Adelaide Addison Pollard

Adelaide Addison Pollard (1862–1934) was an American hymn writer, Bible teacher, and religious worker. Born Sarah Addison Pollard in Bloomfield, Iowa, she later adopted the name Adelaide. She was brought up Presbyterian, but her adult religious life crossed several evangelical and holiness circles. She studied at the Boston School of Oratory and at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, taught in girls’ schools, and later taught at the Missionary Training School of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Nyack, New York.

Pollard’s ministry included teaching, evangelistic work, and overseas service. She spent a period in South Africa before the First World War and, after war disrupted that work, spent time in Scotland. Hymnological sources credit her with more than one hundred hymn and gospel-song texts, though many circulated under initials and not all are equally well documented. Her writings characteristically emphasize consecration, the inner life, dependence on Christ, and readiness for God’s will.

Her best-known text is “Have Thine Own Way, Lord,” but her broader significance lies in the devotional and mission-oriented hymnody she produced within the transdenominational evangelical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She died in New York City on December 20, 1934.