Amazing Grace: The True Story (2025) Movie Script
1
- It's deeply troubling
to realize that in John Newton's
career as a slave trader,
468 African women,
men and children were taken on board
his ships while he was a captain.
68 of those died on his watch.
That blood was on his hands.
He would later have to reckon with this.
- My memory is nearly gone.
And I remember two things.
That I am a great sinner
and the Christ
is a great Savior.
- I once was lost but now
am found.
Was blind but now I see.
- This song is now 250 years old.
It's the most popular English language
hymn ever written.
I'm Charles Morris with Haven Ministries.
We hear Amazing Grace
played in times of triumph
and perhaps even more common,
sung in times of great tragedy.
Remarkably, this song was picked up
by African-Americans during slavery
and in the decades of suffering
that followed emancipation,
it became one of their most cherished
gospel anthems.
This song is timeless, and it has become
an ultimate symbol of hope.
But what do we know about
its writer, John Newton?
Well, we know that Newton
was a slave trader himself,
a ship's captain.
The height of the cruel
British slave trade.
So the obvious question is,
how did God use this man
to write this song?
We're about to find out.
I recently sat down with Bruce Hindmarsh,
the foremost expert on John Newton,
who wrote the definitive book
on Amazing Grace
and the extraordinary spiritual journey
of the man behind the song,
Bruce Hindmarsh.
When you first, as a young man, went
to Oxford to work on a doctorate degree,
what got you interested in John Newton?
- I kind of just stumbled upon John Newton.
I thought, what a compelling story.
What, what an unbelievably dramatic story.
He had never been the subject
of a scholarly study.
So I thought, well, this is perfect.
This is what I want to do.
And then wrote what became my first book
for Oxford, a study of John Newton,
especially of his theology.
But now weve just had the 250 year anniversary
of the hymn Amazing Grace.
And so, 30 years later, I've returned to
all of this because I thought,
you know, there's another opportunity here
to tell this story.
And I thought I really wanted to reckon
more with his slave trading past.
And so I returned to the story.
I thought, this is a time
when we need to hear this story again,
and a whole new generation needs to hear
John Newton story.
The story behind the song Amazing Grace.
- Well, and it's a profound story too,
that has great impact on us
today, even.
- He was born in 1725,
in the tough streets of Wapping,
a neighborhood in London
a stone's throw away from the Thames,
where hundreds of merchant ships
plied their trade.
On one of those ships was his father,
who was a merchant ship captain,
and his father was consistently sailing
in the North Sea and the Mediterranean.
He's essentially
raised by a single mother.
His loving mother
who is a devout, Godly mother.
She loved him, and she read to him
the hymns of Isaac Watts.
- Right here.
- She was a devoted Christian
who trained young Newton to follow God.
- Lord, if thou hast been our dwelling place
in all generations
before the mountains were brought forth.
- This made a deep impression on John.
He would later recall these years
with great affection.
- John, come in.
- When John was just six years old.
- Don't be afraid.
- His mother became severely ill.
- My sweet boy,
listen to me.
Always remember Joshua 1:9
Be strong
Of a good courage.
Be not afraid.
neither be thou dismayed:
for the Lord Your God is with you.
Whithersoever thou goest.
Mummy loves you.
- Just days before his seventh birthday.
His mother died.
- I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand.
At the latter day upon the earth.
And though after my skin worms
destroy this body
yet in my flesh
Shall I see God, whom
I shall see for myself,
- So once John Newtons mother died,
his life took a really
serious turn.
- Life wasn't easy for him, was it?
- His father is away at sea,
and we have to imagine a little boy
all alone in the world.
His father married within two years.
He feels like his new stepmother
sort of favors the other children.
He's sent away to boarding school
in Stratford for two years.
The schoolmaster seems cruel.
Things go from bad to worse.
And his father trained him up at sea.
And he took him from age
11 to about age 17.
He took him on five voyages with him
to the Mediterranean, to the North Sea.
And he's under his father's watch.
But still,
gradually
his mother's influence is wearing off,
and he's becoming
more wild and unrestrained.
- I gradually abandoned
my Christian commitments.
I became an infidel, a free thinker,
and a libertine.
My struggles between sin and
conscience were often repeated.
Every relapse sunk me into still greater
depths of wickedness.
I soon lost all sense of religion.
- By the time he was 17,
Newton had imbibed the fashionable deism
of the third Earl of Shaftesbury,
and he had a refined, highbrow skepticism
of all things Christian.
- Good afternoon, Mrs. Catlett
My father sent me.
- He was a bit pretentious,
but even pretentious
17 year olds can come undone
when they fall in love.
- Mary, look who it is.
- Good day to you, Mr. Newton.
- Mary Catlett
at the first sight of her.
I was impressed with an affection
which never abated.
To her family,
She was known as Polly.
- You did it again.
There never was a girl so sure to win.
- It was luck.
I'm sure.
- He determined
he would make something of himself
to win Polly's hand in marriage.
- Nothing would banish
from my waking thoughts
for the next seven years.
- Fire!
- These were the tense days
before Britain and France would
be at war once more.
Young men were being forced into the Navy.
- Tell me a little bit about life
in the Navy for a young man.
It must have not been easy.
- It was not easy.
The master at arms
would have a rope to whip you with.
It was overcrowded.
Fights would break out.
The food rations might be rancid.
There's rats.
There's the smell of bilge water.
It is a tense environment.
- With French warships off the coast,
my father warned me
not to be seen in town
dressed in my usual sailor's coat attire.
What ship did you serve? You're a sailor.
Look at you. Show us your papers.
- Although it was legal,
he was essentially kidnaped.
His father intervened.
He couldn't get him out of the Navy,
but he was able to get him promoted
to midshipman,
which is a kind of junior officer.
- The only benefit was that as a midshipman,
I could inflict misery on lower ranking
sailors.
I did so frequently,
and even that pleasure
grew stale in time.
My one source of hope
was that I might see my Polly again.
- By about December.
So from March to about December, theyre
patrolling the North Sea.
Then they're back
near the mouth of the Thames.
And you get shore leave this December.
And where do you think he's going to go?
Straight to Mary Catlett.
He wants to see Polly,
and he visits and overstays.
Comes back on board the ship
and he's in trouble with the captain.
Newton's ship.
It's preparing to go
for a five year voyage.
Then the ship pulls into the harbor
at Plymouth.
He is sent to shore with some other
sailors that he's supposed to guard.
And make sure they don't desert.
But instead, all he can think about is he
can't be gone from Polly for five years.
And he's the one who deserts.
Some soldiers find him on the road.
They clap him in irons.
They bring him back to Plymouth
and put him in jail.
And then he's brought back in
shame on board the ship.
- Master at arms
Make him an example.
Now give him the first dozen.
- In time, the wounds to my
back began to heal.
But the cruel humiliation from sailors
that I had previously ordered
to cut deeper.
Yet the greatest pain of all
was Polly, sentenced to five years at sea.
I knew then that I had lost her forever.
- He's looking over the gunwales
and on the horizon line,
He sees the shoreline of England becoming
more and more faint until it disappears.
He has very dark thoughts.
He thinks of murder. Suicide.
I should kill the captain and throw myself
overboard.
It's only the hope of seeing
Polly that prevents him.
- By now, Newton is in his early 20s
and he's already suffered many losses.
He's made many, many rash decisions
and has
by now abandoned his childhood faith
altogether.
And yet, his life is about to take
an even darker turn.
Within a month, he will drop down
into the evil world of the slave trade,
and this will begin
a downward spiral of pain and suffering.
He's about to embark on a dark odyssey
that will mark his life forever.
