305. Jesus Is Tenderly Calling

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Jesus Is Tenderly Calling You Home" brought together two of the most productive figures in nineteenth-century gospel hymnody: Fanny Crosby, already established as a prolific hymn writer at sixty years old, and George C. Stebbins, a musician thirty-four at the time, who had just returned from an evangelistic tour of Scotland with Dwight L. Moody. The words appeared in Gospel Hymns No. 4 in 1883, written specifically for use as an invitation hymn at evangelistic meetings.

Crosby, blind since infancy, spent much of her life in New York City visiting rescue missions in the Bowery, where she went to "tenderly call" the addicted, the homeless, and wayward young people to faith — the very posture the hymn describes. Stebbins, for his part, had watched thousands respond to gospel invitations during the Moody campaigns in Scotland and England, an experience that shaped how he approached writing music meant to accompany exactly that moment of decision.

Stebbins later admitted he had not thought much of the song when he wrote it. He said plainly that he composed the music with the aim of making it useful as an invitation hymn, but that he had no expectation it would meet with the popularity it in fact achieved, or that it would become as widely known as it did within just a few years.

The hymn's structure — four short stanzas, each ending in the same repeated word "away," answered by a refrain that simply repeats "calling today" — gives it an insistence suited to its purpose: not an argument, but a call repeated until it is heard.