Walking by the River - Christopher M Idle

Christopher Idle's hymns are known to many people around the world. They are sung in thousands of churches every Sunday.

Ten years on from Light upon the River, this new collection contains one hundred further hymn-texts written in the past decade. As before, each item is anchored in scripture, with Bible references and notes, recommended tunes and full indexing. Some are locally focused and some written with children in mind, but most are for singing by the whole congregation.

Christopher Martin Idle, born in September 1938, spent 30 years in parish ministry in the Church of England in both urban and rural settings. His first hymn-collection, Light upon the River, marked his 60th birthday in 1998. The present book gathers the fruit of the ten years since then. In the decade of these hundred, their author has also written Real Hymns, Real Hymn Books (Grove, 2000) and Exploring Praise vols 1 and 2 (Praise Trust 2006 and 2007, a companion to the hymn-book Praise!, 2000). He has four married sons, and as grandchildren kept arriving in this period - eleven so far - Grandpa's Amazing Poems and Awful Pictures appeared in 2005 (with better illustrations by Howard Garbutt). Chris's wife Marjorie died in February 2003. Christopher is now retired and lives in South London.