While we do promote special events, we don’t always have a venue for letting people know how well such events fared. Sunday night’s hymn sing drew a crowd of 143, and Dave Mueller "lifted an offering" (southeast Oklahoma term, perfectly legal) of well over $600 to help scholarship HOPE 2003 short-term mission trip participants.

It is my understanding that the songs we used Sunday evening were drawn directly from tallying totals of requests that were passed around the congregation. As it turned out, three or four requests were enough to cause a song to "make the cut". In other words, there were many, many more songs collected that we could not use. No single song could be dubbed "a runaway favorite". It is my conclusion that different songs (of any genre) speak to the hearts of different people on highly personal bases, perhaps, because of how they ministered to those people at specific points in their lives. The reason that so many of these songs endure as they do may very well be that they were "given" to their authors in some time of great religious awakening or for the purpose of teaching, building, comforting or encouraging others.

Cleland Boyd McAfee was born on September 25, 1866 in Ashley, Missouri. He served as a college chaplain and choir director for twenty years and pastored churches in Illinois and New York. He died in 1944 in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. At one of his churches, McAfee would prepare an original hymn for his church choir each quarter to use at the celebration of the Holy Communion. He usually wrote the hymn in conjunction with his morning message, so that it would follow the same theme. There is little question that this preacher was a uniquely gifted man, but the only hymn by C.B. McAfee that appears in our hymnal did not grow out of a weekly discipline, but out of a desire to minister in a time of personal and family tragedy.

In 1903, diphtheria claimed the lives of two beloved nieces, the daughters of McAfee’s brother. Other brothers and one sister, as well as their families did all they could to comfort the devastated parents. Cleland was, of course, gifted to express his love and sympathy in one additional way. Against the backdrop of personal loss and deep empathy, he penned a hymn for the coming communion service. He said to himself, "We can find peace and comfort if we stay near to the heart of God". The words to his greatest hymn flowed freely:

There is a place of quiet rest, Near to the heart of God,

A place where sin cannot molest, Near to the heart of God.

There is a place of comfort sweet, Near to the heart of God,

A place where we our Savior meet, Near to the heart of God.

There is a place of full release, Near to the heart of God,

A place where all is joy and peace, Near to the heart of God.

© 2002 by R. Karl Crouch, 551 Abbeyville Road, Lancaster, PA 17601