Refiner’s Fire: Her Hymns Are Poetry Put to Music

For over 65 years, Christians have sung the songs of Avis B. Christiansen, who was 86 on October 11. Her texts, translated into many languages, have been set to music by many of this century’s leading hymn composers. Largely unknown to a younger generation, she lives quietly in Chicago, remembered by those who recognize her as one of God’s great gifts to twentieth-century gospel hymnody.

Avis (as in Travis) Burgeson was born in Chicago, the younger of two sisters, to parents who constantly practiced the Lord’s presence. The single greatest spiritual influence on her was her maternal grandmother. Bertha Andersen frequently recited devotional poetry to Avis, and encouraged her little granddaughter’s poetic interest. “Even as a child, I liked to make things rhyme,” says Avis.

Henry Gross, her Presbyterian pastor, was the next important influence. Her conversion, at 12, was a moment when “the light dawned so beautifully.” She also attended the Moody Tabernacle, where, under the ministry of Paul Rader she dedicated her life to Christ. After this, she says, her poems came spontaneously.

Upon high school graduation in 1915, she joined Moody, There she heard Harry Dixon Loes, a Moody Bible Institute student, and his sister, sing a song Harry had written, “All Things in Jesus I Find.” Listening, she became convinced her poetic gift was a trust from God and belonged to him. She immediately wrote “Let Go and Let God”—a favorite Rader slogan—and “That Is Far Enough for Me,” her response to Psalm 103:12. She sent them to Daniel B. Towner, head of MBI’s music department, who set them to music and published them in Tabernacle Echoes. “That was all I needed,” says Avis. “I felt, ‘This is for me.’ ” Rader held year-round meetings, Sunday through Friday, in the 5,000-seat, sawdust-floored Moody Tabernacle. “Paul Rader could inspire anybody. I even sang in the choir.” Arthur W. McKee, the conductor, encouraged her writing. Avis had met a young tenor in the choir, Ernest Christiansen, and McKee “played cupid,” often inviting the couple home after the service. On Thanksgiving Day 1917 they were married.

Ernest studied accounting, and eventually became MBI vice-president for investments. Both attended MBI Evening School, and Avis credits this training for the biblical soundness of her texts. The great men she has known and heard, from R. A. Torrey and W. H. Griffith Thomas to such men of the present as Warren Wiersbe, have also significantly influenced her writing.

In 1918, “Love Lifted Me” was popular. Hearing songleaders say it ought to have been “Christ Lifted Me,” Avis got the idea to write “Jesus Has Lifted Me.” Harry Loes sent some of her poems, including that one, to Haldor Lillenas, who set it to music. Lillenas also set “It Is Glory Just to Walk with Him.” Says Avis, “I’ve eaten those words many times when I’ve been going through the valley, but it’s still glorious.”

“Everything I’ve written,” she says, “came out of some crisis or event that has been almost disastrous [see hymn article on p. 30]. When it was over, and I could see how the Lord brought me through, I’d sit down and write it. I never was much at speaking, but I could put anything into poetry.”

In 1920 she collaborated with Loes on “Blessed Redeemer” after Loes wrote the tune and the title. He also wrote the music for “Love Found a Way” (1921) which she authored under the pseudonym, Constance B. Reid. With Lance Latham, a pianist at Moody Church (later pastor of Chicago Gospel Tabernacle), she wrote “Only Jesus” (1920) and “Blessed Calvary” (1921). She also wrote the verses for Harry Clark’s “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ” in 1920.

Many of her best-known songs were written with Wendell P. Loveless. Head of the then-new MBI broadcasting department, he asked Ernest to have Avis send him some poems. “I did, and he got writing, one after the other. I’d send one to him one day, and he’d sing it over the air the next—he’d write the music overnight.” Loveless’s first song was “Precious Hiding Place” (1928). Among their other combined efforts were “Only Glory By and By” (1929), “Trusting Thee More” (1934), and “Precious Melody.”

Also in 1937, Merrill Dunlop set “Only One Life,” and “Only a Few More Shadows,” a song expressing her belief that “all the shadows would soon be gone. Now I’ve outlived most of my family and my friends.” In 1940, she wrote “Fill All My Vision” for MBI’s Founder’s Week. She sent the text to Homer Hammontree, but did not hear the song sung until many years later after it appeared in Inter-Varsity’s Hymns.

In 1968, Donald Hustad asked Avis to write evangelical words to “Come, Come, Ye Saints;” it is one of her strongest texts. When it appeared in Hymns for the Living Church (1974), a competing hymnal publisher said to her, “You know, that new hymnal has a Mormon hymn in it.” Says Avis, “I didn’t have the heart to say anything to him about it.”

Two volumes of her poems, long out of print, were published. Her most recent project, a privately published little book, The Psalms in Verse, was completed in 1978. Just after writing the last psalm, her eyesight began to fail. Now she is unable to read even her beloved Bible. “But I’ve remembered enough in my lifetime that it’s familiar, and I hear it on the radio.”

Avis believes a hymn must “come from the heart, not the head. A lot are just words, rhyming with each other. I wouldn’t write unless I thought it was true, unless it spoke to me, and I believed it in my own heart.” She also says, “You must have deep, personal experiences to write a hymn. Otherwise, it is just ordinary, shallow. Without these, I wouldn’t have written one-tenth of what I have.” Her life has been full of them. She says further, “It must be spontaneous,” and that there must be a God-given talent.

She considers the most sensitive settings of her texts to be “Only Jesus,” and John W. Peterson’s “How Can It Be?” (1961), of which she says, “It is truly my own feeling about it all; I can’t conceive of what the Lord has done. Right after Ernest died in 1964, my mother-in-law and I were sitting listening to the radio. I heard a quartet singing that song. I had completely forgotten I had written the words. It meant so much to me. When they were about half-way through singing, it began to be familiar. I then realized it was my own words—a blessing back to me.”

In spite of many hardships, her poems reveal her faith. “They’re my life story,” she says. The evidence is in this excerpt from “Come, Come, Ye Saints”:

Though hard to you life’s journey may appear,

Grace shall be as your day.

God’s hand of love shall be your guide,

And all your need He will provide.

RICHARD D. DINWIDDIE¹