from a transliteration of the Greek noun, "euangelion," which was regularly employed by the authors of the New Testament to signify the glad tidings -- the good news, the gospel -- of Jesus who appeared on earth as the Son of God to accomplish God's plan of salvation for needy humans. Thus, "evangelical" religion has always been "gospel" religion, or religion focusing on the "good news" of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ.

During the sixteenth century the word "evangelical" began to take on a meanings associated specifically with the Protestant Reformation. In many places around the world to this day, Lutheran churches retain this older sense of the term, as in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The sense of the term "evangelical" that is more common today, however, arose in the eighteenth-century in connection with a series of interconnected renewal movements in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's North American colonies. Considered genealogically, evangelical Christianity has been constituted by the networks of influence shaped by the promoters of the eighteenth-century revivals and their descendents. Yet evangelicalism has also always been constituted by the convictions and attitudes that emerged in those revivals. One of the most effective efforts to summarize those convictions and attitudes has been made by David Bebbington who has identified four key ingredients of evangelicalism:

• conversion, or "the belief that lives need to be changed";
• the Bible, or the "belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages";
• activism, or the dedication of all believers, including laypeople, to lives of service for God, especially as manifest in evangelism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies);
• crucicentrism, or the conviction that Christ's death was the crucial matter in providing reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans.

These core evangelical commitments have never by themselves yielded cohesive, institutionally compact, or clearly demarcated groups of Christians. But they do serve to identify a large kin network of churches, voluntary societies, books and periodicals, personal networks, and emphases of belief and practice.

History Since the mid-eighteenth century, evangelicals have played a significant role in the history of Christianity, especially on the North American continent and wherever else the British or American empires have spread. For much of the nineteenth century white evangelical Protestants constituted the largest and most influential body of religious adherents in the United States (as also in Britain and Canada). Today, groups descended from those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements are more visible than they have been for several decades. In the Church of England, a majority of those in full-time preparation for the ministry have, for some years, been trained in evangelical colleges. In Canada, a majority of the Protestants in church on any given Sunday attend evangelical congregations. Throughout the world, pentecostal and charismatic movements, which trace their lineage to developments within Anglo-American evangelicalism early in the twentieth century, are far and away the fastest growing segments of world-wide Christianity.

Historically considered, evangelicalism has always been diverse, flexible, adaptable, and multiform. From its origins, evangelicalism has also been profoundly affected by its popular character, as argued in Nathan Hatch's important book, The Democratization of American Christianity, which describes how eager many evangelicals were to exploit the new political and social freedoms in the early decades of United States history. The trans-national character of evangelicals has been sustained by innovative but informal networks of communication. The critical agents of transmission have been voluntary associations (e.g., Bible societies), personal ties (e.g., George Whitefield or Billy Graham), books (like C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity), periodicals (like Christianity Today since the 1950s), and as I’ll take up at greater length soon, hymns.

Over the last hundred years or so, American evangelicals have passed through several distinct periods. Early in the last century the battles between fundamentalist Protestants and modernist Protestants greatly weakened the general strength of Protestantism in American culture.

Evangelical cultural influence had, in fact, been declining for several decades owing to the large-scale immigration of non-Protestants, the growth of cities as multicultural sites, and the secularization of university learning. The passing of evangelical cultural dominance, however, was also accompanied by significant innovations. The most important of these was the emergence of pentecostalism, which began early in the twentieth century from emphases on Christian "holiness" that had long existed in several evangelical bodies. Politically, during this period, evangelicals united behind the drive for Prohibition, but otherwise did not take distinctive political positions.

In the period of the Great Depression and the Second World War, evangelicalism was less visible than it has ever been -- before or since -- in North American life. Self-identified fundamentalists largely dropped out of sight after losing control of the northern Protestant denominations and also suffering the ignominy of the Scopes Trial in 1925. Yet appearances were deceptive. Though largely invisible to main arbiters of American culture, fundamentalists advanced their version of evangelical faith in many arenas, and set in motion activities that shape evangelicalism to this day. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene were only some of the evangelical denominations that grew more rapidly than the population during the 1930s. Fundamentalists also pioneered in exploiting the airwaves for religious purposes. Leaders of ecumenical Protestantism negotiated with the new national radio networks for time to present a generic form of religious uplift. For their pains they were granted occasional half-hours on Sunday mornings. By contrast, fundamentalists and evangelicals illustrated their entrepreneurial habits by buying their own radio time in prime listening hours.

