Hymns: 1983 Memories

Posted on by HiberniaGospel
London City Mission VE Hostel, Bermondsey
Most Holy Trinity Church Bermondsey

I left for London in September 1982 to spend a year as a voluntary evangelist (VE) with London City Mission. In today’s terms, it could be described as a gap year program. Most were approaching their 20s or in their 20s. The 23 or so other VEs came from all parts of the UK. I was the only Irish person, and we had one American. We stayed in a hostel in the junction between Old Jamaica Road and Abbey Street in Bermondsey. I took the picture of the hostel (shown above) a year later, in September 84. The second picture is the walk down towards the hostel, where you passed the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church. The church was built to replace one that had been bombed towards the end of WW2. I believe that it was the last v2 bomb that fell on London. Three priests (probably Irish) were killed instantly.

The hostel building was replaced at the beginning of this century. So, everything looks very different now.

We gave out loads of these 😀

We were assigned to various mission halls around London, such as Vauxhall, Customs House, Peckham, West Norwood, Isle of Dogs, Kings Cross, Limehouse and Bermondsey itself. Four of us worked in Covent Garden Christian Centre with Geoff Holland, Martin Kilby, and Gordon Bolton. Now the centre has become Hope Community Church.

Our activities included soup kitchens and Sunday services for the homeless, a coffee bar for tourists, district visits, a senior citizen’s luncheon club, a Bible study for local office workers, and open-air preaching on Tower Hill on Thursdays. We used to teach in St. Clement Danes primary school in the West End too. A couple of us used to take turns helping with music at Hoxton mission hall, which is where London City Mission began in 1835.

We were also involved in the early stages of Luis Palau’s Mission to London. Luis Palau, an Argentinian evangelist, was similar to Billy Graham. I first saw him at a prep meeting in All Souls Langham place in 1982, and then around September 1983, we brought people to some of his meetings in north London, although the biggest ones were the following year at Queen’s Park Rangers Stadium. Billy Graham visited the UK in 1984 too.

The 24 or so voluntary evangelists were from various evangelical backgrounds, Baptist, Pentecostal, charismatic, Anglican, Methodist and so on. I wasn’t sure which church to attend on Sundays. Unlike Irish Baptist churches, many of the Baptist Union churches in the UK were modernist. So they wouldn’t suit me. I did visit the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Elephant and Castle, which was a conservative, independent Baptist Church but they were decidedly anti-charismatic, which didn’t suit me at the time, though I did attend the summer conference there in 1983 and in some subsequent years. This was originally C.H. Spurgeons church, and many of the churches in South London were founded by that church.

I think that most of us either went to Westminster Chapel or Bermondsey Christian Fellowship (BCF). I generally attended BCF, but I did attend Westminster Chapel for the Friday night Bible studies and got involved in some of their evangelistic activities from time to time. At the time, these two churches were very different. Westminster Chapel was a traditional reformed church. BCF were young, new and charismatic. Like some of the fellowships back in Ireland, they were very much influenced by the British New Church Movement (BNCM). Now BCF has evolved into City Hope and Westminster Chapel is, I think, in the same church grouping (New Frontiers). Both are charismatic. And Metropolitan Tabernacle is still a conservative, independent reformed Baptist Church.

Throughout my time in London, I became more interested in theology and church history. In fact, even before I got to London, I regarded myself as a Calvinist. Calvin was very much the big theologian of the reformation era. Newer fellowships wanted nothing to do with all that. The problem was, many of the older traditional evangelical churches were either heading towards modernism or were sound, but sound asleep, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, being a notable exception. So, even though you’d sometimes hear silly things being said in the newer groups, they generally had more life about them. And of course, you might even hear silly things from time to time in the old churches 😀.

Anyway, let’s get to the music.

Bermondsey Christian Fellowship

Here are the songs that I remember. Unlike most evangelical churches nowadays, where the singing is more like a concert, the music was purely acoustic and the whole congregations sang. Most of these songs can be found on Vintage Worship Tapes.

I’ll list all the song that I remember.

Many of these songs found their way into Mission Praise, which was used in evangelical churches throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Nowadays, many churches no longer use hymn books. Even then, most of the hymns were displayed on overhead projectors.

