193. I Surrender All

The Story Behind the Hymn

Judson W. Van DeVenter, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as author of 'I Am Thine, O Lord' (hymn 57), wrote this hymn's text in 1896, drawing once again on the same experience of surrendering a secure career as an art teacher for full-time evangelistic ministry that had already shaped his earlier, similarly themed hymn.

Where 'I Am Thine, O Lord' focuses primarily on the desire for closeness and intimacy with Christ, this hymn returns more directly to the specific act of surrender itself, its repeated chorus — 'I surrender all' — functioning as a direct, first-person restatement of the exact decision Van DeVenter described making after five years of internal resistance to his sense of calling toward evangelistic work.

Winfield S. Weeden, a gospel song composer who worked closely with Van DeVenter on several hymns, composed the tune, and the resulting hymn became, alongside 'I Am Thine, O Lord,' one of the standard hymns sung specifically during the public altar calls of American revival meetings throughout the early twentieth century, its simple, endlessly repeatable three-word chorus making it especially suited to the kind of extended, repeated congregational singing common during revival invitations, when a song might be sung through many times over as individual members of a congregation came forward one by one.

Van DeVenter spent the remainder of his working life alternating between evangelistic preaching and periods of teaching at Bible institutes, and this hymn, together with 'I Am Thine, O Lord,' remains the primary basis for his ongoing reputation as a hymn writer, both songs returning repeatedly to the same central experience of surrendering personal plans that had originally redirected the whole course of his own working life.