During the 1920s and 1930s a number of groups that earlier had little contact with English-speaking evangelicals continued processes of assimilation and education that would one day bring them into the evangelical coalition. Around the Great Lakes, for example, radio broadcasts from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago found receptive listeners among the Dutch Reformed of western Michigan, some Lutherans, and a number of migrants from southern churches who had come North to find work during the Great Depression and World War II.

In this era, politics revolved around economic issues, in particular the appropriate role for government in the economy. Evangelicals reacted to these issues more in terms of their regional subcultures and their lower socio-economic status than in terms of their religious values. With a few exceptions for radical fringe groups, religion seemed largely irrelevant to political life, and participation rates were low.

	Billy Graham

The quarter century or so after the Second World War witnessed a new era for evangelicals. Convenient boundaries for this period are 1949 (and the first national publicity for Billy Graham) and 1974 (when the Graham-sponsored Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization took place).

By the late 1940s, the fluid, shifting life in the shadows that had prevailed for evangelicals since World War I was giving way to an apparently more monolithic movement. The impression that a well-unified, coherent evangelicalism had returned -- resembling in influence the Protestant revivalism of the nineteenth century -- was, however, a mirage. It was a mirage, nonetheless, with great staying power, largely because of the impact of Billy Graham. For nearly thirty years, from the end of the War into the 1970s, the great visibility of Billy Graham and the heightened influence of institutions that he favored gave the impression that a unified evangelicalism had returned to America.

Post-war "neo-evangelicalism," to use a phrase popular in the 1950s and 1960s, was considerably more than just Billy Graham. In New England, the Philadelphia area, the Upper Midwest, and California a small, but vocal generation of articulate post-fundamentalists came of age as willing colleagues of Billy Graham. During the war itself, these leaders founded the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 as a promoter of general evangelical concerns, and soon thereafter they created or expanded many institutions, including Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, Asbury, and Trinity seminaries, Christianity Today and several other periodicals, a number of active youth ministries, and a raft of new mission agencies.

But always many other evangelical groups existed that were related only marginally, if at all, to Graham and his associates. Pentecostals continued to expand in denominations like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. Large healing revivals were conducted by figures of great regional popularity like William Marion Branham and Oral Roberts. Such revivals were especially important for what came later, since they prepared the way for the rapid spread among evangelicals in the 1960s and following decades of charismatic music, emphases on healing, and therapeutic approaches to spirituality.

In the post-war era. evangelical pluralism was regional as well as denominational. Since the late nineteenth century, the South has been the one region with a majority of born-again, Bible-believing Protestants. Yet the relative isolation of the South from the rest of the country’s religious organizations -- as well as the South’s distinctive history -- has meant that the Billy Graham orbit did not actively engage much of the country’s largest reservoir of evangelicals, despite Graham’s own Southern roots.

Other evangelical groups not related as directly to the Billy Graham orbit include African-Americans. Black Protestants in North America have always shared many of the personal convictions and religious practices of white evangelicals. But their experiences -- at first under slavery and then in a racially segregated society -- have been so radically different from white evangelicals that their story is difficult to incorporate in the larger picture. That difficulty is ironic, for black Christians are the ones who have experienced the cross most dramatically in American history. More than white evangelical bodies, they are the ones who have most deeply lived out the pietist themes of comfort in Jesus and security in his cross.

Besides Pentecostals and Blacks (and many Black Pentecostals), many other evangelical groups flourished beyond the Billy Graham orbit, including Southern Baptists, Mennonites, several of the Holiness churches, pietistic Lutherans, and many independent churches.

In marked contrast to the high-energy political action of the nineteenth century, evangelicals from the election of Herbert Hoover in 1928 to the early 1970s remained largely quiescent. Southern evangelicals were Democrats like most of the rest of the populace. Northern evangelicals were divided between the two parties and not very active politically, but, when they did enter the political arena, they were less thoroughly Republican than mainline Protestants.

Over the last 35 years, the diversity that always existed within American evangelicalism has become much more obvious. Because of changes in both the churches and society, the Billy Graham orbit has shrunk relative to other expanding evangelical influences. New leaders and new concerns have created a more pluralistic evangelicalism than has ever existed before. The sources of that diversity are many.

