Article

Change

Grace

Music

14 March 2023

6 min read

Aside from Amazing Grace

Helping win a historic victory for humanity was an influencer with a shocking back story. Biographer Jonathan Aitken discovers there’s more to John Newton than penning Amazing Grace.

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan is a former politician, and now a prison chaplain.

John Newton is back in the news. 250 years ago in January 1773 he wrote the words of what has become the most recorded, performed and loved hymn of all time – Amazing Grace.

As a popular song it is right up there competing with Happy Birthday and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. And the spiritual power of its lyrics shines out at an estimated ten million annual weddings, funerals, celebrations and services across the world.

As a biographer of John Newton I have paradoxical feelings about Amazing Grace. I love the hymn as much as anyone particularly when it brings tears in the prison chapels where I serve as a chaplain.

Yet for historical reasons I am disappointed on this great man’s behalf that he is largely remembered only for this hymn.

For there is much more to John Newton than Amazing Grace.

For starters he was so close a mentor to William Wilberforce, and so important a witness as an ex-slave ship captain to the horrors of the evil trade, that without Newton the Abolition of Slavery Act 1807 would never have won the necessary Parliamentary votes to pass into law.

If this great historical achievement was not enough Newton’s colourful back story was the stuff of which best sellers and movies came to be made.

In his wild youth Newton was a serial rebel. He ran away from home, church, school and military service. He was jailed and publicly flogged for desertion from the Royal Navy.

After being thrown out of the Navy he ended up working as a slave trader in West Africa.

There the hard drinking, riotous and ruthless young Newton indulged in every imaginable vice. His business as a brutal kidnapper of natives, whom he sold to slave ships, made him a fortune.

Then came a dramatic change, Newton got religion. This happened on the 9th of March 1748. Newton was on board a ship, The Greyhound, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly a massive storm wave hit the ship and almost broke it apart. Newton was roused from sleep by a cry of “all hands on deck, the ship is sinking.”

The storm of gale force winds which ripped a huge hole in The Greyhound lasted for the next seven days. For most of that time Newton, a strong young seaman, took the helm. He was certain that he and everyone else on board would be drowned. In desperation he remembered some of the prayers he had learned from his mother, in his childhood, and started to pray for God to save his life.

So when, against all the odds, The Greyhound did not sink and limped into the Port of Londonderry, Newton decided that perhaps there might be a God and began going to church.

Although Newton did start praying and reading his Bible, he did not stop slave trading. Promoted to being a slave ship Captain he made five further voyages to West Africa. On his ships he indulged in many of the vicious cruelties that characterised the slave trade.

Newton kept diaries of these horrors which included chaining, shackling, flogging, thumb screwing and throwing overboard the slaves during their long and dangerous voyage from the West Coast of Africa to the East Coast of America.

Yet gradually, his self-educating Bible study and some teaching from Christian friends caused Newton to see the light. He gave up the slave trade. He got a good shore job in his home port of Liverpool, a city which was being targeted by Methodist preachers such as Wesley and Whitefield.

Newton, by now a soul on fire, became a preacher in dissenter chapels in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

After some years he applied for ordination in the Church of England. But he was turned down for ordination seven times in six years by various Bishops and Archbishops.

These rejections had nothing to do with Newton’s sinful past career as a slave ship Captain. For in the 18th Century, the Church of England was not merely tolerant of the slave trade. It reaped many benefits from its large investments in it and the large donations it received from it. All documented in a recent Lambeth Palace Library exhibition.

Astonishingly the reason why Newton was turned down for ordination was because he was thought to have ‘too much enthusiasm’.

This was a coded phrase meaning that he was felt to be too close to the Methodists whose evangelical preaching and hymn singing was disapproved of by the established church hierarchy.

But with the help of an admiring patron, the Earl of Dartmouth, Newton was ordained as a Church of England priest and appointed to a Dartmouth living at Olney church in Buckinghamshire.

As a Parish Priest Newton was a huge success. He trebled the size of his congregation to over 600 worshippers. As a result, the church had to build a gallery to accommodate them.