- We were to set sail for India
the next day,
when a trader bound for the windward
coast of Africa lay near us
I begged that I might be dismissed.
The captain had no great affection
for me, and gladly agreed
to the transfer.
- So what does it mean?
He's now in the slave trade?
- Oh, Charles, the slave trade.
Do you have to think every time
somebody in England puts
a lump of sugar in their tea and stirs it,
it's the end of a long
and bloody supply chain.
Ships set out from England
with copper, iron, weapons,
and they trade along the West
African shore
for slaves.
Where do those slaves come from?
Through internal African wars,
punishment for crimes,
raiding, through hereditary slavery,
and various ways.
People are enslaved within Africa
and from deep inland
are traded to the coast.
And there are little settlements
along the coast.
Little slave factories, they call them.
They're kind of like warehouses
that would warehouse these slaves.
And then the English would trade in places
like Sierra Leone,
and they'd maybe pick up three slaves here
or five here, maybe a few more here,
and they'd trade along the coast
until they filled the belly of the ship
with these slaves.
Then they follow the trade winds
and the currents across to the Caribbean,
what they call the West Indies.
And they're at islands
like Antigua and Saint Kitts.
They deliver these slaves
into the plantation system.
So the plantation system required
a large supply of labor
for things like sugar or cotton
or tobacco or coffee.
They needed a constant supply
to keep these plantations going.
And then from the Caribbean, sugar
from American ports, tobacco
and so on, comes back to Britain
and completes
this triangular trade system from England.
Manufactured goods come to West Africa.
From West Africa.
Slaves
go to the Caribbean and the Caribbean.
Sugar and commodities
come back to England.
This long and bloody supply chain
people are just they are quite aware of
it, maybe are not entirely aware of it.
When they stir
that sugar into their tea.
- I will remember
while I was passing from
the one ship to the other,
I was rejoicing.
Not only was I free of the Navy,
I was amongst strangers.
I now might be as abandoned as I pleased
without any control.
- The Atlantic slave trade
was an enormous enterprise,
and in human trafficking.
Over the course of three
and a half centuries,
from the 16th century to the 19th century,
something like 12 million Africans
were transported across the Atlantic.
Slave ships initially it was Portuguese
and the Spanish who pioneered it.
But by the 18th century,
the British become,
the greatest European slave traders.
So between 1660 and 1807,
they transported over 3 million people.
These ships are notoriously crowded,
sometimes five, 600 people.
And it's a dangerous place
for, enslaved women as well.
There's a lot of sexual violence on board.
- On the ship. Is a man named Evans.
And Evans has begun to make his fortune
as one of these slave factories.
And he's establishing a new factory
on an island
called Plantain Island.
A small island south of Sierra Leone,
just off shore.
An ideal place
where they could collect slaves.
And the key is that Evans.
He is married to an African princess
named Pi
- He is your servant?
- No, he's a sailor.
- Newton finds himself
working for Evans and Pi.
- But I think he can be of use.
- How?
- With the business.
- I do not need your help
dealing with the white traders.
- No, of course I apologize.
- But no sooner is he on the island,
then he becomes ill.
- Youve take a turn for the worse.
- I'll be quite well in a day or so.
- No, you're too ill to trade.
Join me next time.
- Evans, he leaves and Newton is left with Pi.
And she's really kind of the one
running the show here.
- You are idle.
you lie here doing nothing,
contributing nothing,
and offering nothing.
- She doesn't care that he's ill.
He just seems lazy.
She has no use for him,
and she begins to persecute him.
- Wretched wench.
Why are you here?
- And he finds himself abused, alone,
starving, far from home.
It's nothing like
what he thought it would be.
- Hurry up Newton.
- He was trapped on Plantain Island.
At the hands of Princess Pi,
he became a slave himself,
For months and months,
this was John's daily existence.
Sickness.
Work and constant abuse from his jailers.
And through it all, he was forced to work.
Pi and other slaves would ridicule him.
He was less than a slave.
He was a servant of slaves.
One of his main jobs
was to dig holes to plant lime trees.
They're being attacked by mosquitoes
and other insects was a constant threat.
John had many days of dark thoughts.
Although he never lost
hope of seeing Holly again,
he worried that he had disgraced himself
and had become unworthy of her.
He wrote that
he was depressed
to a degree beyond common wretchedness.
Though he had written to his father
several times,
there was no hope on the horizon.
He was desperate to escape.
He would remember this
as the lowest point of his life.
- John.
Listen to me.
Always remember Joshua 1:9
Be strong,
of a good courage.
- I knew I could easily have died
alone and unloved.
Far from home.
Indeed, I should have.
- Quite unexpectedly, Newton's
father had heard
about his son's plight
and had sent rescue.
Newton escaped his servitude
after little more than a year.
Finally, he had hope
of seeing Polly again.
- Raise the sails.
Not long until England man.
Just ten more days
if these winds keep up.
We set sail, men.
- In search of distraction,
John tried reading any books
he could lay his hands on,
including The Imitation of
Christ by Thomas A Kempis
He later wrote, I carelessly took it up.
I read it with the same indifference
as if it were a romance novel.
Yet he wondered what the consequences
would be if there were a God.
Would there be mercy for him?
Still he had made his choice.
He would have to live with it.
- They encountered a
severe North Atlantic storm
in the winter of 1748.
- What's happened?
- She's just been breached.
We're taking on water.
- Go back.
I need a knife.
Newton, fetch me one from my chest.
- I have it.
- Hoist the main sail!
Keep your formation.
Arghhhh!
Heave ho!
Keep your formation
- Captain, captain!
We must change our heading.
Thats how off course it takes us
We must keep the rims above the water.
- Very well.
- If this will not do,
Lord have mercy upon us.
- The gale began to abate
and the most dangerous leaks were stopped.
And yet the most miraculous
and extraordinary part of all was
that I had prayed.
I had called out
to the God who I had mocked.
- Newton would always remember March 21st,
the day he prayed in the storm
as the anniversary of his conversion.
- Father, we pray that you will comfort John.
Help him to think about you and your loving arms.
In Jesus name,
amen.
- Indeed, the very last entry
he made in his diary as an 80 year old man
was a commemoration of this event.
He and most of the crew
had survived the storm,
but they were left with very little food
or water and a ship out of repair.
They were still in great danger,
and for almost a month
their lives hung by a thread.
As the battered ship
inched eastward toward Ireland.
- By the time the ship
at length reached Ireland,
I no longer considered myself an infidel.
I abhorred my form of profaneness.
- What happened in the storm
spiritually, he said,
this was the beginning.
Not so much of my turning to God,
but His turning to me.
He would say
in the storm his
consciousness was awakened
and he became aware there is a God
and it becomes more serious spiritually.
And there's a moment
when he's back in Ireland,
when he makes vows, he makes resolves.
I will follow Christ.
I am determined to be a Christian.
- So now he's finally found grace.
Is he going to leave the slave trade?
- For the next six years,
I would make four voyages on slave ships.
One as first mate
and three as captain.
- 13.
20. 22.
- He's turned to Christ
- 27
- but he's not left the slave trade.
He bought and imprisoned
468 African men, women and children
on board his ships of whom 68 died
on his watch while an African waters
or in the perilous Middle Passage,
and the rest
he delivered into the deadly plantation
system in the West Indies.
- I never had a scruple
upon this head at the time,
nor was such a thought
once suggested to me by any friend.
- So I think one of the things
that really surprises even shocks us
today is the fact that it was
Christian nations
which carried out this enormous
crime against humanity.
- What I did, I did ignorantly.
- We just feel the tension at this moment.
