Shine, Jesus, Shine

I. Origins

Graham Kendrick was born in Blisworth, Northamptonshire, England in 1950. The son of a Baptist minister, Kendrick started writing songs at age 15. He has written and recorded over 450 songs and has been described by some as the “Father of modern worship music.”[1] Kendrick began his songwriting career in connection with youth evangelism groups, including Youth with a Mission (YWAM), Spring Harvest, and Youth for Christ, and he released his first album in 1971. Now, much of his music is recognized for “occupying an area of intersection between traditional hymnody and modern worship songs.”[2]

In his book Behind the Songs, co-written with Clive Prince, Kendrick explained the origins of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” It was inspired by a study of the holiness of God, who “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16). When Kendrick was first inspired, he wrote the three verses and played the hymn for friends at his church, Ichthus Christian Fellowship. He put the hymn away for a several months, and when he came back to it, he realized it needed a chorus.

The phrase “shine, Jesus, shine” came to mind. I think it was one of the quickest things I’ve ever written! Within 20 minutes or half an hour I’d written the chorus, and the whole thing just needed a little bit of editing and tidying up here and there. The chorus fell into place surprisingly naturally. But even then it took a while to mature. I’d written the verses at a different pace. So the tempo of verse and chorus seemed to pull against one another. It was only through use that it actually began to settle down. As I worked on it with my band, an arrangement and a way of doing it took shape. Then it started to feel like a complete song.[3] 

What was once a three-verse hymn was now a finished congregational song. It was received and sung with great enthusiasm at Spring Harvest, an annual evangelical conference in Great Britain, in 1987.

Looking back, Kendrick remarked how the hymn captured a longing for revival. “I think ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ caught a moment when people were beginning to believe once again that an impact could be made on a whole nation.”[4] This hope captivated the church in Great Britain, as well as nations all over the world. “Shine, Jesus, Shine” also became the iconic song for the March for Jesus movement,[5] which Kendrick co-founded.[6]

II. Publication

“Shine, Jesus, Shine” was published for the first time in the annual Spring Harvest songbook Where Truth and Justice Meet: Spring Harvest 1987. It was recorded live at the same event for the album accompanying the songbook.

“Shine, Jesus, Shine” was adopted into hymnals starting in 1990, with The Worshiping Church, then the following year it appeared in Baptist Praise and Worship in the United Kingdom, and The Baptist Hymnal in the United States. The latter printing is notable for being the first departure from the original scoring—this time arranged by Tom Fettke—especially in the way the chorus is set homophonically in four, sometimes five parts, rather than the original three-part treble harmony throughout the refrain. It also corrects the final note of the verses to be 5 rather than 2.

The most hymn-like presentation to date was given in Praise for the Lord, Expanded Ed. (1997). Other notable hymnals where the hymn can be found are Sing Glory! (1999), Baptist Hymnal (2008), Celebrating Grace (2010), Glory to God (2013), and Ancient & Modern (2013). Kendrick’s tune is called LORD, THE LIGHT OF YOUR LOVE or SHINE, JESUS, SHINE.

III. Discography and Videography

After the live recording from 1987, Kendrick went on to record the hymn in 1988 as the title track of his Shine, Jesus, Shine album. The congregation sings unison on the verses and harmony on the refrain in this recording. The instructions “Majestic and steady” in the original Spring Harvest sheet music were captured in this early recording by the presence of trumpets and woodwinds, plus the steady, moderately fast tempo of 115 bpm. The drums and rhythm section alternate between a half-time feel in the verses and full-time groove in the refrain.

Kendrick recorded the hymn again in 1989 on the album Amazing Love (Integrity Music) and in 2017 on the album Shine (Make Way Music). At least one journalist considers the recording from his 2010 album The Very Best of Graham Kendrick: Knowing You Jesus (Integrity Music), produced by American Nathan Nockels, as “the definite modern recording” of the song.[7] This arrangement includes a completely different introduction and turnaround starting out with a rocking piano figure which is then joined by the band, complete with a 3+3+2 push groove and reverb-heavy electric guitar lines, a-la Coldplay. 

