In 1965 Brian Wren (1936– ) went as pastor to a Congregational church in Essex, England. Writing in The Hymn, January 1981, he says: “In 1968 on Easter Sunday we sang a hymn called “Christ Is Alive,” which I wrote within 10 days because about 10 days before, Martin Luther King was assassinated. It seemed impossible to celebrate Easter without taking that into our thinking. I wrote the hymn after that particular event but also hoping it would say something more universal. So that we would not be singing to an unfamiliar tune, I wrote it for the tune TRURO.” The hymn with this tune is published in his book Faith Looking Forward, where he further explains, “The final stanza was rewritten in 1978 to remove the masculine metaphors in the original (‘he rules . . . to every man displayed’ becomes ‘shall be to all on earth displayed’), but more particularly to catch the dynamism of the Holy Spirit.”

Wren wrote the hymn specifically to fit a tune that was well known to his people. It should be familiar in SDA churches, also, since it was in the 1941 Church Hymnal. However, it was one of those easy-to-neglect half-page hymns and was not often sung. The tune is strong and singable. It will be found again in SDAH 378 with the text “Go, Preach My Gospel.”

TRURO first appeared in Thomas Williams’ Psalmodia Evangelica; A Complete Set of Psalms and Hymns in Three Parts for Public Worship, Part II, 1789. It was used here with Watts’s text “Now to the Lord a Noble Song,” but has been more often sung to his “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun,” SDAH 227. We have no information about the composer of this tune, which gets its name from an old town in Cornwall, England.

Thomas John Williams was born in Ynysmeudwy, a small village in Glamorgan, south Wales, in 1869. He studied music in Cardiff and was the organist and choirmaster of the Zion Church, Llanelly, in Carmarthenshire from 1903 to 1913. Later on he transferred to Calfaria Church in the same town. He composed several hymn tunes and some anthems. He died in Llanelly on April 24, 1944.