Well, surely he can see.
- Portuguese and Spanish and the French,
obviously, regard themselves as devout
Catholic nations, the English
and the Dutch, very devoutly Protestant.
And there's relatively little public
outcry about this.
- Custom, example, and interest
had blinded my eyes.
- Custom means everybody accepts it.
Example means everybody's doing it.
Interest means it's in my self-interest.
- Something that became so atrocious
in the mind of Newton in his later years.
But in the early 1750s,
he justifies it to himself
as so many of the Europeans do.
- And he realized how blind he
was at this point
that he had turned to Christ,
but somehow he still didn't see it.
It makes me wonder what is there
in my own life that I don't see.
A strange providence
landed Newton back on Plantain Island.
Newton hadnt publicly
condemned the slave trade.
Privately, he was going
through a transformation.
Whatever the sense of his past
that haunted him,
he had come to a
point of personal desperation.
- Remember to pray, John.
Always pray.
- Yes. mother.
- It was here
that he made a full surrender to
Jesus Christ.
He needed Christ to do for him
what he couldn't do in his own strength.
He needed a heart conversion.
The breakthrough came as he prayed.
- God, forgive me.
Forgive me.
- This was the moment he began to hope
and trust in a crucified Savior
who died for him,
and whose shed blood
would cover all his sins.
I have a burning question for you.
Did he ever get to marry Polly?
- He returns from this
voyage as first mate of the Brownlow.
He arrives back in England.
Arrangements have been made.
Newton has corresponded with Mary,
and it's in February 1750
that they are finally married.
Newton will always think of this
as an element of God's grace to him,
that God gave him Mary.
God gave him the good things
that he didn't deserve.
You know, poets sometimes
say that they have a muse, somebody
who inspires them.
There's a way that Polly, Mary Catlett,
was John Newton's muse all his life.
He has 6 or 7 months with his new bride
in England,
and then he's called away again.
He'll make three voyages
as captain of a slave ship,
as the Duke of Argyle.
And then it's a ship called the African.
He makes two more voyages
when he had
completed his fourth voyage on board
a slave ship, and when he was days
away from beginning his fifth,
he collapsed.
He is unconscious.
He is not moving.
He's laying on the floor.
He is barely breathing,
and they wonder if he's dead.
After about an hour, he recovers.
The physicians, check him over
and they say you're not going anywhere.
And from that moment
he left the slave trade
and he never went back.
This seizure was more than an opportunity
to turn his back on a world
that may have been troubling him.
It was a new opportunity.
He got a job in Liverpool, in
the customs office,
inspecting ships and their cargo
as they came in and out of harbor.
So he and Polly move to Liverpool
and he will be there as a lay person,
not a clergyman,
but a lay person for about nine years
working in this position
in the customs office.
- When Newton left the sea in 1754,
Liverpool was a hugely formative time for him.
He was there for nine years.
Liverpool is such a dark place.
The profits of the slave trade
had been flowing into this city.
It's full of money, it's
full of wickedness, it's full of crime.
This is a wicked city.
And it's like the light of revival,
the light of God's grace
that Newton sees shines out all the more
brightly against that darkness.
He wants to be a part of what God's doing.
He wants to be able to serve.
And it excited his desires
to see what God was doing in England.
His progress in the Christian
life was slow.
But so for many of us.
He really grasped the heart.
You know,
the Bible has to spell it out for us, that
the heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately corrupt.
And, you know, we're told
that all have sinned and all fallen
short of the glory of God.
So it's not just though one person
or the other person is worse than...
We're all fallen short of the mark.
- And he visited churches and he heard preachers,
and it was like
he couldn't take enough of it in.
- Newton really took Scripture to heart.
In 1757,
he was getting lots of suggestions
from friends that he was showing signs
that he could be
in the ministry.
- He found himself
caught up in a whole new world
of faith and action.
- He taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
Syriac, French, German, Bryom shorthand.
He was very widely read.
He read a lot of Christian writers.
- These were the heady days
of the evangelical revival, a season
when many great preachers were regularly
drawing crowds in the thousands.
Newton was eager to spend as much time
with these men as possible.
Men like George Whitfield
John continued to study,
and his growing relationship
with Whitfield and revivalist John Wesley
led to much spiritual growth.
John began meeting with churches
with a new burning desire
to be ordained as a pastor
so he could share with others
the grace he himself had received,
and in time he is ordained
in the Church of England,
and he has an opportunity to serve
in a parish in the English Midlands.
- For 16 years
I was the minister to a town parish
of about 2000 people.
- He preaches his first sermon
there in May 1764.
He's 39 years of age.
He was cheerful,
he was convivial, sociable.
He, you know, he'd wear his sailor's
jacket around the town.
He had the common touch.
He could tell stories.
He could hold people's attention.
- Doctor Jim Packer said the
three greatest evangelists
in the 18th century were Wesley,
Whitfield and Newton
and Wesley and Whitfield
were itinerant preachers.
But Newton was the pastor par excellence,
and as Packer said, he had no peer.
- Under his ministry,
there's a kind of a local revival.
They have to add a balcony to the church.
People flock to hear him.
He started every week to
write a hymn to go
along with the sermon,
along with the scripture texts.
The parish is filled with poor people,
a lot of poor lace
makers and day laborers,
and these hymns they would take away
and they could recite them
while they're doing their work.
And they could remember the scripture.
They could remember the sermon.
Hymms become a really
important part of his ministry.
So also his ministry to children.
And a lot of children come and they sing
and he teaches,
and he has a real ministry.
(children singing)
During much of the 1770s,
Newton regularly wrote a hymn
for the prayer meeting.
He writes hymns along with his friend,
the troubled poet William Cooper.
- Friday in the 1st of January.
May Thy grace keep me always waiting
until my appointed change shall come.
Amazing grace.
Sweet the sound.
- So he just wrote amazing Grace.
He was middle aged.
This must have been
a special marked moment in his life.
- You would think so, wouldn't you?
Given what we know about the hymn
Amazing Grace.
But, you know,
it's not like he wrote to all his friends
and said, I think I just wrote a hit.
This was just a
part of his weekly ministry.
He would write hymns to go along with
the sermon text that he was preaching on.
(congregation singing)
What was special about this moment.
It was January the 1st, 1773,
and he was thinking,
what should I preach on?
What should I write about?
And he thinks I'm going to write on
1 Chronicles 17, verses 16 and 17,
theologians will talk about the Davidic
covenant,
God's covenant with King David
in the Old Testament.
Newton is certainly sitting there
with his Bible open.
He's thinking about King David.
What was King David?
He was a murderous, treacherous,
adulterous man
who found forgiveness.
He later became a man
after God's own heart.
He writes hymns.
He writes psalms.
And though it came through blood
stained hands, impure, an impure person.
God used him for the salvation of others.
And Newton thinks this is perfect.
I'm going to write Amazing Grace about
King David, and he preaches a sermon.
We have the sermon text.
We know the sermon that went along
with the hymn that New Year's Day.
New Year's was a time to look back.
New year's was a time to look forward.
Examine yourself.
How has God led me and where will God
lead me in this coming year?
And so the hymn title wasn't
Amazing Grace.
In all the Olney hymn book,
it was called Faith's Review
and Expectation
with the eyes of Faith, I review the past
and I look forward with great expectation
to what God will do in the future.
So it was about Newton.
It was about his story.
But he incorporated his story
within the great Biblical story of all
that God is doing to save us.
- I hope God has forgiven me.
But I owe to walk softly
all my days in remembrance of
what I have been
and what I have done.
- John Newton,
the clergyman, did
not try to hide his past.
