341. Send the Fire

The Story Behind the Hymn

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, wrote "Send the Fire" in 1894 and first published it in The War Cry, the Salvation Army's own periodical, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his own conversion. Booth had begun as an apprentice pawnbroker in Nottingham before his conversion to Methodism, and after resigning from the Methodist New Connexion ministry in 1861, he began open-air preaching in London's East End — work that grew, by 1865, into the organization that became the Salvation Army.

The hymn draws its central image from two Old Testament and New Testament episodes of fire descending in answer to prayer: the prophet Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18, where fire from heaven consumed the altar as proof of God's power, and the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2, where tongues of fire marked the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the early church. Booth's repeated plea — "send the fire" — asks for both at once: the dramatic, undeniable kind of divine visitation Elijah witnessed, and the empowering, church-founding kind the apostles received.

Each of the hymn's four stanzas repeats the same three-word refrain three times per verse, an insistence built directly into the text's structure rather than added afterward — the hymn does not build gradually toward its request but states it immediately and keeps stating it, verse after verse, without variation.

Written explicitly for the Salvation Army's own tradition of urgent, public, revivalist worship, "Send the Fire" has remained one of the movement's signature hymns, its insistent repetition suited to exactly the kind of open-air, high-energy gatherings Booth spent his life organizing.