Westminster Central Hall

Every year, LCM had a public meeting in Westminster Central Hall, near Westminster Abbey. The full-time missionaries had a choir, but they asked us young folk to sing two songs too. We performed the following (after much practice):

God of Boundless Might – This YouTube video isn’t us 😀. It’s a choir in Nagaland, but we were good too, at least I was 😀.

Christ Triumphant – a modern hymn written by Anglican, Michael Saward, who wrote over 100 hymns.

Look and Live – I remember the full-time missionaries singing this one. My other memories of that evening are two of the girls doing a drama sketch and me wondering if I could ask to play the huge pipe organ for a few minutes after the show had ended. In the end, I chickened out 😀.

Harvest Hymns

We had a few harvest thanksgiving services in the autumn of 82. Many people donated food for decoration. We were eating pumpkin pie for weeks after😀. I popped along to St James Bermondsey for their harvest thanksgiving. At Covent Garden, our boss, Geoff Holland, surprised us by saying that he would take up a collection for TEAR Fund during the service for the homeless. Why should we think that they’d be unwilling to donate? And, I think, they did donate. Some of them were from Ireland. Many were originally in the building trade.

One day I was walking near the Tower of London and I met one of them. He said I looked skint and gave me £5 or something. I tried to decline, but he insisted. I thought it best to just take it, and give it back when he was more sober. Then, when I saw him again at the homeless service, I tried to give it back, and he smiled and said there’s no need. They were a lovely bunch. But I remember one of the full-time missionaries, Martin Kilby, saying that we get a good class of homeless people coming to our meetings. I used to play the piano, and because I wasn’t properly trained, some of the guys liked my style. They said I played more like a pub player. These are some of the harvest hymns we sang in Autumn 1982.

The Earth is Yours Oh Lord

We Plough the Fields and Scatter

Come Ye Thankful People Come

All Things Bright and Beautiful

Covent Garden Christian Centre, Nottingham Court 1984
Covent Garden

These harvest hymns were traditional hymns, which you wouldn’t hear in the new fellowships, but I love all church and gospel music. In recent years, I discovered the New English Hymnal playlist on YouTube, which I now listen to quite regularly. The Martijn de Goot YouTube site features many from independent churches such as Westminster Chapel and Metropolitan Tabernacle.

At Covent Garden, most of the churches around us were liberal/modernist, including some of the Baptist Union churches. I found a leaflet in one of them that paid tribute to a liberal minister who recently died. Someone once accused him of denying the divinity of Jesus. He replied that he had never denied the divinity of any man. That was the sort of thing you’d hear from liberals😀. Jesus was seen as just a devout man. There might have been a few older evangelical churches in our immediate area, but the two main evangelical churches were about a mile or two away. Westminster Chapel was near Buckingham Palace and All Souls Langham Place was near Oxford Circus. All Souls is an influential Anglican evangelical church as is St Helens Bishopsgate.

I heard John Stott at All Souls one Sunday night in 1982. I think he was retired by then, but I had a brief chat with him before I left. Another Anglican church I visited was St Mark’s Kennington, where David Pawson spoke one Sunday evening in October 1982. I was delighted to meet him, and I spoke to his wife too. My musical memory from that evening was For I’m Building a People of Power. He got us to sing it and do some actions. I remember him joking about his old age. He said “I’m 52; one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana skin”. He actually lived to 90 in the end. I visited his old church in Guildford several times over that period.

Other Musical Memories

Hallelujah, For the Lord Our God the Almighty Reigns
Generally, it was just the four Beatles (as someone used to call us) who went to the Tower Hill outreach, but one day all the voluntary evangelists came along and played music, did drama sketches and so on. I remember this song in particular. It was my first time hearing it. I could just about play the piano by ear, but many of the young people were great on guitar and piano and even wrote and performed songs at various events.

At that time Tower Hill was very much like speaker’s corner in Hyde Park. You’d get all sorts speaking, evangelicals, Catholics, atheists, even modernist Christians. And office workers would come and heckle as a hobby. I remember one of them would shout “What’s all this to do with the price of fish?”. The same ones that heckled us would heckle the atheists. I remember one of them shouting to an evolutionist “Are you trying to tell us that your grandfather was a monkey?”

