Hymn Of The Week: September 7, 2020, Part 1 of 3

Hymn of the Week: 

Brethren, We Have Met to Worship
Glory to God #396

Text George Atkins/Askins 1819
Music Columbian Harmony

Brethren, We Have Met to Worship
Askins or Atkins?

Brethren, we have met to worship and adore the Lord our God.
Will you pray with all your pow-er while we try to preach the word?
All is vain un-less the Spirit of the Holy One comes down.
Breth-ren pray and ho-ly man-na will be showe-ered all a- round.

Sis-ters, will you come and help us? Mo-ses' sis-ter aid-ed him.
Will you help the trem-bling mourn-ers who are strug-gling hard with sin?
Tell them all about the Sa-vior. Tell them that he will be found.
Sis-ters, pray, and ho-ly man-na will be show-ered all a-round.

Is there here a trem-bling jail-er, seek-ing grace and filled with fears?
Is there here a weep-ing Mar-y pour-ing forth a flood of tears?
Breth-ren, join your cries to help them; sis-ters, let your prayers a-bound!
Pray, o pray that ho-ly man-na will be scat-tered all a-round.

Let us love our God su-preme-ly; let us love each oth-er too.
Let us love and pray for sin-ners till our God makes all things new.
Christ will call us home to heav-en; at his table we'll sit down.
Christ will gird him-self and serve us with sweet man-na all a-round.

This hymn’s buoyant tune and text invite a lot of great conversation and has a lot of information for us to unpack concerning the history of the poet who penned the words and the origin of the hymn tune as well as the theology of the text. As a result, we will be looking at this hymn for a couple of weeks.

This week we will look at the lives of two men who may be credited with having written the text. George Askins (b. Ireland; d. Frederick, Maryland; 28 February 1816) has recently been credited by Sacred Harp scholar Richard H. Hulan (b. 1939) as being the author of this text. Little is known about Askins save his birth country, Ireland, and that he made his way to the United States by 1801 as an adult Methodist where he was given a charge as a trial itinerate preacher in the Montgomery circuit of the Baltimore Annual Conference. Still, on trial, he was assigned to the Ohio circuit of the Pittsburgh Annual Conference in 1802 and then to the Shenango circuit of the same annual conference in 1803 in full connection. Between 1803 and 1815, he served as a deacon and then elder in the Ohio, Kentucky, Miami, Virginia, and Baltimore annual conferences (Steel and Hulan, 74-75).

Several songs used in camp meetings helped to bring some of Askins’s hymns to light. Credit for the first printing of “Brethren, We Have Met to Worship” goes to John J. Harrod, who included it in his Social and Camp-Meeting Hymns for the Pious (Baltimore, 1817), a year after Askins’s death (Steel and Hulan, 67).

A second possible author has almost the same name – George Atkins. A recent article in Appalachian Magazine offers an enticing story about a British Methodist minister who, in the midst of the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States, came to America, enemy territory at the time, to become a part of the emergent Methodist Church. This was the situation in which George Atkins (b. Lincoln, England, April 16, 1793; d. Abingdon, Virginia, August 29, 1827) found himself. He first pastored in Ohio before taking a charge in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is said to have composed one of the signature Appalachian hymns of the nineteenth century, “Brethren, We Have Met to Worship” (“Appalachia’s Lost Hymn”, n.p.).

Though this is an attractive narrative, it lacks documentation. Indeed, several hymnals indicate that this hymn is vaguely “attributed” to “George Atkins (19th cent.).” Hymnal companions often have no information on Atkins, stating only that, “The identity of this author is unknown” (Reynolds, 255). Baptist hymnologist David W. Music provides a bit more information:

. . . Tennessee records indicate that a Methodist minister named GEORGE ATKIN (?—1827) was active in the Knoxville area during the first quarter of the 19th century. In 1818 Atkin transferred from Ohio to the Tennessee Conference and was appointed to the Knoxville Circuit. In addition to his activities as a preacher and school teacher, he engaged in newspaper work. Two of Atkin’s sermons were accorded the honor of being printed. In 1826 Atkin was appointed to preach at “Abingdon Town,” but he died the following year. “Brethren, we have met to worship,” the hymn by which he is remembered, is one of the few camp-meeting texts found in modern hymnals (Music, 1980, 247; also Music, 1985, 18).

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

“Appalachia’s Lost Hymn: And Why Churches Should Still be Singing It!” Appalachian Magazine (October 18, 2017, n.p.).

George Askin, Obituary. Provided in correspondence with Richard Hulan, (29 May 2019).

Carl P. Daw, Jr., Glory to God: A Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016).