Hymn of the Week: October 25, 2024

Lord, When I Came into this Life
Glory to God: 691 

Text: Fred Kaan, 1976 
Music: American Folk melody 

Lord, when I came into this life 
you called me by my name; 
today I come, commit myself, 
responding to your claim. 

Within the circle of the faith, 
as member of your cast, 
I take my place with all the saints 
of future, present, past. 

In all the tensions of my life, 
between my faith and doubt, 
let your great Spirit give me hope, 
sustain me, lead me out. 

So help me in my unbelief 
and let my life be true: 
feet firmly planted on the earth, 
my sights set high on you. 

This week’s Hymn of the Week…

…is adpated from a wonderful book by Paul Westermeyer entitled With Tongues of Fire Profiles in 20th -Century Hymn Writing.  Concordia Publishing House 1995. 

Fred Kaan was born in 1929 in Harlem, Netherlands, to a nominally Christian family. After his baptism, except for occasional Sunday School attendance, he did not attend church as a boy. His interest in theology was stimulated by high school theology religious education teachers, among them Hendrikus Berkhof who becamse Professor of Dogmatics and Biblical Theology at the University of Leiden. 

As you can tell from his birth year, Kaan endured the Nazi occupation of Holland as a youth. He was a member of the Dutch resistance movement. His family hid a Jewish man and a political prisoner. Through the war he almost lost his mother to starvation and lost all his grandparents to starvation. 

At first, Kaan wanted to be a painter but turned to theology in 1949 at the State University in Utrecht. He made his way to London where in 1954 he graduated with a B.A. from Bristol University. Other degrees include his PhD in theology from Geneva Theological College where his dissertation was entitled “Emerging Language in Hymnody”. He was ordained in 1955 into the Congregational Union of England and Wales, a denomination that later merged with the Presbyterian Church of England and the Churches of Christ to ultimately become the Union Reformed Church in the United Kingdom.   

When asked to talk about his theological accents in his hymns, he is summarized as saying the following: 

He believes that one should sing a new song to the Lord, “A new hymn for a new day.” He firmly believes that Christians today learn of a “new corporate existence in community” but continue to emphasize the individualism of the 18th and 19th centuries. We work in an urban world but sing of nature and a heavenly home.   He argues that the world needs to write the agenda and that Christ is in our midst. He wants to balance the heavy weight we place on Jesus as God with Jesus as a human being, a human like all of us. 

In terms of the function of hymns in worship, he believes that it should help people to live the liturgy and make their response to God. He believes that when a person sees the hymns listed for the day, they should know that they are in for a worship that they can see and fell where it is going to go. 

Since he is not a musician he relies on the rhythm and meter to carry him through as he writes his texts.