Choral Anthems

I Will Sing!

Composer: Priscilla Murphy (Celebrating Grace)

Text: Charles Wesley (1739), “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” with a refrain by Priscilla Murphy

Season: Sung October 4, 2026, the first anthem of the season, Beverly Heights Sanctuary Choir

Charles Wesley wrote the hymn for the first anniversary of his conversion, May 21, 1739, and gave it eighteen stanzas. The one everyone knows, “O for a thousand tongues to sing,” was the seventh; it rose to the top because it remembers something a Moravian friend, Peter Böhler, had said to him: “Had I a thousand tongues, I would praise him with them all.” What follows in Wesley’s text is a catalogue of what the name of Jesus does: it breaks the power of cancelled sin, it sets the prisoner free, it makes the foulest clean.

Priscilla Murphy keeps Wesley’s stanzas and adds a refrain of her own, “I will sing of my Savior,” which turns the hymn’s wish into a promise. The choir chose it to open the 2026 season, and the last line, “Had I a thousand hearts to give, they would be yours alone,” is a good summary of what a church choir is for.

Scripture: Psalm 35:28; Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18

Jesus Paid It All

Composer: arr. Marianne Forman (Beckenhorst Press)

Text: Elvina M. Hall (1865); tune by John T. Grape

Season: Sung March 9, 2025, the first Sunday in Lent, Beverly Heights Sanctuary Choir

The words were written in a choir loft. In 1865 Elvina Hall was sitting with the choir of Monumental Methodist Church in Baltimore during a long pastoral prayer, and the lines came to her so insistently that she wrote them on the flyleaf of the hymnal in her lap. Her pastor, George Schrick, already had a tune on his desk: the church’s organist, John Grape, had written one and called it “All to Christ I Owe,” and nobody knew what to do with it. Schrick put the two together. The hymn was in print within three years.

It is a Lenten hymn in the Reformed sense: not a meditation on our sorrow but a statement of what was done for us. “Sin had left a crimson stain; he washed it white as snow.” Marianne Forman’s arrangement lets the choir sing it the way a congregation does, straight and without ornament, and the choir sang it on the first Sunday of Lent in 2025. It was also sung the previous spring, on April 21, 2024.

Scripture: Isaiah 1:18; Colossians 2:13 and 14

Come, Christians, Join to Sing

Composer: Randall Kempton

Text: Christian Henry Bateman (1843); tune MADRID, a Spanish melody

Season: Sung October 20, 2024, Beverly Heights Sanctuary Choir

Bateman wrote the hymn for children. He was a young minister in Edinburgh, raised among the Moravians, and the first line was “Come, children, join to sing”; the hymn appeared in a collection for Sunday schools in 1843. Later editors widened it to “Christians,” which is why a hymn built on one-syllable words and a shout of “Alleluia! Amen!” now stands near the front of so many hymnals. The tune is older than the words, a Spanish melody that reached English-speaking churches through an American arrangement in the 1820s.

Beverly Heights sings it often, as an anthem and as a choral introit, and this is the recording most people have found. Randall Kempton’s setting keeps the hymn’s plainness and lets the choir lean into the refrain. The Alleluia is the point: praise that needs no explanation, sung by people who intend to keep singing it, “on heaven’s blissful shore.”

Scripture: Psalm 148; Revelation 19:6

1234