Great Is Thy Faithfulness: A Song History
The words of "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" are by Thomas O. Chisholm (1866–1960), a Kentuckian who was ordained a Methodist minister in 1903 but, because of poor health, served only one short pastorate and later earned his living selling insurance in Vineland, New Jersey[1]. He wrote well over a thousand poems[1][2], and this one, built on Lamentations 3:22–23, came not from any crisis but from a daily sense of God's provision[2]; in a 1955 letter Chisholm said nothing out of the ordinary lay behind it[3]. In 1923 he mailed a group of poems to his friend William M. Runyan (1870–1957), who set this text to music that year in Baldwin, Kansas, and later wrote that he had prayed hard over the setting, hoping it would do the words justice[3][2].
Claude Lorrain, Sunrise, oil on canvas, possibly 1646–47. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its morning light; it has no connection to the hymn.
Runyan first issued the hymn in his own song pamphlets and then in his songbook Songs of Salvation and Service (Chicago, 1923)[3]. Runyan worked with the Moody Bible Institute and as an editor at Chicago's Hope Publishing Company, and hymnals print the copyright as Hope's, dated 1923 and renewed in 1951[1][4]. By Chisholm's account the hymn spread slowly at first, until Dr. Houghton, then president of Moody, championed it; it became a favorite there, though never the school's official theme song[3]. The tune's usual name, FAITHFULNESS, was assigned for the 1956 Baptist Hymnal at Runyan's suggestion[3].
Its wider fame owes much to George Beverly Shea, who learned the hymn because it was so well loved at Moody. A singer with Billy Graham's evangelistic team, Shea introduced it to British audiences at the team's 1954 meetings there[3][1], and its use there helped carry it to churches on both sides of the Atlantic[4]. Despite Chisholm's own Methodist ordination, the hymn did not enter an official Methodist hymnal until The United Methodist Hymnal of 1989, and Carlton Young reported it as the second most requested hymn for that book[1].
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