But his biggest break through was that Newton started writing articles, books and hymns. These bought him fame and a move to the strategically important church of St. Mary Woolnoth in the heart of the City of London.

During his 28 years of service there, Newton continued to be a best-selling author, a campaigner for social reforms and a renowned preacher. Influential people flocked to hear his sermons including an unknown young MP called William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce first approached Newton to ask him to resolve what the young MP called “my anguish of soul”. He said he wanted to give up being a Member of Parliament in order to become a Minister of Religion.

Newton persuaded Wilberforce that it would be better for him to serve God by staying in Parliament. After taking that wise advice, Wilberforce developed a close friendship and mentoring relationship with Newton.

During the next 15 years there were periods when Wilberforce became depressed and wanted to give up his abolitionist campaign. It was Newton who persuaded him to keep going.

More importantly Newton became Wilberforce’s most vital witness about the horrors of the slave trade in front of a Select Committee in the House of Commons and in front of William Pitt and his Cabinet.

Newton’s authentic eye witness accounts of the suffering of the Africans on board slave ships were devastating.

His evidence and his best-selling pamphlet Thoughts on the African Slave Trade were game changers. Gradually the tide of public and parliamentary opinion turned against the slave trade. Eventually in 1807 when 82 year old Newton was still the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, William Wilberforce’s Abolition of Slavery Bill was voted into law by the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16.

It was an historic victory for humanity. And a political triumph for William Wilberforce. But that victory and that triumph would never have been achieved without John Newton’s mentoring, supporting and his giving of vital evidence to Wilberforce’s campaign.

In his last years John Newton was venerated as an iconic church leader, bestselling author, and abolitionist reformer.

Surprisingly, he was not well known in his lifetime for Amazing Grace which only became famous when American churches took it up and made it an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. So Newton was regarded as a great man long before he was recognised as a great hymn writer.

Fame was of little interest to John Newton. He remained endearingly humble. When he was on his deathbed the 18th century equivalent of a tabloid reporter burst into his bedroom and asked:

“Any last words Mr Newton?”

He replied:

“Sir I know only two things. That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour!”

What an exit line! What a life!

Article

Change

Community

Hospitality

10 March 2025

6 min read

“We’re amongst everybody.” The novel communities serving London

The city's intentional communities live in, and love, particular places.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man stands in a relaxed way on the doorstep of a brick building.

Mark Bishop at HOP East.

Mark Bishop has an unusual view from his home in Stepney, east London, at Friday lunchtimes. Because the nearby Stepney Shahjalal mosque has insufficient space for worshippers at its busiest weekly service, neighbouring Shandy Park turns into an impromptu outdoor worship space. For the main Friday service, more than 500 men alternate between standing and kneeling in prayer in the open air.

The scene has seized the attention of Bishop, an ordained Church of England priest, because his home is the House of Prayer for East London (HOP East), a community that he and Carrie, his wife, founded in 2023. From its base in Faith House, built as a 19th century mission outpost on the edge of Shandy Park, it is seeking to bring the power of Christian prayer to the same area. Bishop and Carrie live at HOP East with their children and another couple.

The community is one of multiple Christian “intentional communities” worldwide engaged in concerted efforts to develop new forms of monastic or communal living to minister to an increasingly secular world. The trend has had particular attention in the UK because of the decision of Elizabeth Oldfield, a Christian writer and podcaster, and her husband to live in an intentional community with another couple. In Germany, Johannes Hartl 20 years ago in Augsburg founded a community called the House of Prayer where there is always at least one community member praying, 24 hours a day.

HOP East was partly inspired by Hartl’s community. The Stepney community shares with many other Christian intentional communities both a strong sense of ministering to a particular place and a focus on the importance of prayer. As well as the residents, there are a growing number of non-resident members who regularly come to Faith House for prayer, worship and to eat together.

The open-air prayer highlights both the contrast between HOP East and its many non-Christian neighbours and their shared commitment to prayer, according to Bishop.

“We’re amongst everybody, to be good Christian neighbours,” he says.

Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a lecturer in Cardiff Metropolitan University’s school of education and social policy who has a research interest in intentional communities, says Christians have a particular affinity for communal living.

Stevens-Wood points out that sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter – better known for her later management writing – concluded after researching intentional communities that Christianity’s mixture of shared commitment and rituals was highly compatible with communal living.

“It enables communities to be more stable and endure longer periods of time,” Stevens-Wood says.

New communities such as HOP East coexist with the survivors of previous waves of idealism about communal living. In the UK, they include Northern Ireland’s Corrymeela Community, which seeks to heal the polarisation caused by the political conflict in the region. Bishop himself was born in the Lee Abbey community in Devon, a Christian community linked to Anglicanism founded after the second world war.

The London outpost of Lee Abbey runs a hall of residence for international students in Kensington, on the other side of London from HOP East.

“They definitely come in waves,” Stevens-Wood says of intentional communities.

HOP East’s focus on prayer is manifested in multiple ways, according to Bishop. They include a commitment for members to say the Lord’s Prayer daily at noon, wherever they are, and to engage in “prayer-walking” – praying in the streets as they walk along them.

“To our Muslim neighbours, it really helps to be more serious about how we pray, because they’re really serious about prayer,” Bishop says. “This is very much a neighbourhood where prayer is strong.”

He and Carrie had long felt a calling to pray for London and East London in particular before setting up HOP East, he says.

“We began, out of lots of different activity, to ask a question: ‘What would it look like to form a community as an expression of church?’” Bishop recalls. “We’re a new monastic expression. We’re living out, working out a rule of life and other things that might define what a new monastic community is.”

Members of the community range in age from school-age children to older, retired people, Bishop says. He describes the community as “both gathered and scattered”, with only a few of the community members living in Faith House.

But he says living in a relatively small number of East End neighbourhoods – including Limehouse, Mile End and Shadwell - unites them.

“Everybody else has a level of proximity to us,” Bishop says.

The points of contact between apparently contrasting communities are clear visiting the imposing Kensington townhouses owned by Lee Abbey London.

Sue Cady, Lee Abbey London’s chaplain and deputy director, says the site is home to 150 international students and around 25 team members who form the community on the site.

The students living at Lee Abbey London are mostly not Christians while the team members who serve them make up the community. Team members consist of a small core of longer-term workers like Cady and one-year volunteers who are single and share rooms. While Cady would like to welcome more British volunteers for the one-year positions, nearly all at present come from overseas on charity worker visas.

Cady shares with Bishop the sense that a place where Christians live and pray together is special. Lee Abbey London expresses that partly by training up a new generation of Christian leaders, she says.

“The young Christians are being grown and developed and then after their year with us they’re going all over the world as stronger Christians, grown in discipleship and leadership,” Cady says.

She is also clear that the life of the community affects the students.

“Our mission field is the international students, who are really open about UK life and asking us questions about our faith and the difference our faith makes to us,” she says. “They notice something very different about us that’s peaceful and kind.”

At the heart of both communities, however, is a sense that prayer is a vital, sustaining, communal activity.

For Cady, that manifests itself in Lee Abbey London’s distinctive atmosphere compared with other halls of residence.

“People comment on the sense of God’s peace and God’s presence here, which I think is due to the fact that our team worship and pray daily for the residents that live here, and that the majority of our team are on gap years themselves,” she says.

At HOP East, meanwhile, prayer is partly a manifestation of the members’ practical desire to help impoverished and disadvantaged people in their area. Community members pray for the area’s many refugees and those working with them, for victims of modern slavery and for many other social causes.

However, the pledges to engage in prayer-walking and saying the Lord’s Prayer daily reflect Bishop’s conviction that prayer is a sustaining activity regardless of any practical need. Bishop insists prayer is a vital part of relating to God, of mission and ensuring people have opportunities to encounter the love of Christ.

“We always try to remind ourselves… that prayer is always worth it, in and of itself,” he says. “We’re really aware of a hunger in this cultural moment we find ourselves in for healthy spiritual practice.”

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