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Dan Damon

b. 1955 Person Name: Daniel Charles Damon Scripture: Isaiah 45:3-4 Author of "I Have Called You by Your Name (Te sais...je t'ai appelé(e) par ton nom)" in More Voices Daniel Charles Damon (b. 1955) is an internationally published writer of hymn texts and tunes and is Associate Editor of Hymnody for Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, Illinois. Damon is also a jazz pianist and has played in many hotels and clubs in the San Francisco Bay area. He holds degrees from Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois (BME, 1977) and Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California (MDiv, 1987). He is an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church in the San Francisco Bay area and a life member of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. Several single-author collections of Damon's hymns have been published: Faith Will Sing (Carol Stream, 1993), The Sound of Welcome (Carol Stream, 1998), To the Thirsty World (Nashville, 2002), Fields of Mercy (Carol Stream, 2007), and Garden of Joy (Carol Stream, 2011). He collaborated with text writer Gracia Grindal in A Treasury of Faith: Lectionary Hymns Series A (Colfax. 2012). Damon's hymns have been included in several major hymnals and supplements. He has also written hymn translations from Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Shona languages, and, with Patrick Matsikenyiri, edited Njalo, A Collection of 16 Hymns in the African Tradition (Nashville, 1996). He has released three recordings of hymns, carols, and traditional songs, and a solo piano recording of jazz standards (available at www.damonstuneshop.com). Damon has presented his work at national conferences of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada and the Fellowship of United Methodists in Music and Worship Arts. He is a contributor to the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. In 2016, Damon was made a Fellow of the hymn Society, the highest honor The Hymn Society can confer. Dan Damon

David Fines

b. 1957 Scripture: Isaiah 45:3-4 Translator (French) of "I Have Called You by Your Name (Te sais...je t'ai appelé(e) par ton nom)" in More Voices

John L. Bell

b. 1949 Person Name: John L. Bell, b. 1949 Scripture: Isaiah 45:6 Composer of "MORTON" in Singing the Faith John Bell (b. 1949) was born in the Scottish town of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, intending to be a music teacher when he felt the call to the ministry. But in frustration with his classes, he did volunteer work in a deprived neighborhood in London for a time and also served for two years as an associate pastor at the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam. After graduating he worked for five years as a youth pastor for the Church of Scotland, serving a large region that included about 500 churches. He then took a similar position with the Iona Community, and with his colleague Graham Maule, began to broaden the youth ministry to focus on renewal of the church’s worship. His approach soon turned to composing songs within the identifiable traditions of hymnody that began to address concerns missing from the current Scottish hymnal: "I discovered that seldom did our hymns represent the plight of poor people to God. There was nothing that dealt with unemployment, nothing that dealt with living in a multicultural society and feeling disenfranchised. There was nothing about child abuse…,that reflected concern for the developing world, nothing that helped see ourselves as brothers and sisters to those who are suffering from poverty or persecution." [from an interview in Reformed Worship (March 1993)] That concern not only led to writing many songs, but increasingly to introducing them internationally in many conferences, while also gathering songs from around the world. He was convener for the fourth edition of the Church of Scotland’s Church Hymnary (2005), a very different collection from the previous 1973 edition. His books, The Singing Thing and The Singing Thing Too, as well as the many collections of songs and worship resources produced by John Bell—some together with other members of the Iona Community’s “Wild Goose Resource Group,” —are available in North America from GIA Publications. Emily Brink

James Relly

1722 - 1778 Scripture: Isaiah 45:5 Author of "Maker and Husband" in Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs James Relly was born about 1722 at Jeffreston, Pembrokeshire, Wales, and died in 1778. He was converted to Christianity during the Great Awakening ushered in by George Whitefield. He worked under George Whitefield as a Calvinistic Methodist preacher and missionary. However, Whitefield and Relly separated ways over Relly's seemingly universalist teaching that all humanity was elect (i.e. saved) when Christ took the punishment for all sin when he died. He also departed from both the Calvinists and Methodists by taking the doctrine of Justification further, in teaching that believers no longer sin and the Law's sole purpose is to condemn humanity and point them to Christ. He was the mentor of John Murray, the founder of the Universalist Church of America. Relly along with his brother John wrote Christian Hymns, Poems and Spiritual Songs in 1758, which John Murray had republished in America in 1776. Dianne Shapiro; from an article by Alexander Gordon in Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, vol. 48; Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography; and Disoriented. Reoriented. blog (https://disorientedtheology.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/all-shall-be-well-chapter-6-james-relly/)

Timothy Dudley-Smith

b. 1926 Scripture: Isaiah 45 Author of "The Heavens Are Singing, Are Singing and Praising" in Scripture Song Database Timothy Dudley-Smith (b. 1926) Educated at Pembroke College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge, Dudley-Smith has served the Church of England since his ordination in 1950. He has occupied a number of church positions, including parish priest in the diocese of Southwark (1953-1962), archdeacon of Norwich (1973-1981), and bishop of Thetford, Norfolk, from 1981 until his retirement in 1992. He also edited a Christian magazine, Crusade, which was founded after Billy Graham's 1955 London crusade. Dudley-Smith began writing comic verse while a student at Cambridge; he did not begin to write hymns until the 1960s. Many of his several hundred hymn texts have been collected in Lift Every Heart: Collected Hymns 1961-1983 (1984), Songs of Deliverance: Thirty-six New Hymns (1988), and A Voice of Singing (1993). The writer of Christian Literature and the Church (1963), Someone Who Beckons (1978), and Praying with the English Hymn Writers (1989), Dudley-Smith has also served on various editorial committees, including the committee that published Psalm Praise (1973). Bert Polman

Michael Morgan

b. 1948 Scripture: Isaiah 1-66 Author of "Song of the Prophets" in Lift Up Your Hearts Michael Morgan (b. 1948) is a church musician, Psalm scholar, and collector of English Bibles and Psalters from Atlanta, Georgia. After almost 40 years, he now serves as Organist Emeritus for Atlanta’s historic Central Presbyterian Church, and as Seminary Musician at Columbia Theological Seminary. He holds degrees from Florida State University and Atlanta University, and did post-graduate study with composer Richard Purvis in San Francisco. He has played recitals, worship services, and master classes across the U. S., and in England, France, Spain, Switzerland, and Germany. He is author of the Psalter for Christian Worship (1999; rev. 2010), and a regular contributor in the field of psalmody (most recently to the Reformed collections Psalms for All Seasons and Lift Up Your Hearts, and the new Presbyterian hymnal, Glory to God). Michael Morgan