This song was part of the career retrospective album The New Hymn Makers: Graham Kendrick (Meekness and Majesty), as recorded by Paul Leddington Wright and St. Michael’s Singers. The album includes a biographical sketch and commentary on all the songs.

Known video recordings of Kendrick performing the song are more difficult to enumerate. He was recorded performing the song at the 40th Greenbelt Festival in 2013, held at the Cheltenham Racecourse, Gloucestershire, England, and he was recorded on 24 May 2014 in Budapest at the Papp László Sportaréna, backed by the Magyar Continental Singers, a performing group based in Miskolc, Hungary. He recorded two informal videos for YouTube in 2020, shown below, and another described as a Lockdown Session with Martin Smith, posted 14 March 2023. He also recorded a brief testimonial video dated 23 April 2023.

The oldest publicly accessible video of the song being performed congregationally is from a televised program called Songs of Praise, broadcast from Kilmarnock Grand Hall, Scotland, dated 23 February 1992.

IV. Poetic Analysis

This song arguably occupies a space on the boundary between a modern praise chorus and a hymn. The chorus is sometimes published on its own. According to Scotty Gray, a hymn must be a “well-written poetic statement in strophic form.”[8] The song is thoroughly strophic, with three stanzas written in a consistent meter of 9.9.10.10.6. Hymnals often label the text as irregular, perhaps because it is a unique meter, but “irregular” in hymnody refers to unequal syllables per stanza, which does not apply here. The word “radiance” in stanza two, which is usually scored as a two-syllable word and can be performed that way, is presented in dictionaries officially as a three-syllable word. This song is also unique because the six-syllable line serves as a sort of pre-chorus, rather than a traditional final line of a stanza. Nonetheless, the song is technically strophic and can be set homophonically, like a hymn.

Additionally, Kendrick writes with vivid poetry in this hymn, including antithesis, contrasting “darkness” with “shining,” and “shadows” with “radiance.” There is also a plethora of alliteration. For example, there are three “l” sounds in the opening line. In lines five and six of the chorus, there are three “f” sounds in succession with “Flow, river, flow, flood the nations.” Then lines seven and eight contain alliteration with the “l” sounds again with “Lord, and let there be light.” Kendrick also employs epizeuxis, or the immediate repetition of a word or phrase by concluding each stanza with “shine on me, shine on me.” The statements “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” “Blaze, spirit, blaze,” and “Flow, river, flow” are all a form of repetition called epanadiplosis, which contributes to a feeling of earnestness.

The rhyme scheme of the stanzas is a consistent aabbc, even though there are few true rhymes in the hymn. In the first stanza, the final word of each line is repeated as the final word of the next line, which is an epistrophe, not really a rhyme. There is a perfect rhyme in stanza three, with “glory” and “story.” For the majority of the hymn, Kendrick relies on assonance to provide a sense of rhyme. For example, in line three of stanza one, the words “light” and “shine,” provide an inner assonance rhyme. In the chorus, the last word of line one, “shine,” rhymes using assonance with “fire,” which is the last word of line four. Then there is a subtle yet effective succession of three “or” sounds in the penultimate line of the chorus with “Send forth your word, Lord.”

V. Theological & Liturgical Analysis

The text is filled with biblical allusions and themes. The first stanza draws significantly from the gospel of John. The second line alludes to John 1:5, which states, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Jesus calls himself the “Light of the World,” (John 8:12), and Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The refrain is a first-person plural (“set our hearts”) Trinitarian prayer. The Son is addressed in the first line, while the second line voices the singers’ prayer for Jesus to fill the land with the Father’s glory (see John 7:19). Then, the third line addresses the Spirit: “Blaze, Spirit, blaze, set our hearts on fire,” alluding to Matthew 3:11 which affirms that Jesus came to “baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Additionally, this lyric reminds singers of the two disciples’ experience with Christ on the road to Emmaus: “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” (Luke 24:32).