He filled his sermons
with seafaring anecdotes,
and he wore his old blue sailor's coat
as he wandered the town.
But in Onley, he did not talk
directly about his years
in the slave trade.
But when he moved to London in 1779,
things were different.
In the city that had grown fat
on the profits of the slave trade,
Newton encountered people who were desperate
for him to talk about his past.
- Mr. Wilberforce, I have
always entertained hopes
and confidence that God one day
would bring you to me.
- I am grateful.
- William Wilberforce
was a member of Parliament
who devoted his career
to the abolition of the slave trade
and then the abolition
of slavery itself in Britain.
- But the Lord has raised you up
for the good of His church
and for the good of the nation.
- William had found in Newton
a pastor and a mentor of rare skill.
- So be of good courage, my friend.
You are blessed.
You are called.
There is nothing quite so
iniquitous, so cruel,
so oppressive,
so destructive as the African slave trade.
- Aware that he could easily be
branded a hypocrite
for preaching against the trade
he once profited from, Newton wrote
his tract thoughts on the African Slave
Trade with brutal honesty.
- It is a disgraceful branch of commerce,
a stain on our national character.
- A copy of the book was given
to each member of Parliament,
and it became a sensation in London.
The graphic description of the slave
trade was shocking.
Newton wrote two thirds of the cargo
of slaves are males.
They are all put in irons in most ships,
two and two together.
He tells of 100 grown slaves
thrown into the sea.
He writes, when the women and girls
are taken on board
a ship naked, trembling, terrified,
they are often exposed to the wanton
rudeness of white savages.
I have seen them sentenced to
unmerciful whippings.
Continue to the poor creatures
have not had power to groan
under their misery,
and hardly a side of life has remained.
- It will always be a subject
of humiliating reflection to me,
that I was once an active instrument
in a business at which
my heart now shudders.
- The honor is mine.
- Oh, sir, you honor me.
- Come this way, please.
- The next step was for Newton
to offer official testimony
before the committees of the
House of Commons itself.
He did this in 1789
and again in 1790.
- The condition of the slaves
at home is bad,
worse on board the ships,
and worst of all, in our islands.
- Newton's testimony was critical
to the parliamentary campaign
for the abolition of the slave trade,
and he lived to see the very beginnings
of the changes that would, in time
lead to emancipation
and universal human rights.
- In the final year of his life, 1807,
John Newton saw legislation passed
which brought an end once and for all
to Britain's involvement
in the slave trade.
- It was grace
that taught my heart to fear.
Grace, my fears relieved.
- By Gods amazing grace, a former slave trader
became one of the loudest voices
in the campaign to end the slave trade.
But it would be years
after he died, before
his song would take root in the culture
and spread.
It emerged in the most
unlikely and extraordinary way.
So I'm looking at a hymnal called
Onley Hymns.
Amazing Grace is only one of those.
How did it reach around the world?
- Amazing Grace doesn't immediately
become a popular song in England.
Onley Hymns, the hymn book goes to
multiple editions in Newton's lifetime,
on both sides of the Atlantic,
and the story of Amazing Grace
and its popularity
will ultimately be an American story.
In about 1829,
it gets matched to its now
unforgettable tune.
The tune is called New Britain,
and it gets matched
to the words of amazing Grace.
And it sticks.
- To the Southern Baptist tradition,
especially within the black
churches, there's a sense
in which that song is still very key.
- And it becomes a popular song
in African-American churches
before and after emancipation.
It becomes a gospel standard.
- The word gospel itself,
we're talking about the communicating
of the message of salvation.
- This song that was written by a former
slave trader becomes a song that African
American Christians sing and own
as their own gospel, spiritual song.
It's about 1947 when it makes its way
into the commercial marketplace,
as it's recorded by Mahalia Jackson.
- Amazing
Grace
- it becomes a song that is
played on the radio.
- How sweet
- When we hear Aretha Franklin,
what we're hearing is a connection,
with Mahalia Jackson,
because Aretha was mentored by Mahalia.
So there's a connection there.
And also Aretha comes out of the Baptist
tradition as well.
- (Aretha singing)
Oh. I know.
(Aretha continues singing)
The Aretha Franklin's recording,
which happens in 1972.
What's critical
is that only two months before, Elvis
Presley had also recorded the same song,
- (Elvis) Amazing Grace.
Oh how sweet.
- The year before, John Lennon had released
Imagine, which is this sort of atheistic
cry, if you will, to say, well, imagine
if there isn't anything after death.
Imagine if there isn't a God.
Imagine if there isn't.
You know,
this kind of idea is responded to then,
if you will, with these two,
seminal gospel albums
from two very important individuals
across popular culture.
So there's a sense
in which there's a conversation going on,
which is really key.
And I think that's one of the reasons
why it became so important.
- When we sing it, we're not singing as
John Newton, we're singing as ourselves.
We're saying we are wretches.
We are saved by God's amazing grace.
And that's the beauty of it.
Is 10 million people
singing this every year, 10 million people
hopefully coming to know
that amazing grace
that can save each and every one of us
if we put our faith and trust in Him.
- During the Civil Rights Movement,
its sung as a bit of a protest song
by people like Judy Collins.
Surprisingly, in the 1970s
it charts in the Billboard Top 40.
- How precious did that
grace appear
- People are turning to this song.
A song that expresses gratitude for grace.
It becomes a cry for grace
in times of inconsolable loss and tragedy.
- Like 9-11,
- Like 9-11.
- That first verse where it's so much
about the senses, amazing grace,
how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found.
Was blind.
But now I see.
And I'm a partially sighted musician.
So I can't see very well
throughout my, through my right eye.
And I often think one day
about how wonderful it will be in eternity
to be able to see perfectly again.
And I think John Newton is playing on that
a little bit in this hymm
that he's saying, coming to know
Jesus, knowing His grace
is like your eyes being open
for the first time
and your world being flooded
with God's light and goodness.
And in fact,
I think he really brings that home.
In the final verse where he says,
the earth shall soon dissolve
like snow, the sun forbear to shine.
But God who called me here
below will be forever mine.
And he's basically saying,
God is that light that enters your life.
When you receive His grace.
- People gather and they hold hands.
And what do they want to sing?
- Amazing grace.
- They sing Amazing Grace.
- To mark the 250th anniversary of Amazing Grace,
the Kingdom Choir came to Onley, England
to sing the hymm in the very church
where it was originally sung.
It was an historic occasion.
- Amazing Grace.
How sweet the sound
that saved
A wretch like me
I once was lost
but now I am found
- I've been thinking a lot about God's
grace and how He gave
away His son so that we didn't have to
pay the wages of sin
and how His grace.
His love, His mercy, it's completely free
and all we have to do is give
Him our hearts and our lives.
- ...my fears relieved
- I think when we sing the hymn Amazing Grace,
it strikes a tuning fork in our hearts.
Theres something about those words
that saved a wretch like me
It resonates.
Maybe others might not look at me
as a wretch to be saved,
but I know the stuff of which I made.
I know the evil behavior
of which I'm capable.
And I'm not the paragon of virtue
that many people think I am.
I am a junkyard dog, nasty sinner
that needs rescuing,
that needs deliverance from her sin.
And there's no one else but Jesus Christ
who can bear that load of guilt
and pain.
- As long as time...
- Ive spent a lifetime sharing
God's grace with others.
What is grace?
- I think three little words
that Jesus said come to mind,
and it's come to me, come to me.
Jesus said, and I will give you rest.
I will give you peace.
I will give you grace.
That's what we need so
desperately in our world.
- I once was lost
but now I'm found
I was blind, but now I see
was blind
but now I see.
