Lyrics
Children of the heavenly King,
As we journey let us sing;
Sing our Savior’s worthy praise,
Glorious in His works and ways.
We are traveling home to God,
In the way the fathers trod;
They are happy now, and we
Soon their happiness shall see.
Fear not, brethren, joyful stand
On the borders of your land;
Jesus Christ, your Father’s Son,
Bids you undismayed go on.
Lord, obediently we’ll go,
Gladly leaving all below;
Only Thou our leader be,
And we still will follow Thee.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1742). Words by John Cennick.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Cennick was an English lay preacher who worked closely for a period with both John Wesley and the prominent evangelist George Whitefield, during the early years of the Methodist revival.
He eventually parted ways theologically with Wesley, over disputes concerning predestination and Calvinist doctrine. He subsequently joined and became an influential preacher within the Moravian Church, the same ecumenically minded Protestant tradition already discussed elsewhere in this collection in connection with ‘Come, Christians, Join to Sing’.
He wrote this hymn’s text in 1742, drawing on the frequently recurring biblical image of the Christian life as an ongoing journey or pilgrimage toward a promised heavenly homeland. That theme is also found in several other hymns throughout this collection, including William Williams’s ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’.
Cennick’s own treatment of the theme places particular emphasis on the communal, shared nature of that journey. The hymn is addressed throughout to ‘children,’ plural, traveling together, rather than to a single isolated individual pilgrim.
Cennick died relatively young, at only thirty-six, from typhus contracted while actively ministering to the sick during an epidemic.
He had spent much of his short working life traveling extensively as an itinerant preacher across England, Ireland, and continental Europe, on behalf of the Moravian Church — a demanding traveling ministry not entirely unlike the ‘journey’ the hymn itself describes in more figurative, spiritual terms.
The hymn’s simple, direct language, and its central image of a community of believers traveling together rather than individually, made it especially popular within camp-meeting and revival settings in colonial and early American Protestant worship.
It was frequently sung by congregations gathered from considerable distances, specifically to travel together, in a very literal sense, to a shared outdoor worship location.
