Joseph Hart spares no one’s feelings when he surveys the mass of humanity, men and women and boys and girls, and analyzes people in their natural condition apart from Christ. And it is not just that men are merely defective or slightly ill-adapted, or that they just need a little bit of tweaking. No, Hart paints a picture of our condition that aligns with the Holy Scripture: we are poor, wretched sinners. But right away, consider the good news in that opening stanza: “Jesus ready stands to save you, full of pity, joined with power.” And that’s a marvelous, balanced, biblical portrayal of the Savior.

This is an absolutely lovely hymn. The tune to which it is paired in the Trinity Hymnal (Selection No. 472) is called BRYN CALFARIA, which is one of those stirring, minor-key Welsh hymn tunes (of which there are so many). The tune is so full of pathos and is well-suited to the hymn text here. That Welsh tune name, by the way, in English means “Calvary’s Hill”[1]—a very apt name for the tune, especially when it is wedded to this text.
The Tune
Now, this tune is not the easiest to sing. It’s a little tricky, but I think that a determined congregation could learn and master it after singing through it just a few times. I have a Welsh pastor friend who has said that it is not uncommon for the Welsh to sing tunes like this when they come together at rugby matches. And, as he says, if 50,000 inebriated Welsh sports fans can learn a complex tune and sing it with some cogency, so can an average congregation!
The fundamental underpinning theme of this hymn is that it does not congratulate the sinner on his ability; it recognizes that all the ability belongs to Jesus Christ alone. Notice that the first refrain is, “He is able, He is able, He is willing, doubt no more.” No emphasis falls on the sinner’s power and ability; it’s all on the Savior’s power and ability.
The BRYN CALFARIA tune was originally composed by a Welshman named William Owen. Owen, born in 1813 and lived through 1893, was a publisher of several hymnals using Welsh tunes. He was born in Bethesda in Northern Wales, and he worked in a slave quarry as a young man at the age of ten. That gives us something of the historical context: both awful child labor and slave labor were alive and well at this time in early 1800s Wales.[2]
Owen lived near a church called St. Ann, and he loved to hear the organist playing there. He became a good musician himself and started composing. Some of his tunes at the time were very popular, but the style of these tunes fell out of favor years later. However, this tune has survived partly due to the efforts and interest of Ralph Vaughan Williams — the great English hymn collector, hymn publisher, and composer of symphonies. Vaughan Williams gave us that majestic tune to which we sing “For All the Saints,” for example (SINE NOMINE).[3]
Well, Vaughan Williams took Owen’s BRYN CALFARIA tune and tamed it so as to make it easier for congregations to sing it. He then published his arrangement of the tune in the English Hymnal. He also did an organ prelude on this tune.[4] If you are a classical music lover, you might have heard that organ prelude, and it is a lovely arrangement of this tune. So, it’s thanks to Vaughan Williams (at least in part) that this tune has been preserved in English hymnody.
The Text
Well, that’s a little about the tune and its composer (and popular arranger). How about a little bit about the man who wrote the stirring lyrics? Joseph Hart was born about a dozen years before John Newton. John Newton (the former slave-trader-turned-abolitionist who gave us hymns such as “Amazing Grace”) was born in 1725, and Joseph Hart was born in 1712. Hart was converted to Christ under George Whitefield’s ministry in the late 1750s, some ten years after the close of the “Great Awakening” (denominated the “Evangelical Revival” in Britain).
After his conversion, Hart went on to become a pastor and preacher for an independent chapel. He wrote a number of hymns and was later buried in Bunhill Fields in London, which is famous for being the final resting place of the likes of John Owen, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Susannah Wesley (mother of John and Charles), and other notables.[5]
The hymn “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Wretched” was first published in 1759 in a collection of English hymns, and the original title given to this hymn was “Come, and welcome to Jesus Christ.” As an aside, that is one of my absolute favorite phrases in the English language. It’s also the title of one of John Bunyan’s little works. Read that book if you can. It expresses his delight and joy in the free and gracious welcome given to sinners by Jesus Christ. Some have suggested that that little book even helped pave the way for the modern missions movement.
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There has been discussion recently of the spiritual “wastelands” in our own country, in terms of the relative paucity of a Reformed and Presbyterian presence in some regions. Might we then take a page out of the book of the Father of Presbyterianism and think through ways of putting similar not-ideal-but-sufficient-for-the-time-being Presbyterian measures in place? Who knows what shape that may take? Perhaps it looks like small “core group” gatherings in places where there is not yet a Reformed church, or yoked pastorates where several small congregations cannot afford a full-time minister by themselves, or interim evening-evangelistic worship services supplied by a (somewhat) proximate congregation that doesn’t itself have an evening service in place—surely the collective Presbyterian intellect can exert some confessional ingenuity!

It is sometimes alleged (or perhaps just assumed) that Reformed doctrine and practice can be rigid, intractable, and stubbornly inflexible—refusing to allow for any adaption to serve the needs of a context or mission field. It has been intimated (at least in my hearing) that some more conservative actors in the PCA would not allow for any adaptability when such is allowed and even commended by Scripture.
