Elisha Albright Hoffman

Elisha Albright Hoffman (1839–1929) was an American minister, gospel-song writer, composer, editor, and publisher whose work helped shape evangelical congregational song in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania, he grew up in a German-American Evangelical Association household; his father, Francis A. Hoffman, was a long-serving minister. Family worship and church singing formed his earliest musical education. Hoffman later studied at Union Seminary in New Berlin, Pennsylvania, and spent about eleven years working with the Evangelical Association’s publishing interests in Cleveland, Ohio.

His ministry crossed several Protestant settings. Hymnological sources record service in Ohio congregations and missions, including Congregational work, followed by a long pastorate at First Presbyterian Church in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and later ministry in Illinois. Alongside preaching and pastoral care, Hoffman edited more than fifty songbooks and wrote or composed more than two thousand gospel songs. He also became associated with the newly established Hope Publishing Company and served for years as one of its important music editors.

Representative works include “Are You Washed in the Blood?”, “I Must Tell Jesus,” “Is Your All on the Altar?”, and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” for which Anthony J. Showalter supplied the refrain and Hoffman wrote the stanzas. Hoffman’s songs typically use direct language, regular meter, memorable refrains, and practical devotional themes such as conversion, cleansing, assurance, prayer, and consecration. He died in Chicago on November 25, 1929. His repertory remained prominent in Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Holiness, African American, evangelical, and gospel-song traditions long after his death.