Missional Christmas Carols - part 1

Millennial Christ-followers desiring a faith with street credibility will find common cause with many hymn writers of 160 years ago. O Holy Night was originally a French carol of 1847 and brought into the American song book by a Unitarian minister in 1855.

The third verse, tracking closely with the French original reads,

"Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name..."

Here the French carol feeds the emergence of the American abolitionist movement, itself an outgrowth of the Second Great Awakening. A powerful rediscovery of God leads inescapably to pracical matters of justice, not just in the life of the church, but in the economic sector as well.

Abraham Kuyper, Dutch theologian a few years later would declare, "No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'"