The second half of the chorus hearkens to Jesus foretelling how he will indwell believers through the Holy Spirit like “rivers of living water” (John 7:38). The second line then refers to Zecheriah 12:10, which says, “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn” (emphasis added). Although Zecheriah’s prophecy refers to the nation of Israel, the unfolding canon of Scripture reveals God’s plan to save all nations. This chorus is thus thoroughly biblical, including a prayer for “this land” and for all “the nations.” This also adds to its appeal as a prayer applicable to churches across the globe. Finally, Kendrick masterfully connects Genesis 1:3 (“Let there be light”), Psalm 43:3 (“Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me”), and 2 Corinthians 4:6 (“For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”), in the two final lines of the chorus.

As Kendrick stated, he was inspired to write a song about the holy God “who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). The second stanza focuses on coming out of the shadows and entering the “marvelous light,” (1 Pet. 2:9) by the blood of Jesus (Heb. 10:19). The last two lines of stanza two reflect the psalmist’s prayer in Psalm 139:23, “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts!” Stanza three follows much of the same logic as the third chapter of 2 Corinthians. Second Corinthians 3:18 states, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

Horton Davies complimented Kendrick’s hymns as being “marked by Biblical fidelity and vivid lyrics.”[9] This is a compliment Kendrick himself would be pleased to receive. In 2018, he remarked on the need for songs with deep content, like classic hymns, saying,  

We need lots of different kinds of songs. But I think if there’s an area where we need more of a certain kind it is that area of content, strong content. With a good hymn you look at it and you think “This is worth memorizing. This is so true and so well expressed that you could set it as a task in your Bible class.” You could say, “Memorise this and this will help you understand an aspect of God.” I'd love to see much more of that.[10]

Liturgically, this hymn can be used in many places in a worship service. It can be used as an opening hymn of praise, a hymn of illumination before the message (“Send forth your word”), or as a commissioning hymn as a closing prayer before the church goes out to be lights in the world. It can be used during many seasons of the liturgical year. The Presbyterian Glory to God hymnal suggests using it on Transfiguration Day, the Sunday immediately before Lent, because of its many references to Jesus’s glory and brilliance.[11] 

VI. Musical Analysis

Written in common time at a moderate tempo, “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” is usually sung around 110 beats per minute. Many hymnals have arranged it in the key of A or A♭, and often hymnals will display the guitar chords above the grand staff. The first four bars contain a pedal point with I, IV, and V chords: I–IV/I–I–V/I. After two progressions of IV–V/IV–iii–vi, the most adventurous harmonic portion of the hymn is the inclusion of the ♭VII (G Major in the key of A) moving to the Vsus and V right before the refrain, or chorus. This signature harmonic progression sets apart the phrase “Shine on me, shine on me,” which also serves as a pre-chorus, or on-ramp, to the chorus.

The chorus contains two eight-bar phrases, with the first six bars each being identical musically. In the first ending, the last two bars contain the ♭VII–Vsus progression once again. In the second ending, the hymn ends in a more typical ii–V7–I perfect cadence.

The melody is in an octave and a third in range and lifts to the chorus. The high points of the melody occur on the words “Shine,” “blaze,” “set,” “Flow,” “send,” and “Lord.” The rhythms are fairly simple with a gentle syncopation in the first and fourth measures of the chorus.

The moderately fast tempo used for “Shine, Jesus, Shine” made this an ideal hymn for evangelistic rallies and for the March for Jesus marches. The pre-chorus section and the syncopation of the chorus are modern elements, yet it has been sung and enjoyed in both traditional and contemporary services.

VII. Legacy

“Shine, Jesus, Shine,” was listed as one of the top ten hymns in BBC’s Songs of Praise list.[12] It has been translated into numerous languages and consistently is ranked in the Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) top 100 in the U.S. and U.K. It is one of three Graham Kendrick songs still in the CCLI Top 100 of the U.K. as of December 2022, the others being “Knowing You” and “The Servant King.”