I am not sure how true or untrue that may be, and my goal here is not so much to answer those allegations as they may exist in our contemporary situation, but to demonstrate that, for at least one of our major Presbyterian forebears, such a mentality was not the case.
The name “John Knox” does not often connote “flexibility” or “adaptability” in the modern, popular imagination. But perhaps this brief observation and pastoral application will dispel some of those assumptions and provide some encouragement to those of us in the 21st-century PCA that there is a place for what we might call “biblical and prudent adaptability” and it is not without precedent in our tradition.
A few months ago, I was reading John Knox’s Letter of Wholesome Counsel, Addressed to His Brethren in Scotland.[i] In perusing his essay, it struck me that Knox provides grounded counsel as to how the church might carry on its operation in his absence—and not only his personal absence (as if the health and existence of the Christian church in Scotland were solely dependent on his personal presence), but also in the current absence of any duly ordained Protestant ministers. Knox is mindful of the fact that what he suggests is not a permanent solution and that the absence of a suitable Protestant minister is not an ideal situation, but it is the current reality facing these Proto-Protestants in Scotland.
Likening their situation to that of a hungry people needing food, he acknowledges that, like Israel of old eating manna day after day, subjecting oneself to the same predictable diet can become “tiresome and wearisome.” And while this is a temptation that God’s elect may endure for a time, Knox is confident that ultimately God’s people will be called away from such boredom. In other words, Knox is acknowledging that the sort of makeshift worship services and devotional habits that he is suggesting these house churches (“privy kirks”) implement (in the absence of an ordained ministry to structure regular public worship and administration of the sacraments) may seem predictable and tedious at times. Nevertheless, he trusts that by the grace of God his countrymen will find joy and sustenance in it, even as much as a hungry man will find joy and sustenance in the same predictable bread coming upon him day after day after day. Just as a man who is starving will soon come not to despise that monotonous bread supply, likewise God’s children will not long despise feeding their souls upon the Word of God when that is precisely what their soul needs.
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The church of centuries past had a far more robust and biblical understanding of the church’s corporate self-conception and the need for corporate discipleship and gathering. We can and ought to recapture and promote this past self-conception and ecclesiastically corporate mentality.

[Reformation21] Editor’s Note : This post has been adapted from a longer article set to be published in a forthcoming edition of the Puritan Reformed Journal.
It will come as little surprise to many readers on this site that the state of theology in the contemporary North American church is fraught with weakness. This theological anemia is one that prompts serious concern and demands serious attention. In particular, the way in which the modern evangelical populace in North America regards the church and the church’s corporate identity and the necessity of corporate worship is one that is in dire need of correction.
The trend has been observed for some years that a growing number of self-professing evangelical Protestants have been embracing a lower and lower ecclesiology. The tendency to downplay the necessity for corporate worship and corporate discipleship as a covenanted, local community (local church) has increased, parallel with an accompanying tendency to emphasize personal or private prayer and Bible reading either over against corporate worship/gathering, or that such individual habits of piety are fundamentally more important than any such corporate practices of piety. While this social trend has been observed anecdotally for years and has been the subject of ire within many a sermon introduction or popular magazine article[1], in recent years, there has at last emerged empirical data to substantiate this observation.
In 2020, Ligonier Ministries, in partnership with Lifeway Research, commissioned and performed a survey[2] of three thousand Americans asking a variety of questions about key theological tenets and doctrines: about Jesus Christ, the Bible, truth, ethics, etc. The results are eye-opening. Particular to the concerns of this article, one of the statements to which survey participants were asked to respond was this, “Worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church.” Amongst all respondents, 32% “Somewhat agree” with that statement, and 26% “Strongly agree”—thus, 58% of all respondents viewed that statement favorably.[3] Conversely, some 29% of all respondents disagreed with that statement either “strongly” or “somewhat.” Now, these data reflect the views of Americans writ large, not specifically the views espoused by evangelicals. However, the Ligonier Survey does provide a subset of data regarding evangelical responses to that statement—and it does not portend well for evangelicals’ ecclesiology. When faced with the statement “Worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church,” 20% of self-identified evangelical respondents strongly agreed with that statement—a full fifth!—and 19% agreed somewhat. Nearly 40% of all evangelical respondents viewed the aforementioned statement favorably. Conversely, some 55% of self-identified evangelicals disagreed with that statement—35% disagreeing strongly, and 20% disagreeing somewhat.[4]
While the higher statistic is heartening, it is at the same time disconcerting: barely over half of self-identified evangelicals take issue with an individualistic Christian mindset. Barely over half of self-identified evangelicals, presumably, object to this statement which downplays a corporate sensibility and obligation to the Christian life—and it is only just over a third which disagrees strongly! Meanwhile, a strong minority (39%) find that congregationally-reductionistic attitude regarding Christianity at least somewhat agreeable.
