Frederick Pratt Green

Frederick Pratt Green, usually known as Fred Pratt Green, was born at Roby near Liverpool, England, on September 2, 1903. After working in his father’s leather business, he trained for ministry at Didsbury Theological College and was ordained in 1928. He served Methodist circuits in northern and southern England until retiring in 1969. Long before becoming a prolific hymn writer, Green wrote poetry and plays; the clarity, compression, and social concern of that earlier work helped shape his mature hymnody.

Green’s sustained hymn writing began late in his active ministry and flourished after retirement in Norwich. He produced more than 300 hymns and songs and became a leading voice in the British hymn-writing renewal sometimes called the hymnic explosion. His texts addressed worship, Christian discipleship, the church’s public responsibility, music, doubt, justice, and the modern world in direct contemporary language. This 1970 harvest hymn arose from John Wilson’s request for a new text to fit Francis Jackson’s EAST ACKLAM. Other widely known Green texts include When in Our Music God Is Glorified and The Church of Christ, in Every Age.

Emory University awarded Green an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1982, and he was appointed MBE in 1995 for services to hymnody. In 1984 he founded the Pratt Green Trust, directing royalty income toward the support of hymnody and church music. He died in Norwich on October 22, 2000.