Evangelical History

A 1947 Film Starring George Beverley Shea on the Impact of Fanny Crosby’s Hymns

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Frances Jane van Alstyne (better known to the world as Fanny Crosby) lived from 1820 to 1915. She became physically blind shortly after birth but used spiritual insight to become one of the most beloved and influential hymn writers in American evangelical history, writing the lyrics for over 8,000 hymns and gospel songs, many of them with Robert Lowry, her pastor at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Her best-known hymns include Blessed Assurance (1873) and To God Be the Glory (1875). For a religious biography of Fanny Crosby and her work, see Edith Blumhofer’s Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby (Eerdmans, 2005).

One of evangelicalism’s first film companies was C. O. Baptista Films, called in its early days the Scriptures Visualized Institute, based in Wheaton, Illinois, “a non-profit company engaged in spreading the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ by motion pictures.”

In 1947 they produced a half-hour film to honor Fanny Crosby’s work in the lives of churchgoing Protestant Christians and to serve as a form of gospel witness and renewal.

It stars George Beverly (“Bev”) Shea, who ended up living to the remarkable age of 104 (1909–2013). He was 38-years-old at the time of the filming. On January 2, 1944, he had begun singing on a hymn program carried by AM station WCFL, which ran every Sunday evening from 10:15 to 11:00 pm out of the basement of the Village Church in Western Springs, Illinois, featuring a sermonette from the church’s pastor, 25-year-old Billy Graham. Three years later, in November 1947, Shea sang at his first Billy Graham Crusade at the old Armory in Charlotte, North Carolina. George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows became the nucleus of the Graham musical team for the remainder of the 20th century.

The film (embedded below) follows the fictional character of Bill Whitney, a family man who hasn’t been to church lately where he used to sing. One Sunday morning he sends his wife and daughter off to church while he takes his son Jimmy on a golf outing. He figures the Lord doesn’t mind him enjoying the great outdoors after a long week of work. As they drive, Jimmy turns the radio dial and lands on Fanny Crosby’s “Blessed Assurance” being sung by a choir. Bill acknowledges to Jimmy that he likes the song very much. After the song is over, Bill begins humming and singing the song with the radio off.

Remembering Jimmy saying how much they’ve been missing church, Bill proposes they take a walk. (The scenes here are filmed at Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, just to the south of Wheaton.) Bill and Jimmy sing “Blessed Assurance” together as they walk. Bill then asks Jimmy if he’s ever told him much about Fanny Crosby. He explains that because her songs have meant so much to him, he’s noticed their effect on other people throughout his life. We then see a montage of ordinary people singing her hymns while they work—a carpenter, a housewife hanging laundry, a farmer driving his tractor, an African American man cleaning factory equipment, a mother with her children.

Across the lake, Bill hears a church congregation singing a Fanny Crosby song. They make their way over there and sit on the steps. Bill tells Jimmy that someday he’d like to take him to the place where Bill’s life was changed by her songs. In a few weeks he’ll be heading East and will take him there.

In the next scene, they enter Mountain Grove Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They walk by the grave of the famous circus men P. T. Barnum and Tom Thumb, and finally arrive at a humble grave, whose simple marker says “Aunt-Fanny: she hath done what she could: Fanny J. Crosby.” It turns out that Bill’s mother had been friends with Fanny and had brought Bill here when he was a boy. And it was here that Bill’s mother had brought him to the Lord.

Bill then pulls out a book that George C. Stebbins (1846-1945) had given him before he died. Stebbins wrote music to many of Crosby’s hymns and wrote this book on the great hymn writers. Bill then reads a biographical sketch of Crosby. Jimmy asks his dad to sing “Tell Me the Story of Jesus,” which he does.

Bill prays that the Lord would forgive him and enable him to be a real example to Jim. Jim follows by praying the “Sinner’s Prayer,” taking Christ as his Savior and Lord. At the conclusion, a beaming Bill asks his son, “How do you feel now, Jim?” “Swell!” is his reply, as the two spontaneously break into another rendition of “Blessed Assurance.”

The film ends with Bill standing at a pulpit inside the church, singing a solo of “Jesus Is Tenderly Calling.”

Some questions if you want to interact further with this film as an evangelical artifact:

  • What message do you think the film is trying to convey and assuming to be true about (a) evangelical piety, (b) evangelical conversion, (c) the family, (d) individualism and corporate witness, (e) church attendance and the role of the church, and (f) the past?
  • What continuity or discontinuity might there be between what the film portrays or presupposes and typical evangelical practices today?
  • How does the theology of Fanny Crosby’s songs coincide or reinforce the theology or message of this film?
  • Why do you think the male soloist used to be a feature of certain church cultures and seems virtually absent today? Does that tell us anything about the church and its culture?
  • Do you see any similarities with today’s style of evangelistic filmmaking or with filmmaking in general? (For a cultural point of reference, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life premiered for Christmas of 1946.)

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