John Newton Writes Amazing Grace

John Newton's "Amazing Grace" is the most sung, most recorded and most loved hymn in the world. No other song, spiritual or secular, comes close to it in terms of numbers of recordings, (over 3,000 in the United States alone), frequency of performances (it is publicly sung at least 10 million times a year), international popularity across six continents or cultural longevity (234 years and going strong).....Yet among the billions of people who have enjoyed singing or listening to it, remarkably few have any knowledge of its origins, purposes, consequences or history.

"Amazing Grace" was conceived by Newton in late December 1772 as part of the preparations he was making for a New Year's Day sermon to his parishioners on January 1, 1773. The notion of writing a hymn in order to prepare for a sermon would have been alien to most eighteenth-century clergymen, but Newton was an ingenious innovator in this field of spiritual communication. In the previous two years he had been experimenting with the highly unusual activity (for a Church of England incumbent) of writing "People's Hymns." This activity stemmed from Newton's realization that the principal religious books of the established church, the King James Bible and 1662 Book of Common Prayer, were full of words and phrases that uneducated people found difficult to understand.

As his Olney congregation consisted largely of lace-makers, agricultural laborers, malting's workers, blacksmiths, carpenters and other artisans or tradesmen, Newton thought he could help them to understand the Scriptures if he amplified his sermons by writing simply worded hymns that illustrated the biblical passages on which he was preaching.

At the beginning of his curacy in Olney, Newton used the hymns of other writers such as Isaac Watts or John and Charles Wesley for this purpose. The first recipients of this biblical teaching through hymns had been the children of the parish......When Newton realized how effective the singing and learning by heart of hymns could be as a spiritual teaching aid for children, he expanded the practice to the adult members of his congregation....Although the hymn singing there proved popular, it was only occasionally extended into Olney church itself, rather than prayer meetings during the week, because the eighteenth-century Church of England frowned upon anything other than metrical Psalms (the Psalms set to song meters) being sung within consecrated buildings.

There was a particular reason why Newton might have chosen January 1, 1773 as a date on which to expound on God's grace. He was in the habit of regarding every New Year's Day as a milestone for spiritual stock taking.

Newton's diary notes for his sermon in Olney Church on this New Year's Day show that he developed the theme of his December 31 diary entry. For he began by emphasizing the importance of being grateful to God for his past mercies. Then he asked the same rhetorical question that David had asked some three thousand years earlier: "Who am I, Lord?"

Newton's answer took on autobiographical overtones clearly echoed in his just written hymn. For he declared that unconverted sinners were blinded by the god of the world (Satan) until "God's mercy came to us not only undeserved but undesired...... our hearts endeavored to shut him out till He overcame us by the power of grace."

----John Aitken, John Newton, From Disgrace to Amazing Grace