This is a growing trend in North American Christianity and it betrays the low ecclesiology which continues to plague the church. This is something that must be answered with a strong ecclesiology that recognizes and emphasizes the centrality of the corporate life and identity of the institutional church, her people, and their collective ministry. The current moment demands a resounding “Amen!” to Cyprian’s dictum (which sentiment has been perpetuated in Reformed circles by Calvin in Institutes IV.1.1.)[5] that “No one can have God for his Father, who does not have the Church for his mother.”[6]
Recent Scholarship
In recent years there has been something of a happy resurgence of both popular-level writings as well as more scholarly theological work relevant to ecclesiology, such as much of the fine work that has been produced by 9Marks ministries and other connected writers.[7] Much of this scholarship has come from a credobaptist viewpoint and assumes congregationalism as the standard for church governance. Though this factor is at odds with classically Reformed and Presbyterian ecclesiological commitments, these works are nonetheless useful in emphasizing the necessity for the corporate gathering and a corporate Christian self-conception.[8] While there has been useful ecclesiological work coming from Presbyterian and Reformed authors of late, these have tended to be more popular-level works that focus more narrowly on issues surrounding the sacraments or that of pastoral leadership/church officers.[9]
There are works that deserve frequent reference in ecclesiological studies such as the late Edmund Clowney’s work on the church[10] which, while Reformed in its theological orientation, is not exactly a work of recent scholarship, being published in 1995. Of course, the classic 19th-century ecclesiological tome by James Bannerman[11] is both Reformed and eminently worthy of consideration, but hardly recent. There is also the widely popular work by Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the communal/community aspect of the life of the church,[12] but this work is not recent (being published in 1939) and Bonhoeffer’s theological orientation is not of the classical Reformed sort.[13] One happy exception to this is Michael Horton’s People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology, which was published in 2008.[14] There are also forthcoming scholarly works that promise to contribute to a more robust ecclesiology in our day but, at the time of this article’s writing, have not yet been released and are thus unable to be considered.[15]
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The Christmas hymns and carols being among the most lovely, sing-able, and familiar, are also among the most richly doctrinal. I know of no other time of the year where so many Evangelical and Protestant congregations (from all sections of the worship-style spectrum) are singing and meditating on such explicitly creedal confessions of the church and Scripture with such frequency and regularity.

I realize that there is a spectrum of opinion and conviction amongst the readership of Ref21. There are those in the Reformed orbit who are entirely opposed to singing hymns in corporate worship, to say nothing of any sort of acknowledgment of anything even vaguely approximating the liturgical calendar! Those convictions are certainly respected and respectable, but (fair warning) for adherents of such a position, the following article will probably serve only as an irritant.
However, for those within the Reformed communion who do not hold to the aforementioned convictions, I suspect many of you might be like me: I serve in a Reformed Christian tradition where large segments of our denomination do not observe a church calendar or liturgical year. A few congregations do, a few more have a quasi-Advent observance during the month of December. But really for the majority of congregations, it’s simply the weekly cycle of Lord’s Day Morning worship and Lord’s Day Evening worship each and every Sunday.
There are a whole host of reasons for this reality and the aim here is not to debate the merits or detractions of a liturgical calendar, but simply to point out that (in American Protestantism at least) regardless of how high-church or low-church an individual congregation may be, almost every congregation I know of gives some sort of head-nod to the two predominant “festival” days of the year: Easter and Christmas.
We can argue another day about whether this should be. There is a venerable tradition of its custom, particularly coming out of the Continental Reformed Tradition.[1] But I digress.
No, the point of this article (assuming the reality of Christmas and the hymns that accompany it) is to give some attention to the theologically rich and particularly creedal congregational singing that comes ‘round at Christmastime.
In addition to the Christmas hymns and carols being among the most lovely, sing-able, and familiar, are also among the most richly doctrinal. I know of no other time of the year where so many Evangelical and Protestant congregations (from all sections of the worship-style spectrum) are singing and meditating on such explicitly creedal confessions of the church and Scripture with such frequency and regularity.
Perhaps it is lamentable that this is a phenomenon that does not happen more often. But the national worship scene being what it is, it is worth celebrating the fact that such singing is happening and that our Christian worship as is the more blessed and enriched because of it.
If you will indulge me a few examples and comparisons, I think you will see why such creedal hymnody encourages me and moves me to consider that the state of Christian worship in this nation may not yet be totally forgone and forsaken.
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Notes
[1] Do with this information what you will. Much of it was born out of compromise and as a result of tensions between ecclesiastical leaders and various civil magistrates. As historians, we must acknowledge the historical reality and subsequent traditions that followed:
Synod of Dordt Church Order: “Article 67 – The Churches shall observe, in addition to Sunday, also Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, with the following day, and whereas in most of the cities and provinces of the Netherlands the day of Circumcision and of Ascension of Christ are also observed, Ministers in every place where this is not yet done shall take steps with the Government to have them conform to the others.”