The best speaker of all was Lord Donald Soper, a liberal pacifist methodist, who sat in the House of Lords. It was amazing how he dealt with the hecklers. I remember him mentioning that he used to speak there during World War 2. I couldn’t believe that someone could go all the way back to World War 2. But that was only 40 years from 1943, and now my time in London is over 40 years ago. I saw Donald Soper there again in the mid 90s, in a wheelchair by then.

Tower Hill 1984, near where we used to preach

He Who Would Valiant Be
This one sticks in my mind, because when we were trying to decide which hymn to sing for the St. Clement Danes school assembly, one of my friends said how obscure some of the old hymns are, and he used this as an example. I’d never heard it sung much, but I was surprised to see that it had been written by John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. I think it actually features in Pilgrim’s Progress. I had read a modern translation of that book a couple of years earlier and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was full of biblical references. It’s a little like a Christian version of Lord of the Rings. I do love that hymn. I’ve never been into poetry much, but hymns and songs are my poetry.

In Heavenly Love Abiding and I’ve Found a Friend are two hymns that I first heard at the Westminster Chapel Friday night Bible studies on Hebrews by RT Kendall. Westminster Chapel, like many older churches, had challenges adjusting to changing times. Some would want to keep things as they were. It’s where Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones ministered. Lloyd Jones was a huge influence in British evangelicalism. For many, the 1950s and 1960s were a golden era. But much was changing. Huge crowds would attend Westminster Chapel to hear Lloyd Jones, but when he left, that all stopped. And there was the risk of dwindling congregations, as happened in many central London churches.

Kendall was much criticized for being open to the radical side of the charismatic wing of evangelicalism, which was where all the growth was. He wasn’t just doing it to get his church growing. He genuinely believed that the Holy Spirit was at work in the new movements, even if some of it was a bit silly and immature. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I would count him as one of my key influences throughout my Christian life, along with some of the more conservative people who criticize him. I used to get involved in some of the Westminster Chapel outreach from time to time. I last met him outside the chapel in 1991. We had a brief chat, but he was anxious to get back to his street evangelism, which says a lot about him. I still listen to him on Facebook. And I recently read his book, In Pursuit of His Glory: My 25 Years at Westminster Chapel.

Jesus is Lord
This modern song was unusual because in some senses, it was an old-style hymn. Yet it was very popular during my London days, being just a couple of years old. I was always pleased to hear it when I got back to Ireland.

Jesus, Lover, of My Soul
Near us, in Covent Garden, we had contact with a 100-year-old lady named Jesse. This was her favourite hymn. She actually moved to Australia to live with one of her children, with the help of my boss, Geoff Holland, who had to do a bit of research to collect all her details for the passport etc. We were actually featured on London TV news, who took an interest in the story. I stayed out of the picture, but I did get a glimpse of myself in my old grey duffle coat later that night on the London news😀.

See, Him Lying on a Bed of Straw
We learned this one for our carol singing. It was new to me at the time. I remember having about five or six Christmas dinners in 1982, because we had them with the homeless, the senior citizens, with the other voluntary evangelists, and with a friend who invited me to Southampton. We also went out Carol singing in Trafalgar square and in the Covent Garden district. We did a Christmas Carol play in Covent Garden Christian Centre. I think I played the ghost of Christmas future 😀.

Through Our God (The Victory Song)
I remember visiting a friend in Hindhead Surrey, and we walked across to Hazlemere for the Sunday evening meeting. It might have been an older independent church, but it had a very strong charismatic element among the younger people. That’s where I heard that song for the first time.

You Are My Hiding Place
My chief memory of this one was us all singing it back in the common area of the hostel. I’m so nostalgic about that year. I revisited the hostel in the summer of 1984 and 1985. Then, I went again in 1996, and not only did no-one know me, no-one even knew anyone I knew. I was actually on my way to an evening meeting in the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Thankfully that’s still there and thriving. The school that Bermondsey Christian Fellowship met in, in Jamaica Road, is long gone too.