In 2006. Kendrick was asked whether he thought "Shine, Jesus, Shine" was going to achieve the popularity it has. He responded, "The honest answer to this is no, as at the time most people were writing short songs or choruses and this is quite substantial like a hymn. so I didn’t think it would be picked up as quick! The song was used and there seemed to be something special about it, but over the years it has developed its own identity."[13] It has now impacted worshipers for over three decades in both traditional hymn-singing and contemporary praise and worship style churches.

by JAMES CHEESMAN
for Hymnology Archive
16 December 2024

Footnotes:

1. Tony Cummings, “Graham Kendrick: Modern Worship Maestro Speaking to the next Generation,” Cross Rhythms (8 June 2018): https://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/music/Graham_Kendrick_Modern_worship_maestro_speaking_to_the_next_generation_/62899/p1/

2. Nancy Jiwon Cho, “Graham Kendrick,” The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: http://hymnology.hymnsam.co.uk/g/graham-kendrick

3. Graham Kendrick, Behind the Songs, First Edition (High Town Green, Suffolk, UK: Kevin Mayhew, 2001).

4. Lindsay Terry, The Sacrifice of Praise: Stories behind the Greatest Praise and Worship Songs of All Time, Songs 4 Worship (Eastborne, East Sussex, UK: Integrity Publishers, 2002), 102–3.

5. J. Gertrud Tönsing, Cas J. Wepener, and Cas Vos, “The ‘Cognitive’ and the ‘Emotive’ Component in Christian Songs: Tracing the Shifts in Traditional and Contemporary Songs,” Verbum et Ecclesia vol. 36, no. 1 (20 May 2015), 11.

6. Graham Kendrick, Public Praise: Celebrating Jesus on the Streets of the World (Altamonte Springs, FL: Charisma House, 1996).

7. Tony Cummings, “Graham Kendrick—Shine Jesus Shine: Classic Songs of Christian Music History,” Cross Rhythms (6 April 2012), https://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/music/Graham_Kendrick__Shine_Jesus_Shine_Classic_songs_of_Christian_music_history/48283/p1/

8. Scotty Wayne Gray, Hermeneutics of Hymnody: A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach to Understanding Hymns (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc, 2015), p. 2.

9. Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Book 3: The Ecumenical Century, 1900 to the Present (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 241.

10. Cummings, “Graham Kendrick” (2018).

11. Glory to God (Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), no. 192.

12. Coventry St. Michael’s Singers, The New Hymn Makers: Graham Kendrick Meekness and Majesty (East Sussex: Kingsway Music, 1996), liner notes, p. 5.

13. Cummings, “Graham Kendrick—Shine Jesus Shine” (2012).

Additional Resources:

Erik Routley and Paul A. Richardson, Panorama of Christian Hymnody, 2nd ed. (Chicago: GIA, 2005), pp. 475–477.

Christopher M. Idle, Exploring Praise!, vol. 1 (Darlington, UK: Praise Trust, 2006), no. 533.

Emily R. Brink, “When in Our Music God Is Glorified: Classic Contemporary Protestant Hymnody,” The Choral Journal, vol. 53, no. 9 (1 April 2013), pp. 8–26.

C. Michael Hawn, “Shine, Jesus, Shine,’” United Methodist Discipleship Ministries, History of Hymns (21 June 2013): https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-shine-jesus-shine.

Lester Ruth and Swee Hong Lim, Lovin’ on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship (Abingdon Press, 2017), pp. 74–75.

Greg Scheer, “Contemporary Praise and Worship Music,” Hymns and Hymnody: Historical and Theological Introductions, Vol. 3, ed. Mark A. Lamport, Benjamin K. Forrest, and Vernon M. Whaley (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019), pp. 283–99.

Graham Kendrick, [Testimonial response to “Shine, Jesus, Shine”], YouTube (23 Apr. 2023): YouTube