Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
Before our Father's throne
We pour our ardent prayers;
Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one,
Our comforts and our cares.
We share our mutual woes,
Our mutual burdens bear,
And often for each other flows
The sympathizing tear.
When we asunder part,
It gives us inward pain;
But we shall still be joined in heart,
And hope to meet again.
Public domain hymn text (published 1782). Words by John Fawcett.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Fawcett was a Baptist minister serving a small, financially struggling congregation in the rural Yorkshire village of Wainsgate, England, having originally been converted as a teenager after hearing the famous evangelist George Whitefield preach — the same preacher whose sermon, decades apart, also proved pivotal in the conversion of Robert Robinson, author of 'Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing' (hymn 17 in this collection). Fawcett had served his small, modest Yorkshire congregation faithfully for years on a very limited income when he received, and initially accepted, a call to move to a much larger, considerably more prestigious congregation in London — a substantial and, for most ministers of the period, thoroughly welcome step up in status, income, and broader denominational influence for a country minister who had spent his career until that point in comparative rural obscurity.
On the very day set for the family's actual departure, as the Fawcetts' modest household belongings were already being loaded onto wagons for the journey south to London, members of his small, grief-stricken congregation gathered around the loaded wagons, visibly and openly distraught, pleading with him directly not to leave them for the more prestigious opportunity awaiting him in the capital. According to the most commonly told version of the resulting events, Fawcett's own wife turned to him amid this emotional scene and said plainly that she could not bear to actually go through with the move after witnessing the congregation's genuine grief, and Fawcett, visibly moved himself by the sheer depth of his small congregation's attachment to him and his family, made the decision on the spot, right there among the loaded wagons, to cancel the planned move entirely and remain permanently in rural Yorkshire for the rest of his ministry.
He went on to serve that same small Wainsgate congregation, and later a neighboring one, for the remaining decades of his working life, never again seriously entertaining an offer to leave for a more prominent or lucrative position elsewhere, and he became, in time, a respected figure within English Baptist life more broadly despite deliberately remaining in a comparatively small rural setting throughout his career.
He wrote this hymn reflecting directly and specifically on that pivotal, unplanned decision — the deep, almost involuntary emotional bond of ongoing Christian fellowship that had proven, in the very real, lived circumstances of his own personal and family life, to be genuinely stronger than the considerable pull of greater prestige, income, and professional opportunity waiting for him elsewhere, a hymn about community loyalty written by a man who had just turned down London for exactly the kind of small, unglamorous congregation the hymn itself describes and celebrates.