For one, the rulings by the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s that eliminated prayer in the public schools and in 1973 that legalized abortion contributed to the politicization of American religion. Evangelicals differed among themselves on how best to respond to these decisions. Evangelicals of the Billy Graham sort have remained either apolitical or, if politically engaged, relatively unobtrusive. By contrast, new leaders, like the Baptists Jerry Falwell and Timothy LaHaye or the lay psychologist James Dobson, entered politics with a vengeance during the 1970s and 1980s. These figures were all marked by unusual enterprise in putting to use media of mass communications. They, rather than the "neo-evangelicals," were the ones who created the New Religious Right and have made conservative evangelical support so important for the Republican Party since the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.

Their efforts transformed evangelicals from a political constituency that was more Democratic than Republican and relatively passive politically to one that has become more Republican than, and almost as active as, the American population at large. It took a second phase of Christian Right activism to mobilize the pentecostal and charismatic wings of American evangelicalism. In 1988 Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign did not fare all that well, but it did succeed in politicizing a large segment of the evangelical community that had not been involved before.

Recent decades have also witnessed a re-positioning of old religious and ideological antagonisms. With secularizing changes at work across North America, even the very deep, historic antagonism between Catholics and evangelicals is breaking down. Evangelicals have also helped once sectarian groups like the Seventh-day Adventists and the Worldwide Church of God in their move toward more traditional Christian affirmations. At the end of the twentieth century, there were even a few signs of improved relations between some evangelicals and some Mormons, whom most evangelicals had long considered far beyond the pale. With the decreasing influence of the older, mainline Protestant churches, evangelicals now worry less about theological liberalism and more about multiculturalism, post-modernism, and the general secularization of public life. Evangelicals also now expend considerable energy in debating modes of public worship, with much support in many churches for innovative contemporary styles (as on display, for example, at the 17,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago), while others promote older patterns, and many vacillate in-between.

American evangelicals are participating fully in the increasing turn to images that is replacing the historic Protestant reliance on the written word. A culture dominated by television, advertising, and therapy has presented both problems and opportunities for evangelical outreach. What it has not provided is unity. As people who have served on the worship committee of a local evangelical church know well, evangelicalism embraces a full spectrum of musical tastes and a thoroughly diverse set of responses to contemporary culture -- from those who race to baptize the most visible products of modern life to those who reject soft-rock, client-centered preaching, and the cult of celebrity as dangerous threats to the faith.

At the end of the twentieth century, there are very few generalizations that apply to all American evangelicals. A reliance on Scripture remains, though how that reliance is expressed differs widely. The belief that the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago has spread very widely in evangelical circles, but in these same circles are found vigorous defenders of evolution who contend that they are the ones reading the Bible correctly. Concern for conversion also remains, though conversion is understood differently in, for example, charismatic, confessional, or Baptist circles. Evangelicals are as active as ever, but that activity spreads over every point on the compass. Most North American evangelicals oppose the liberalization of abortion laws that has occurred over the last thirty years in Canada and the United States, but how that opposition is expressed -- passively, apolitically, or through civil disobedience -- ranges widely, as do religious conclusions about the basic issues at stake. The Religious Right has galvanized the political energies of many Christians, but a surprising spectrum of economic, political, and social viewpoints can be found in evangelical communities.

The death of Christ on the cross is still at the heart of evangelical religion, although the formal doctrines that once defined the message of atonement receive much less attention today than thirty or sixty or a hundred years ago. The continuing spread of pentecostalism and the growth of the charismatic movement has meant more concentration on doctrines of sanctification (becoming holy oneself) than on doctrines of justification (how God accepts a sinner). In biblical terms, the Psalms have taken precedence over Isaiah, the gospels are edging out the epistles of Paul.

How many? Since the meaning of "evangelical" depends on how observers employ the concept, so does the question of how many evangelicals are there also depends on how the concept is used. The redoubtable team of political scientists -- John Green, Jim Guth, Bud Kellstedt, and Corwin Smidt -- has concluded that about 25% of the adult American population is associated with the mostly-white Protestant churches and movements that have historically been known as evangelicals. Of that number about two-thirds (or roughly 16% of the total population) are actively involved in their congregations. These political scientists argue that the fact of activity is much more important than mere identification, for any correlation with social views or political behavior.

But the bigger picture is considerably more complicated. If attention is fixed on the four identifying markers of evangelical Christianity defined by David Bebbington (conversion, Bible, activism in evangelism, and the cross of Christ), then a very substantial number of African Americans also look like evangelicals (perhaps 5-6% of the national population). In addition, a very substantial number of individuals associated with the mainline Protestant churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian) also affirm all four of the characteristic evangelical markers, as does a substantial number of Roman Catholics. Taken together, there are probably about as many Catholics, black Protestants, and mainline Protestants who tell survey researchers they embrace the four evangelical characteristics as there are adherents to the conservative Protestant denominations. Thus, when asking about the religious commitments of the American population, probably about 30% of adults practice a religion that looks more or less evangelical.