- It's deeply troubling
to realize that in John Newton's
career as a slave trader,
468 African women,
men and children were taken on board
his ships while he was a captain.
68 of those died on his watch.
That blood was on his hands.
He would later have to reckon with this.
- My memory is nearly gone.
And I remember two things.
That I am a great sinner
and the Christ
is a great Savior.
- I once was lost but now
am found.
Was blind but now I see.
- This song is now 250 years old.
It's the most popular English language
hymn ever written.
I'm Charles Morris with Haven Ministries.
We hear Amazing Grace
played in times of triumph
and perhaps even more common,
sung in times of great tragedy.
Remarkably, this song was picked up
by African-Americans during slavery
and in the decades of suffering
that followed emancipation,
it became one of their most cherished
gospel anthems.
This song is timeless, and it has become
an ultimate symbol of hope.
But what do we know about
its writer, John Newton?
Well, we know that Newton
was a slave trader himself,
a ship's captain.
The height of the cruel
British slave trade.
So the obvious question is,
how did God use this man
to write this song?
We're about to find out.
I recently sat down with Bruce Hindmarsh,
the foremost expert on John Newton,
who wrote the definitive book
on Amazing Grace
and the extraordinary spiritual journey
of the man behind the song,
Bruce Hindmarsh.
When you first, as a young man, went
to Oxford to work on a doctorate degree,
what got you interested in John Newton?
- I kind of just stumbled upon John Newton.
I thought, what a compelling story.
What, what an unbelievably dramatic story.
He had never been the subject
of a scholarly study.
So I thought, well, this is perfect.
This is what I want to do.
And then wrote what became my first book
for Oxford, a study of John Newton,
especially of his theology.
But now weve just had the 250 year anniversary
of the hymn Amazing Grace.
And so, 30 years later, I've returned to
all of this because I thought,
you know, there's another opportunity here
to tell this story.
And I thought I really wanted to reckon
more with his slave trading past.
And so I returned to the story.
I thought, this is a time
when we need to hear this story again,
and a whole new generation needs to hear
John Newton story.
The story behind the song Amazing Grace.
- Well, and it's a profound story too,
that has great impact on us
today, even.
- He was born in 1725,
in the tough streets of Wapping,
a neighborhood in London
a stone's throw away from the Thames,
where hundreds of merchant ships
plied their trade.
On one of those ships was his father,
who was a merchant ship captain,
and his father was consistently sailing
in the North Sea and the Mediterranean.
He's essentially
raised by a single mother.
His loving mother
who is a devout, Godly mother.
She loved him, and she read to him
the hymns of Isaac Watts.
- Right here.
- She was a devoted Christian
who trained young Newton to follow God.
- Lord, if thou hast been our dwelling place
in all generations
before the mountains were brought forth.
- This made a deep impression on John.
He would later recall these years
with great affection.
- John, come in.
- When John was just six years old.
- Don't be afraid.
- His mother became severely ill.
- My sweet boy,
listen to me.
Always remember Joshua 1:9
Be strong
Of a good courage.
Be not afraid.
neither be thou dismayed:
for the Lord Your God is with you.
Whithersoever thou goest.
Mummy loves you.
- Just days before his seventh birthday.
His mother died.
- I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand.
At the latter day upon the earth.
And though after my skin worms
destroy this body
yet in my flesh
Shall I see God, whom
I shall see for myself,
- So once John Newtons mother died,
his life took a really
serious turn.
- Life wasn't easy for him, was it?
- His father is away at sea,
and we have to imagine a little boy
all alone in the world.
His father married within two years.
He feels like his new stepmother
sort of favors the other children.
He's sent away to boarding school
in Stratford for two years.
The schoolmaster seems cruel.
Things go from bad to worse.
And his father trained him up at sea.
And he took him from age
11 to about age 17.
He took him on five voyages with him
to the Mediterranean, to the North Sea.
And he's under his father's watch.
But still,
gradually
his mother's influence is wearing off,
and he's becoming
more wild and unrestrained.
- I gradually abandoned
my Christian commitments.
I became an infidel, a free thinker,
and a libertine.
My struggles between sin and
conscience were often repeated.
Every relapse sunk me into still greater
depths of wickedness.
I soon lost all sense of religion.
- By the time he was 17,
Newton had imbibed the fashionable deism
of the third Earl of Shaftesbury,
and he had a refined, highbrow skepticism
of all things Christian.
- Good afternoon, Mrs. Catlett
My father sent me.
- He was a bit pretentious,
but even pretentious
17 year olds can come undone
when they fall in love.
- Mary, look who it is.
- Good day to you, Mr. Newton.
- Mary Catlett
at the first sight of her.
I was impressed with an affection
which never abated.
To her family,
She was known as Polly.
- You did it again.
There never was a girl so sure to win.
- It was luck.
I'm sure.
- He determined
he would make something of himself
to win Polly's hand in marriage.
- Nothing would banish
from my waking thoughts
for the next seven years.
- Fire!
- These were the tense days
before Britain and France would
be at war once more.
Young men were being forced into the Navy.
- Tell me a little bit about life
in the Navy for a young man.
It must have not been easy.
- It was not easy.
The master at arms
would have a rope to whip you with.
It was overcrowded.
Fights would break out.
The food rations might be rancid.
There's rats.
There's the smell of bilge water.
It is a tense environment.
- With French warships off the coast,
my father warned me
not to be seen in town
dressed in my usual sailor's coat attire.
What ship did you serve? You're a sailor.
Look at you. Show us your papers.
- Although it was legal,
he was essentially kidnaped.
His father intervened.
He couldn't get him out of the Navy,
but he was able to get him promoted
to midshipman,
which is a kind of junior officer.
- The only benefit was that as a midshipman,
I could inflict misery on lower ranking
sailors.
I did so frequently,
and even that pleasure
grew stale in time.
My one source of hope
was that I might see my Polly again.
- By about December.
So from March to about December, theyre
patrolling the North Sea.
Then they're back
near the mouth of the Thames.
And you get shore leave this December.
And where do you think he's going to go?
Straight to Mary Catlett.
He wants to see Polly,
and he visits and overstays.
Comes back on board the ship
and he's in trouble with the captain.
Newton's ship.
It's preparing to go
for a five year voyage.
Then the ship pulls into the harbor
at Plymouth.
He is sent to shore with some other
sailors that he's supposed to guard.
And make sure they don't desert.
But instead, all he can think about is he
can't be gone from Polly for five years.
And he's the one who deserts.
Some soldiers find him on the road.
They clap him in irons.
They bring him back to Plymouth
and put him in jail.
And then he's brought back in
shame on board the ship.
- Master at arms
Make him an example.
Now give him the first dozen.
- In time, the wounds to my
back began to heal.
But the cruel humiliation from sailors
that I had previously ordered
to cut deeper.
Yet the greatest pain of all
was Polly, sentenced to five years at sea.
I knew then that I had lost her forever.
- He's looking over the gunwales
and on the horizon line,
He sees the shoreline of England becoming
more and more faint until it disappears.
He has very dark thoughts.
He thinks of murder. Suicide.
I should kill the captain and throw myself
overboard.
It's only the hope of seeing
Polly that prevents him.
- By now, Newton is in his early 20s
and he's already suffered many losses.
He's made many, many rash decisions
and has
by now abandoned his childhood faith
altogether.
And yet, his life is about to take
an even darker turn.
Within a month, he will drop down
into the evil world of the slave trade,
and this will begin
a downward spiral of pain and suffering.
He's about to embark on a dark odyssey
that will mark his life forever.
