Alfred Henry Ackley

Alfred Henry Ackley was an American Presbyterian minister, evangelist, editor, hymn writer, and musician born at Spring Hill, Pennsylvania, on January 21, 1887. He grew up in a strongly musical family: his father, Stanley Frank Ackley, was a minister and music teacher, and his much older brother Bentley DeForest Ackley later became pianist and secretary for the Billy Sunday–Homer Rodeheaver evangelistic campaigns. Alfred received early musical instruction from his father, studied music in New York, and continued his training at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where hymnological biographies particularly note his work as a cellist.

Sources identify his theological school as Westminster Theological Seminary in Westminster, Maryland; this was an earlier institution and should not be confused with the Westminster Theological Seminary founded in Philadelphia in 1929. Ackley was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1914 and served congregations in Pennsylvania and California, including pastoral work in Wilkes-Barre, Elmhurst, and Escondido. He also worked in evangelistic ministry and later edited or contributed to gospel songbooks associated with the Rodeheaver publishing enterprise.

Ackley is credited with writing or composing roughly 1,500 sacred and secular songs. His 1933 resurrection hymn became his best-known text. Its origin is linked by the near-contemporary account of George W. Sanville to an evangelistic conversation that pressed Ackley to articulate why Christian faith confesses a living Christ rather than merely honoring a figure of the past.