297. Lord, I’m Coming Home

The Story Behind the Hymn

William J. Kirkpatrick wrote "Lord, I'm Coming Home" in 1892 at a camp meeting in Rawlinsville, Pennsylvania, under circumstances that gave the hymn an immediate, personal purpose. Kirkpatrick had a young soloist working with him at the meeting who was not yet a believer, and Kirkpatrick, praying specifically for that young man's conversion, found the words of this hymn coming to him and wrote them down quickly.

That same night, the soloist sang the finished hymn — and, according to the account passed down with the song, was converted through singing his own words back to the congregation. Kirkpatrick published the hymn later that year in Winning Songs, issued in Philadelphia.

Kirkpatrick had come to music relatively late in life: trained originally as a carpenter, he worked in the furniture business for sixteen years before leaving that trade behind in 1878 to devote himself entirely to church music, eventually serving as music director at Grace Methodist Church in Philadelphia and composing tunes for several of Fanny Crosby's texts.

The hymn casts its singer directly as the prodigal son of Luke 15, returning home after wasting his years in a far country — each of its six verses adding a new admission of failure or need, but each one closing on the same resolved decision: Lord, I'm coming home.