At their best When modern evangelicalism arose in the English-speaking world in the mid-eighteenth century, hymnody became the lifeblood of the movement. Many have heard, for example, what John Wesley, founder of Methodism, wrote in his journal after his memorable experience of conversion at Aldersgate in London in May 1738: "About a quarter before nine, while [the speaker] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

But for every evangelical who knows something about these words of John Wesley, there are thousands who have taken to heart the hymns written by his brother Charles Wesley, for example:

Hark, the herald angels sing, Glory to the new-born King.…
Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more may die.…
Jesu, Lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly.…
Arise, my soul, arise; shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding Sacrifice in my behalf appears.…
Love divine, all loves excelling, Joy of heaven to earth come down.…
Come, Thou long-expected Jesus, Born to set Thy people free,
From our fears and sins release us, Let us find our rest in Thee.…
Ye servants of God, Your Master proclaim,
And publish abroad His wonderful name: …
"Christ the Lord is risen today," Sons of men and angels say!
Raise your joys and triumphs high: Sing, ye heavens; thou earth reply.

Hymns, at least until very recently, have been the lifeblood of evangelical consciousness. The hymns that have been sung, re-published, and sung some more carry observers close to the essence of evangelicalism. Whatever their many differences of theology, ethnicity, denomination, class, taste, politics, or churchmanship -- and in these areas divisions existed beyond number -- evangelical hymn-writers and hymn-singers pointed to a relatively cohesive religious vision.

At the heart of the evangelical hymnody is Jesus Christ, whose love offers sinners mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God. In this Savior redeemed sinners find new life in the Holy Spirit, as well as encouragement in that same Spirit to endure the brokenness, relieve the pain, and bind up the wounds of a world that the great evangelical hymn writers almost always depicted in strikingly realistic terms.

The history of modern evangelicalism could be written as a chronicle of calculated offense. Those who know even a little evangelical history know how prone evangelicals have been to violate decorum, compromise integrity, upset intellectual balance, and abuse artistic good taste. In specifically theological terms, the evangelical movement, including many of its sub-canonical hymns, offers the spectacle of a luxurious expanse of weeds, with multiple varieties of gnosticism, docetism, manicheanism, modalism, and wild eschatological speculation, not to speak of confusion over doctrinal details and manifold outbreaks of unintended Unitarianism, springing up as a threat to the good seed of classic orthodoxy.

The great hymns are not like that. They do not meander theologically. Whatever else they may lack, they possess the virtue of clarity. Professor Stephen Marini of Wellesley College has twice in recent years tallied the most often reprinted hymns in American Protestant hymnbooks from the colonial era to the decades after World War II. Because of the different range of hymnals he sampled for the two surveys, he has identified two different hymns as the most often reprinted in American Protestant history. Because the message of one of those two is so often repeated in so many of the other classic hymns of evangelicalism, its compact, forceful lines are an especially good record of the center of evangelical concern. That hymn appeared in 1776, and I say with calculated awareness of what else was going on in that year in Philadelphia and in Scotland where Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, that of all world-historical occurrences in that year the publication of August Montagu Toplady's hymn may have been the most consequential:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood, From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
Not the labours of my hands Can fulfill Thy law's demands;
Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow,
All for sin could not atone: Thou must save, and Thou alone.
Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy Cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress; Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly; Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

The classic evangelical hymns have virtually no politics. Charles Wesley thought the American Revolution was sinful through and through, but American patriots hardly noticed as they went on reprinting his hymns in edition after edition. I could go on -- different evangelicals of different sorts and at different times have tolerated or advocated racism, they have cheered attacks on the intellect, they have indulged unimaginable vulgarity in the production of religious kitsch, they have been callous to the dispossessed, they have confused their political allegiances with divine mandates, they have equated middle class decorum with sanctification in the Holy Spirit, and they have tried to pass off gratuitous nonsense as if it were gospel truth -- as Toplady, for example, did in the essay where he first published "Rock of Ages" by claiming that the average number of sins committed by each individual in his or her lifetime was 2,522,880,000.

