Will you come and follow me

Sung in Worship, 6 April.

The hymn was written by John Lamberton Bell (b. 1949), possibly with some collaboration by Graham Maule (1958-2019), a frequent collaborative partner.  Bell was educated at the University of Glasgow (MA 1975, BD 1978, DD Honoris causa 2002).  He was elected Rector while still a student, the first and the last student Rector.  A minister of the Church of Scotland and a member of the Iona Community, Bell has spent much of his career in youth ministry.  He has written 200 hymns and composed or arranged as many.  Bell was the chairman for Songs of God's People, a 1988 supplement to the third edition of the Church of Scotland’s Church Hymnary, and the chairman again for the fourth edition of 2005.  He has produced a number of other hymn collections.  In an interview in Reformed Worship in 1993, he expressed his care for hymns that focus on social action: “I discovered that seldom did our hymns represent the plight of poor people to God. There was nothing that dealt with unemployment, nothing that dealt with living in a multicultural society and feeling disenfranchised. There was nothing about child abuse, which is one of the big problems in our country just now. There was nothing that reflected concern for the developing world, nothing that helped us see ourselves as brothers and sisters to those who are suffering from poverty or persecution.”  This hymn, “The Summons,” is in the form of a dialogue in which the first four stanzas are spoken by Jesus and the last by the Christian follower.  Bell wrote the hymn in 1987 for a specific occasion: the commission of volunteer workers for a project in deprived housing areas in Glasgow.  In 2018 Bell received at the hands of Justin Welby the Thomas Cranmer award for Worship.

The tune, Kelvingrove, may have existed from the early 17th century;  early in the 18th century it is the regular setting for a song commonly called “O the shearin’s no’ for you, bonnie lassie O” (but sometimes, as a fiddle tune, “The Poor Old Woman”).  The song’s basic structure is that of a conversation between a pregnant woman and the man who has impregnated her; it has many variations, ranging from a more or less innocent springtime affair to a brutal rape.  In the early 19th century the melody was adopted for a sentimental love song, “Let us haste to Kelvin Grove, bonnie lassie O,” by Thomas Lyle (1792-1859), possibly with alterations by John Sim, who printed it in The Scottish Minstrel (1811).  Kelvingrove is a park in Glasgow, running along the banks of the river Kelvin.