Charles Parkin

Charles Parkin (1884–1981) was an English-born Methodist minister, missionary advocate, poet, and hymn writer whose ministry was carried out largely in the United States. Hymnological sources place his early life in England and record military service during the First World War before his move to the United States in the early 1920s. He entered the Methodist ministry in the Maine Conference and served churches in communities that included Brunswick, Farmington, Bangor, Portland, and Ocean Park.

Parkin later held broader denominational responsibilities. From 1950 to 1952 he served as superintendent of the Portland District of the Maine Conference. From 1952 to 1964 he worked on the administrative and cultivation staffs of the Methodist Board of Missions, with assignments connected with Philadelphia and New York. His writing extended beyond congregational hymnody to poems, articles, and missionary material used in Methodist religious publications.

"See the Morning Sun Ascending," dated 1953, became Parkin's best-known hymn text. It was subsequently included in Methodist hymnals and later in Voices United in Canada. Another text, "Lord, When the Way We Cannot See," was published by the Hymn Society in the 1970s. Parkin's hymns reflect the devotional and missionary setting of twentieth-century Methodism rather than the eighteenth-century Anglican context formerly assigned to him in this record.