Other Memories

In London you’d meet people from all nations and all ethnic backgrounds. I remember a few years before, in 1979, I went to Dublin for the day, and I noticed a black man in the street. That’ll tell you how unusual it was to see people of different ethnic backgrounds in Ireland. And in Ireland, evangelism was easier because everyone was a Catholic, so you knew where to start.

I always found Muslims very friendly, apart from one young guy at Picadilly circus. I was distributing leaflets to people, and he accused me of targeting Muslims. To him, with his outlook, he saw everyone in England as Christian. Soho was quite a sordid place at the time, so he would see Christianity as decadent. I did try to explain to him that that was all nominal Christianity or the absence of Christianity, but he wouldn’t listen. So, I carried on, and assured him that I was targeting everyone, nominal Christians included. Then, I gave a leaflet to another guy sitting close by. But it turned out that he was another Muslim, so the first guy ran over and said “You see! I told you that you are targeting Muslims! 😀”

As well as all my Christian work, London was a great opportunity to expand my world. I remember seeing Annie (the musical) in the West End, Gandhi (the film) Return of the Jedi, various classical concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, a Gerald Scarfe exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, Swan Lake, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regents Park, and Fantasia (the film). And, on my days off, I had the chance to regularly visit museums and towns or cities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton, Margate, Keswick, Southampton, Portsmouth, Brixham, Guildford, and Richmond, Surrey. I went to the Lake District and climbed the Three Peaks in the Yorkshire Dales (or was it two? we got a bit lost on the third one).

Life got awful dull when I came back home to Ireland to do teacher training in Limerick. But I consider myself very blessed to have had such a year. Some of my full-time London City Mission friends visited Cork Baptist Church a few years later as part of their regular church visits to promote the mission. And as I mentioned earlier, I made a few return visits to the London City Mission VE hostel for the following couple of years.

Finally, here’s some music, events, and films/TV shows that would have formed the background to 1983. I don’t necessarily endorse all the songs or films😀, but thinking of them takes me back to 1983.

10 Songs

  • Red Red Wine – UB40
  • Let’s Dance – David Bowie
  • Total Eclipse of the Heart – Bonnie Tyler
  • True – Spandau Ballet
  • Beat It – Michael Jackson
  • Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) – Paul Young
  • Say Say Say – Paul McCartney & Michael Jackson
  • Moonlight Shadow – Mike Oldfield & Maggie Reilly
  • Give It Up – KC & The Sunshine Band
  • Karma Chameleon – Culture Club

10 Events

  • Shergar Race Horse Kidnapped in Ireland
  • Pro-Life Amendment Passed in Ireland (revoked in 2018)
  • Don Tidey Kidnapping and Rescue
  • Irish Dunlop Closed in Cork
  • UK General Election Victory for Margaret Thatcher
  • ARPANET Adopts TCP/IP – Birth of the Internet
  • Korean Air Lines Flight 007 Shot Down by Soviet Union
  • U.S. Embassy Bombing in Beirut
  • Ronald Reagan Proposes Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
  • U.S. Invasion of Grenada

10 Films or TV Shows

  • sStar Wars: Return of the Jedi
  • Terms of Endearment
  • Flashdance
  • Trading Places
  • The A-Team
  • Fraggle Rock
  • Inspector Gadget
  • Black Adder
  • Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
  • Glenroe

10 Famous People Who Passed Away

  • Karen Carpenter – American singer and drummer of The Carpenters; died from complications related to anorexia
  • David Niven – British actor known for The Pink Panther and Separate Tables
  • Tennessee Williams – Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright of A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Muddy Waters – Influential blues musician, often called the “father of modern Chicago blues”
  • Jack Dempsey – American heavyweight boxing champion of the 1920s
  • Buckminster Fuller – Architect and futurist, popularized the geodesic dome
  • Corrie ten Boom – Dutch Holocaust survivor and author of The Hiding Place
  • Anthony Blunt – British art historian and former Soviet spy
  • Billy Fury – British rock singer of the 1960s
  • Dennis Wilson – Drummer for The Beach Boys

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