- We were to set sail for India
the next day,
when a trader bound for the windward
coast of Africa lay near us
I begged that I might be dismissed.
The captain had no great affection
for me, and gladly agreed
to the transfer.
- So what does it mean?
He's now in the slave trade?
- Oh, Charles, the slave trade.
Do you have to think every time
somebody in England puts
a lump of sugar in their tea and stirs it,
it's the end of a long
and bloody supply chain.
Ships set out from England
with copper, iron, weapons,
and they trade along the West
African shore
for slaves.
Where do those slaves come from?
Through internal African wars,
punishment for crimes,
raiding, through hereditary slavery,
and various ways.
People are enslaved within Africa
and from deep inland
are traded to the coast.
And there are little settlements
along the coast.
Little slave factories, they call them.
They're kind of like warehouses
that would warehouse these slaves.
And then the English would trade in places
like Sierra Leone,
and they'd maybe pick up three slaves here
or five here, maybe a few more here,
and they'd trade along the coast
until they filled the belly of the ship
with these slaves.
Then they follow the trade winds
and the currents across to the Caribbean,
what they call the West Indies.
And they're at islands
like Antigua and Saint Kitts.
They deliver these slaves
into the plantation system.
So the plantation system required
a large supply of labor
for things like sugar or cotton
or tobacco or coffee.
They needed a constant supply
to keep these plantations going.
And then from the Caribbean, sugar
from American ports, tobacco
and so on, comes back to Britain
and completes
this triangular trade system from England.
Manufactured goods come to West Africa.
From West Africa.
Slaves
go to the Caribbean and the Caribbean.
Sugar and commodities
come back to England.
This long and bloody supply chain
people are just they are quite aware of
it, maybe are not entirely aware of it.
When they stir
that sugar into their tea.
- I will remember
while I was passing from
the one ship to the other,
I was rejoicing.
Not only was I free of the Navy,
I was amongst strangers.
I now might be as abandoned as I pleased
without any control.
- The Atlantic slave trade
was an enormous enterprise,
and in human trafficking.
Over the course of three
and a half centuries,
from the 16th century to the 19th century,
something like 12 million Africans
were transported across the Atlantic.
Slave ships initially it was Portuguese
and the Spanish who pioneered it.
But by the 18th century,
the British become,
the greatest European slave traders.
So between 1660 and 1807,
they transported over 3 million people.
These ships are notoriously crowded,
sometimes five, 600 people.
And it's a dangerous place
for, enslaved women as well.
There's a lot of sexual violence on board.
- On the ship. Is a man named Evans.
And Evans has begun to make his fortune
as one of these slave factories.
And he's establishing a new factory
on an island
called Plantain Island.
A small island south of Sierra Leone,
just off shore.
An ideal place
where they could collect slaves.
And the key is that Evans.
He is married to an African princess
named Pi
- He is your servant?
- No, he's a sailor.
- Newton finds himself
working for Evans and Pi.
- But I think he can be of use.
- How?
- With the business.
- I do not need your help
dealing with the white traders.
- No, of course I apologize.
- But no sooner is he on the island,
then he becomes ill.
- Youve take a turn for the worse.
- I'll be quite well in a day or so.
- No, you're too ill to trade.
Join me next time.
- Evans, he leaves and Newton is left with Pi.
And she's really kind of the one
running the show here.
- You are idle.
you lie here doing nothing,
contributing nothing,
and offering nothing.
- She doesn't care that he's ill.
He just seems lazy.
She has no use for him,
and she begins to persecute him.
- Wretched wench.
Why are you here?
- And he finds himself abused, alone,
starving, far from home.
It's nothing like
what he thought it would be.
- Hurry up Newton.
- He was trapped on Plantain Island.
At the hands of Princess Pi,
he became a slave himself,
For months and months,
this was John's daily existence.
Sickness.
Work and constant abuse from his jailers.
And through it all, he was forced to work.
Pi and other slaves would ridicule him.
He was less than a slave.
He was a servant of slaves.
One of his main jobs
was to dig holes to plant lime trees.
They're being attacked by mosquitoes
and other insects was a constant threat.
John had many days of dark thoughts.
Although he never lost
hope of seeing Holly again,
he worried that he had disgraced himself
and had become unworthy of her.
He wrote that
he was depressed
to a degree beyond common wretchedness.
Though he had written to his father
several times,
there was no hope on the horizon.
He was desperate to escape.
He would remember this
as the lowest point of his life.
- John.
Listen to me.
Always remember Joshua 1:9
Be strong,
of a good courage.
- I knew I could easily have died
alone and unloved.
Far from home.
Indeed, I should have.
- Quite unexpectedly, Newton's
father had heard
about his son's plight
and had sent rescue.
Newton escaped his servitude
after little more than a year.
Finally, he had hope
of seeing Polly again.
- Raise the sails.
Not long until England man.
Just ten more days
if these winds keep up.
We set sail, men.
- In search of distraction,
John tried reading any books
he could lay his hands on,
including The Imitation of
Christ by Thomas A Kempis
He later wrote, I carelessly took it up.
I read it with the same indifference
as if it were a romance novel.
Yet he wondered what the consequences
would be if there were a God.
Would there be mercy for him?
Still he had made his choice.
He would have to live with it.
- They encountered a
severe North Atlantic storm
in the winter of 1748.
- What's happened?
- She's just been breached.
We're taking on water.
- Go back.
I need a knife.
Newton, fetch me one from my chest.
- I have it.
- Hoist the main sail!
Keep your formation.
Arghhhh!
Heave ho!
Keep your formation
- Captain, captain!
We must change our heading.
Thats how off course it takes us
We must keep the rims above the water.
- Very well.
- If this will not do,
Lord have mercy upon us.
- The gale began to abate
and the most dangerous leaks were stopped.
And yet the most miraculous
and extraordinary part of all was
that I had prayed.
I had called out
to the God who I had mocked.
- Newton would always remember March 21st,
the day he prayed in the storm
as the anniversary of his conversion.
- Father, we pray that you will comfort John.
Help him to think about you and your loving arms.
In Jesus name,
amen.
- Indeed, the very last entry
he made in his diary as an 80 year old man
was a commemoration of this event.
He and most of the crew
had survived the storm,
but they were left with very little food
or water and a ship out of repair.
They were still in great danger,
and for almost a month
their lives hung by a thread.
As the battered ship
inched eastward toward Ireland.
- By the time the ship
at length reached Ireland,
I no longer considered myself an infidel.
I abhorred my form of profaneness.
- What happened in the storm
spiritually, he said,
this was the beginning.
Not so much of my turning to God,
but His turning to me.
He would say
in the storm his
consciousness was awakened
and he became aware there is a God
and it becomes more serious spiritually.
And there's a moment
when he's back in Ireland,
when he makes vows, he makes resolves.
I will follow Christ.
I am determined to be a Christian.
- So now he's finally found grace.
Is he going to leave the slave trade?
- For the next six years,
I would make four voyages on slave ships.
One as first mate
and three as captain.
- 13.
20. 22.
- He's turned to Christ
- 27
- but he's not left the slave trade.
He bought and imprisoned
468 African men, women and children
on board his ships of whom 68 died
on his watch while an African waters
or in the perilous Middle Passage,
and the rest
he delivered into the deadly plantation
system in the West Indies.
- I never had a scruple
upon this head at the time,
nor was such a thought
once suggested to me by any friend.
- So I think one of the things
that really surprises even shocks us
today is the fact that it was
Christian nations
which carried out this enormous
crime against humanity.
- What I did, I did ignorantly.
- We just feel the tension at this moment.
Well, surely he can see.
