“I Do Not See How a True Methodist Could Write Such Meaningful Words”
In 1922, a twenty-one-year-old music prodigy in Bono, Arkansas, gave up the best job he had ever had.
Lloyd Otis Sanderson (1901–1992) was the choir director of the First Methodist church and a part-time clerk at the Bono Mercantile Co. He had been taught to read music by his mother at age five, had taught his first singing school on his fifteenth birthday, and had earned what amounted to a bachelor’s degree in music at eighteen, paying his own tuition with money made picking cotton and working a sawmill. He was raising funds for a Methodist mission campaign with a goal of $75 million. He had, in his own words, “good pay and good friends and boosters with an opportunity to receive worthy promotion.”
His father had been a Methodist. His mother, his older brother, and his younger sister were members of the church of Christ. Sanderson later admitted that he “had previously declined to listen.” Then a friend got through to him: Robert Cherry, the main clerk at the Mercantile. “I finally came to know and love the truth that makes men free,” Sanderson wrote. He was baptized in July of 1922.
He was blunt about what it cost him: “This meant the end of choir directing for the Methodist church and soon after the work at the Mercantile.”
“I Didn’t Really Sacrifice”
What happened next is the part he liked to tell. The church of Christ in Bono hired him immediately to lead singing for a tent meeting, and the calls kept coming. “I didn’t miss a week’s work by the change,” he wrote. By the spring of 1923, J. N. Armstrong had hired him as music director at Harper Christian College in Kansas; when Harper merged with Arkansas Christian College in 1924 to form Harding College, Sanderson went with it and stayed until 1928.
Looking back on the whole thing decades later, he refused to call it a sacrifice at all:
“I found so many true associations. I had a thousand mothers in spiritual Israel. I had brothers and sisters by the thousands who were nearer and dearer than flesh kin. I was led into endeavors that far outstripped what I had been doing. I decided I had been wonderfully blessed.”
That paragraph is, essentially, the lyric sheet for The Lord Has Been Mindful of Me. He said so himself: “With this feeling, I wrote ‘The Lord Has Been Mindful of Me.’ You can see this story in the lyrics.”
What He Did With It
Sanderson spent the rest of his life handing that gain back to the church. In 1933 the Gospel Advocate Company brought him on as music editor, and in 1935 he moved to Nashville as its business manager, teaching part time at David Lipscomb College on the side. When editor John T. Hinds died at the beginning of 1938, Sanderson served as editor of the Gospel Advocate itself until B. C. Goodpasture arrived in 1939. He then went right back to the music desk, which is where he wanted to be. He resigned in 1942 to preach full time, and he served congregations in Springfield, Columbia, Little Rock, Amarillo, Tulsa, Norman, Wichita, Memphis, and Atlanta.
His lasting work was the hymnal. Sanderson edited Christian Hymns (1935), Christian Hymns Number Two (1948), and Christian Hymns III (1966)—three books that sat in the pew racks of a great many congregations for the better part of the twentieth century. Through the 1950s and 60s he crisscrossed the Bible Belt holding singing schools, teaching ordinary members to read the notes their grandparents had learned from shape-note masters. He wrote, by his own count, some five hundred songs and hymns, at least fifty of them children’s songs published as “A Guide to Child Activity.” When he wrote lyrics rather than music, he sometimes signed them Vana R. Raye—a name assembled out of his wife’s: Rena Raye Woodring, whom he met at Harper and married in 1927.
The Poem He Asked For
“After my conversion, I tried to influence others,” Sanderson wrote. One of them was Thomas O. Chisholm—the Kentucky-born Methodist minister who had already given the English-speaking church Great Is Thy Faithfulness and would eventually write some twelve hundred hymn texts. Chisholm had left preaching for his health and was selling life insurance in Vineland, New Jersey; Sanderson was preaching in Springfield, Missouri. “Long trips were ‘out’ in those days,” Sanderson noted, so the two of them argued it out by mail. “We exchanged many letters on religious convictions. We seemed agreed. He had a similar background.”