Such failings, as well as the particular dogmas and practices insisted upon by different evangelical churches, have been the occasion for oceans of offense. The classic evangelical hymns, by contrast, are virtually innocent of such offenses. Rather, their overriding message and the single offense upon which they insist is compacted into the four words that best summarize their message: Jesus Christ Saves Sinners. These hymns, in other words, proclaim a particular redemption of substitutionary atonement through a particular act of God accomplished in the particularities of the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and kingly rule of Jesus Christ.

Evangelicalism at its best is an offensive religion. It claims that human beings cannot be reconciled to God, understand the ultimate purposes of the world, or live a truly virtuous life unless they confess their sin before the living God and receive new life in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Such particularity has always been offensive, and in the multicultural, post-modern world in which we live it is more offensive than ever. But when evangelicalism is at its best, as it is in its greatest hymns, that declaration of a particular salvation is its one and only offense.

Of much else that could be said about classical evangelical hymnody, it is also worth recording that an important sub-theme concerns the relief of suffering. The challenge to service in this world found so often in Charles Wesley’s hymns has never been an oddity:

A charge to keep I have, A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save, And fit it for the sky:
To serve the present age, My calling to fulfill;
Oh, may it all my powers engage To do my Master's will.

In the Victorian era, the blind phenomenally popular Fanny Crosby expressed directly the care that at least some evangelicals have always shown to those for whom few others cared:

Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o'er the erring one, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save.
Rescue the perishing, care for the dying;
Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.

At its best, the evangelical desire to rescue the perishing has meant putting the perishing on their feet in the here and now as well as preparing them for eternity. Of course, we evangelicals are often not at our best, so the occasions are many of having been lured away from Christ-inspired social service by prejudice, class-consciousness, middle class fastidiousness, blindness to the structural conditions of power that condition personal choices, and the many other forms of social sinfulness that beset the human race in general.

William Wilberforce

But at its best, evangelicalism is William Wilberforce, who for the sake of the kingdom of Christ, devoted his life for the destruction of slavery. At its best evangelicalism is the tireless, unpretentious, but absolutely stunning social achievements of the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Central Committee. And at its best evangelicalism is the motivation from the gospel of Matthew that has inspired many to establish shelters for pregnant women in distress and to march on pro-life picket lines: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (11:28-29) "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven." (19:14, RSV)

At the start of the twenty-first century, all people of good faith, indeed all people, have multiplied reasons to hope that evangelicalism will be at its best. A recent survey reported that nine out of the ten most rapidly growing non-Catholic churches in the United States, and 93 out of the top 100, are self-identified as evangelical, charismatic, pentecostal, Southern Baptist, fundamentalist, or by some other label usually considered as fitting under the broader evangelical umbrella. Annual tabulations by the missiologist David Barrett suggest that of the world’s nearly two billion people identified with Christian churches, something like 650 million are evangelical in a broad sense of the term. His figures make clear that the only varieties of Protestantism growing with any concerted energy in the world are evangelical in general and most likely pentecostal in particular.

In the second survey made by Professor Marini, "All Hail the Power of Jesus Name" emerges as the most-often reprinted hymn in American Protestant hymnbooks. This hymn’s story reveals much that is typical of evangelicalism. As a typical instance of evangelical ecumenism, the version of the hymn most often sung today actually represents an original composition of Edward Peronnet, who was a paedo-Baptist associated primarily with the Methodists, and John Rippon, a Baptist. The tune Diadem, the most lively of several tunes to which the hymn is sung, was composed by an 18-year old Wesleyan hatmaker, James Ellor.

Less auspiciously, Edward Perronet’s career is also not untypical of evangelicalism. Peronnet, it turns out, was not an easy chap to get along with. As a young man he eagerly joined in the work of the Wesleys, but his zeal for revival led him to bitter attacks on the Church of England that soon alienated him from the Wesleys, who always saw their work as a complement to official Anglicanism. Perronet next took one of the chapels in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection, but the violence of his festering anti-Anglicanism remained so strong, he wore out the Countess’ patience and finally ended up pastoring a Congregational church. Evangelicalism at its best is not the career of Edward Perronet. Evangelicalism at its best, rather, is the hopes, dedication, aspirations, and longing that have led tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of evangelicals to sing, decade after decade, and with all their hearts:

All hail the power of Jesus’ Name; Let Angels prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem To crown Him Lord of all.…
Sinners, whose love can ne’er forget The wormwood and the gall,
Go spread your trophies at His feet, And crown Him Lord of all.
O that, with yonder sacred throng, We at His feet may fall,
Join in the everlasting song, And crown him Lord of all.