- Portuguese and Spanish and the French,
obviously, regard themselves as devout
Catholic nations, the English
and the Dutch, very devoutly Protestant.
And there's relatively little public
outcry about this.
- Custom, example, and interest
had blinded my eyes.
- Custom means everybody accepts it.
Example means everybody's doing it.
Interest means it's in my self-interest.
- Something that became so atrocious
in the mind of Newton in his later years.
But in the early 1750s,
he justifies it to himself
as so many of the Europeans do.
- And he realized how blind he
was at this point
that he had turned to Christ,
but somehow he still didn't see it.
It makes me wonder what is there
in my own life that I don't see.
A strange providence
landed Newton back on Plantain Island.
Newton hadnt publicly
condemned the slave trade.
Privately, he was going
through a transformation.
Whatever the sense of his past
that haunted him,
he had come to a
point of personal desperation.
- Remember to pray, John.
Always pray.
- Yes. mother.
- It was here
that he made a full surrender to
Jesus Christ.
He needed Christ to do for him
what he couldn't do in his own strength.
He needed a heart conversion.
The breakthrough came as he prayed.
- God, forgive me.
Forgive me.
- This was the moment he began to hope
and trust in a crucified Savior
who died for him,
and whose shed blood
would cover all his sins.
I have a burning question for you.
Did he ever get to marry Polly?
- He returns from this
voyage as first mate of the Brownlow.
He arrives back in England.
Arrangements have been made.
Newton has corresponded with Mary,
and it's in February 1750
that they are finally married.
Newton will always think of this
as an element of God's grace to him,
that God gave him Mary.
God gave him the good things
that he didn't deserve.
You know, poets sometimes
say that they have a muse, somebody
who inspires them.
There's a way that Polly, Mary Catlett,
was John Newton's muse all his life.
He has 6 or 7 months with his new bride
in England,
and then he's called away again.
He'll make three voyages
as captain of a slave ship,
as the Duke of Argyle.
And then it's a ship called the African.
He makes two more voyages
when he had
completed his fourth voyage on board
a slave ship, and when he was days
away from beginning his fifth,
he collapsed.
He is unconscious.
He is not moving.
He's laying on the floor.
He is barely breathing,
and they wonder if he's dead.
After about an hour, he recovers.
The physicians, check him over
and they say you're not going anywhere.
And from that moment
he left the slave trade
and he never went back.
This seizure was more than an opportunity
to turn his back on a world
that may have been troubling him.
It was a new opportunity.
He got a job in Liverpool, in
the customs office,
inspecting ships and their cargo
as they came in and out of harbor.
So he and Polly move to Liverpool
and he will be there as a lay person,
not a clergyman,
but a lay person for about nine years
working in this position
in the customs office.
- When Newton left the sea in 1754,
Liverpool was a hugely formative time for him.
He was there for nine years.
Liverpool is such a dark place.
The profits of the slave trade
had been flowing into this city.
It's full of money, it's
full of wickedness, it's full of crime.
This is a wicked city.
And it's like the light of revival,
the light of God's grace
that Newton sees shines out all the more
brightly against that darkness.
He wants to be a part of what God's doing.
He wants to be able to serve.
And it excited his desires
to see what God was doing in England.
His progress in the Christian
life was slow.
But so for many of us.
He really grasped the heart.
You know,
the Bible has to spell it out for us, that
the heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately corrupt.
And, you know, we're told
that all have sinned and all fallen
short of the glory of God.
So it's not just though one person
or the other person is worse than...
We're all fallen short of the mark.
- And he visited churches and he heard preachers,
and it was like
he couldn't take enough of it in.
- Newton really took Scripture to heart.
In 1757,
he was getting lots of suggestions
from friends that he was showing signs
that he could be
in the ministry.
- He found himself
caught up in a whole new world
of faith and action.
- He taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
Syriac, French, German, Bryom shorthand.
He was very widely read.
He read a lot of Christian writers.
- These were the heady days
of the evangelical revival, a season
when many great preachers were regularly
drawing crowds in the thousands.
Newton was eager to spend as much time
with these men as possible.
Men like George Whitfield
John continued to study,
and his growing relationship
with Whitfield and revivalist John Wesley
led to much spiritual growth.
John began meeting with churches
with a new burning desire
to be ordained as a pastor
so he could share with others
the grace he himself had received,
and in time he is ordained
in the Church of England,
and he has an opportunity to serve
in a parish in the English Midlands.
- For 16 years
I was the minister to a town parish
of about 2000 people.
- He preaches his first sermon
there in May 1764.
He's 39 years of age.
He was cheerful,
he was convivial, sociable.
He, you know, he'd wear his sailor's
jacket around the town.
He had the common touch.
He could tell stories.
He could hold people's attention.
- Doctor Jim Packer said the
three greatest evangelists
in the 18th century were Wesley,
Whitfield and Newton
and Wesley and Whitfield
were itinerant preachers.
But Newton was the pastor par excellence,
and as Packer said, he had no peer.
- Under his ministry,
there's a kind of a local revival.
They have to add a balcony to the church.
People flock to hear him.
He started every week to
write a hymn to go
along with the sermon,
along with the scripture texts.
The parish is filled with poor people,
a lot of poor lace
makers and day laborers,
and these hymns they would take away
and they could recite them
while they're doing their work.
And they could remember the scripture.
They could remember the sermon.
Hymms become a really
important part of his ministry.
So also his ministry to children.
And a lot of children come and they sing
and he teaches,
and he has a real ministry.
(children singing)
During much of the 1770s,
Newton regularly wrote a hymn
for the prayer meeting.
He writes hymns along with his friend,
the troubled poet William Cooper.
- Friday in the 1st of January.
May Thy grace keep me always waiting
until my appointed change shall come.
Amazing grace.
Sweet the sound.
- So he just wrote amazing Grace.
He was middle aged.
This must have been
a special marked moment in his life.
- You would think so, wouldn't you?
Given what we know about the hymn
Amazing Grace.
But, you know,
it's not like he wrote to all his friends
and said, I think I just wrote a hit.
This was just a
part of his weekly ministry.
He would write hymns to go along with
the sermon text that he was preaching on.
(congregation singing)
What was special about this moment.
It was January the 1st, 1773,
and he was thinking,
what should I preach on?
What should I write about?
And he thinks I'm going to write on
1 Chronicles 17, verses 16 and 17,
theologians will talk about the Davidic
covenant,
God's covenant with King David
in the Old Testament.
Newton is certainly sitting there
with his Bible open.
He's thinking about King David.
What was King David?
He was a murderous, treacherous,
adulterous man
who found forgiveness.
He later became a man
after God's own heart.
He writes hymns.
He writes psalms.
And though it came through blood
stained hands, impure, an impure person.
God used him for the salvation of others.
And Newton thinks this is perfect.
I'm going to write Amazing Grace about
King David, and he preaches a sermon.
We have the sermon text.
We know the sermon that went along
with the hymn that New Year's Day.
New Year's was a time to look back.
New year's was a time to look forward.
Examine yourself.
How has God led me and where will God
lead me in this coming year?
And so the hymn title wasn't
Amazing Grace.
In all the Olney hymn book,
it was called Faith's Review
and Expectation
with the eyes of Faith, I review the past
and I look forward with great expectation
to what God will do in the future.
So it was about Newton.
It was about his story.
But he incorporated his story
within the great Biblical story of all
that God is doing to save us.
- I hope God has forgiven me.
But I owe to walk softly
all my days in remembrance of
what I have been
and what I have done.
- John Newton,
the clergyman, did
not try to hide his past.