Then Sanderson did something clever. Instead of pressing the point directly, he set his friend a task:
“So to know if I might have made an impression, I asked him to write me a poem on Romans 6:3–18.”
Romans 6:3–18 is not a neutral passage. It is the passage—buried with Him by baptism into death, raised to walk in newness of life, the old man crucified, sin no longer having dominion, obedience from the heart, made free from sin. Sanderson handed a Methodist a text he could not versify without preaching the thing Sanderson had left Methodism over.
What came back in the mail was Buried with Christ.
Bur-ied with Christ, my bless-èd Re-deem-er,
Dead to the old life of fol-ly and sin;
Sa-tan may call, the world may en-treat me,
There is no voice that an-swers with-in.
Read the three stanzas against the chapter and you can watch Chisholm work straight down the text. Stanza one is verses 3 and 4: buried, dead to the old life. Stanza two is verse 11 (“Dead unto sin, alive thru the Spirit”) with the resurrection of verses 4 and 5 attached. Stanza three lands on verse 14 and verse 18 in a single breath: “Sin hath no more its cruel dominion, / Walking ‘in newness of life,’ I am free.” Chisholm even put the quotation marks around “in newness of life” himself, so no one could miss that he was quoting Paul. And the chorus catches the paradox of verse 17—obeyed from the heart—in four words that a Restoration preacher could have spent a lifetime trying to phrase: “Living anew, obedient but free.”
Sanderson set it to his own tune, in a rolling 9/8 that keeps the whole thing moving forward like a man walking out of water. It was copyrighted in 1935, the year Christian Hymns appeared. His reaction to the manuscript survives in one sentence:
“I do not see how a true Methodist could write such meaningful words.”
The Part That Doesn’t Resolve
Honesty requires the rest of it. So far as the record shows, Chisholm never came. He remained a Methodist to the end, dying in 1960 at the Methodist Home for the Aged in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.
The two men kept working together anyway, and the collaboration produced some of the most-sung music in the churches of Christ. In 1934, Sanderson woke around two in the morning with a melody he couldn’t shake, in an odd 11.10.11.10 meter he could find no words for. Eight days later a letter arrived from Vineland: Chisholm had gotten out of bed after midnight that same Tuesday to write down a poem that had taken hold of him. “It was an exact fit for my music,” Sanderson wrote. “I bought the poem, and the twain have been together since.” That is Be With Me, Lord. Bring Christ Your Broken Life came the same way—Sanderson sent the tune east and asked what Chisholm thought it ought to say.
There is something worth sitting with in that. A man can write the truth more clearly than he can walk into it. Sanderson’s letters did not produce the obedience to Christ in Chisholm that he was angling for; they produced a hymn that has been sung over baptisteries in congregations of the churches of Christ for ninety years (often, one suspects, by people who assume a member of the church must have written it). The seed did not come up in the ground Sanderson was aiming at. It came up everywhere else.
“The Lord Has Been Mindful”
Sanderson’s own life did not resolve neatly either. In 1984 his daughter Lloydene died of cancer on August 2; his wife Rena Raye was struck by a car and killed on August 15, thirteen days later, in the accident that left him crippled for the rest of his life. He lived another eight years, remarried in 1988, and died in Memphis in January of 1992. He never changed the title of the song he had written about God’s goodness to him. “In days of shadow, troubles and darkness,” he wrote, “the Lord has still been mindful.”
The boy who left a Methodist choir loft in a railroad town in Arkansas gave the church a body of song it is still singing: Be With Me, Lord, I’ll Never Forsake My Lord, Pray All The Time, The Lord Has Been Mindful of Me, Buried with Christ. He thought at first that obedience had cost him something. He spent seventy years discovering it hadn’t.
A special thanks to Leon Sanderson who has granted OpenPsalm.com permission to post these songs.
Sanderson’s own words above are taken from “The Lord Has Been Mindful of Me,” an autobiography published posthumously in the Gospel Advocate (Vol. CXLVI, No. 9, September 2004, pp. 26–28) and reproduced at the History of the Restoration Movement, along with his 1992 obituary.