Stuart K. Hine
Musician · 1899–1989 · London, England
Best known for
Songwriter
Stuart K. Hine was an English Plymouth Brethren missionary whose 1949 English-language version of “How Great Thou Art” — built on a Russian translation he and his wife encountered as missionaries in the Carpathians — became one of the most-recorded hymns in the English-speaking world, especially after George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows introduced it to Billy Graham’s 1950s crusades.
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- Born Stuart Wesley Keene Hine in west London on July 25, 1899.
- Made his personal commitment to Christ at fourteen, after baptism, led by Madame Annie Ryall on February 22, 1914.
- Served in the British Army in France during World War I.
- Entered Methodist missionary work in 1923; he and his wife Mercy were posted to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and what was then the Soviet Ukraine.
- Encountered a Russian translation of Carl Boberg’s 1885 Swedish hymn “O Store Gud” in the Carpathian region; began his own English translation in stages over the 1930s and 1940s.
- Finalized his four-verse English version, “How Great Thou Art,” in 1949 and published it in his Russian-language gospel magazine Grace and Peace that same year.
- Returned to England in 1939 and ministered through the war and after to Eastern European refugees in London, hosting weekly Slavic meetings in Earls Court from 1950 to 1959.
- Wrote evangelistic tracts and a 1982 memoir, Not You, But God: A Testimony to God’s Faithfulness.
- Died in Somerset, England on March 14, 1989.