He filled his sermons
with seafaring anecdotes,
and he wore his old blue sailor's coat
as he wandered the town.
But in Onley, he did not talk
directly about his years
in the slave trade.
But when he moved to London in 1779,
things were different.
In the city that had grown fat
on the profits of the slave trade,
Newton encountered people who were desperate
for him to talk about his past.
- Mr. Wilberforce, I have
always entertained hopes
and confidence that God one day
would bring you to me.
- I am grateful.
- William Wilberforce
was a member of Parliament
who devoted his career
to the abolition of the slave trade
and then the abolition
of slavery itself in Britain.
- But the Lord has raised you up
for the good of His church
and for the good of the nation.
- William had found in Newton
a pastor and a mentor of rare skill.
- So be of good courage, my friend.
You are blessed.
You are called.
There is nothing quite so
iniquitous, so cruel,
so oppressive,
so destructive as the African slave trade.
- Aware that he could easily be
branded a hypocrite
for preaching against the trade
he once profited from, Newton wrote
his tract thoughts on the African Slave
Trade with brutal honesty.
- It is a disgraceful branch of commerce,
a stain on our national character.
- A copy of the book was given
to each member of Parliament,
and it became a sensation in London.
The graphic description of the slave
trade was shocking.
Newton wrote two thirds of the cargo
of slaves are males.
They are all put in irons in most ships,
two and two together.
He tells of 100 grown slaves
thrown into the sea.
He writes, when the women and girls
are taken on board
a ship naked, trembling, terrified,
they are often exposed to the wanton
rudeness of white savages.
I have seen them sentenced to
unmerciful whippings.
Continue to the poor creatures
have not had power to groan
under their misery,
and hardly a side of life has remained.
- It will always be a subject
of humiliating reflection to me,
that I was once an active instrument
in a business at which
my heart now shudders.
- The honor is mine.
- Oh, sir, you honor me.
- Come this way, please.
- The next step was for Newton
to offer official testimony
before the committees of the
House of Commons itself.
He did this in 1789
and again in 1790.
- The condition of the slaves
at home is bad,
worse on board the ships,
and worst of all, in our islands.
- Newton's testimony was critical
to the parliamentary campaign
for the abolition of the slave trade,
and he lived to see the very beginnings
of the changes that would, in time
lead to emancipation
and universal human rights.
- In the final year of his life, 1807,
John Newton saw legislation passed
which brought an end once and for all
to Britain's involvement
in the slave trade.
- It was grace
that taught my heart to fear.
Grace, my fears relieved.
- By Gods amazing grace, a former slave trader
became one of the loudest voices
in the campaign to end the slave trade.
But it would be years
after he died, before
his song would take root in the culture
and spread.
It emerged in the most
unlikely and extraordinary way.
So I'm looking at a hymnal called
Onley Hymns.
Amazing Grace is only one of those.
How did it reach around the world?
- Amazing Grace doesn't immediately
become a popular song in England.
Onley Hymns, the hymn book goes to
multiple editions in Newton's lifetime,
on both sides of the Atlantic,
and the story of Amazing Grace
and its popularity
will ultimately be an American story.
In about 1829,
it gets matched to its now
unforgettable tune.
The tune is called New Britain,
and it gets matched
to the words of amazing Grace.
And it sticks.
- To the Southern Baptist tradition,
especially within the black
churches, there's a sense
in which that song is still very key.
- And it becomes a popular song
in African-American churches
before and after emancipation.
It becomes a gospel standard.
- The word gospel itself,
we're talking about the communicating
of the message of salvation.
- This song that was written by a former
slave trader becomes a song that African
American Christians sing and own
as their own gospel, spiritual song.
It's about 1947 when it makes its way
into the commercial marketplace,
as it's recorded by Mahalia Jackson.
- Amazing
Grace
- it becomes a song that is
played on the radio.
- How sweet
- When we hear Aretha Franklin,
what we're hearing is a connection,
with Mahalia Jackson,
because Aretha was mentored by Mahalia.
So there's a connection there.
And also Aretha comes out of the Baptist
tradition as well.
- (Aretha singing)
Oh. I know.
(Aretha continues singing)
The Aretha Franklin's recording,
which happens in 1972.
What's critical
is that only two months before, Elvis
Presley had also recorded the same song,
- (Elvis) Amazing Grace.
Oh how sweet.
- The year before, John Lennon had released
Imagine, which is this sort of atheistic
cry, if you will, to say, well, imagine
if there isn't anything after death.
Imagine if there isn't a God.
Imagine if there isn't.
You know,
this kind of idea is responded to then,
if you will, with these two,
seminal gospel albums
from two very important individuals
across popular culture.
So there's a sense
in which there's a conversation going on,
which is really key.
And I think that's one of the reasons
why it became so important.
- When we sing it, we're not singing as
John Newton, we're singing as ourselves.
We're saying we are wretches.
We are saved by God's amazing grace.
And that's the beauty of it.
Is 10 million people
singing this every year, 10 million people
hopefully coming to know
that amazing grace
that can save each and every one of us
if we put our faith and trust in Him.
- During the Civil Rights Movement,
its sung as a bit of a protest song
by people like Judy Collins.
Surprisingly, in the 1970s
it charts in the Billboard Top 40.
- How precious did that
grace appear
- People are turning to this song.
A song that expresses gratitude for grace.
It becomes a cry for grace
in times of inconsolable loss and tragedy.
- Like 9-11,
- Like 9-11.
- That first verse where it's so much
about the senses, amazing grace,
how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found.
Was blind.
But now I see.
And I'm a partially sighted musician.
So I can't see very well
throughout my, through my right eye.
And I often think one day
about how wonderful it will be in eternity
to be able to see perfectly again.
And I think John Newton is playing on that
a little bit in this hymm
that he's saying, coming to know
Jesus, knowing His grace
is like your eyes being open
for the first time
and your world being flooded
with God's light and goodness.
And in fact,
I think he really brings that home.
In the final verse where he says,
the earth shall soon dissolve
like snow, the sun forbear to shine.
But God who called me here
below will be forever mine.
And he's basically saying,
God is that light that enters your life.
When you receive His grace.
- People gather and they hold hands.
And what do they want to sing?
- Amazing grace.
- They sing Amazing Grace.
- To mark the 250th anniversary of Amazing Grace,
the Kingdom Choir came to Onley, England
to sing the hymm in the very church
where it was originally sung.
It was an historic occasion.
- Amazing Grace.
How sweet the sound
that saved
A wretch like me
I once was lost
but now I am found
- I've been thinking a lot about God's
grace and how He gave
away His son so that we didn't have to
pay the wages of sin
and how His grace.
His love, His mercy, it's completely free
and all we have to do is give
Him our hearts and our lives.
- ...my fears relieved
- I think when we sing the hymn Amazing Grace,
it strikes a tuning fork in our hearts.
Theres something about those words
that saved a wretch like me
It resonates.
Maybe others might not look at me
as a wretch to be saved,
but I know the stuff of which I made.
I know the evil behavior
of which I'm capable.
And I'm not the paragon of virtue
that many people think I am.
I am a junkyard dog, nasty sinner
that needs rescuing,
that needs deliverance from her sin.
And there's no one else but Jesus Christ
who can bear that load of guilt
and pain.
- As long as time...
- Ive spent a lifetime sharing
God's grace with others.
What is grace?
- I think three little words
that Jesus said come to mind,
and it's come to me, come to me.
Jesus said, and I will give you rest.
I will give you peace.
I will give you grace.
That's what we need so
desperately in our world.
- I once was lost
but now I'm found
I was blind, but now I see
was blind
but now I see.