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At the close of Adoniram Judson's commissioning service, just before he and Ann set sail for India in 1812, those in attendance sang a hymn written especially for the occasion by the minister:

Go, ye heralds of salvation;
Go, and preach in heathen lands;
Publish loud to every nation,
What the Lord of life commands.

The congregation, "weeping unashamedly" as they sang, had resolved to support foreign missions in general and to stand behind this first group of missionaries in particular. Above all else, the hymn reflected a firm belief in the providence of God and the inevitable worldwide reign of Christ:

To his grace we now resign you,
To him only you belong,
You with every Christian Hindoo,
Join at last th' angelic throng.

This hymn and many others in the late 18th and early 19th centuries expressed the necessity and urgency of foreign mission. The words were commanding. The tunes were easy to sing and capable of stirring the soul. The lyrics reflected a Calvinist theology of the sovereignty of God, the total depravity of mankind, the blood atonement of Christ, and the Lamb's universal reign of peace and justice. These missionary hymns were a powerful means of rallying support for early American missionaries and also inspiring those men and women already active on the mission field.

As evangelistic fervor heated up in the first few decades of the 19th century, a kind of canon of missionary hymns emerged, reprinted again and again in American hymnals. Such hymns were sung at ordination ceremonies, missionary commissioning ceremonies, annual meetings of missions organizations, and monthly "concerts of prayer" for missions—encouraging people to go, to provide financially for those who did go, and to pray for the fruit of their labors.

When the teenage Harriet Atwood decided to marry Samuel Newell and join the first group of American missionaries, she quoted the popular hymn "Yes, Christian Heralds, Go Proclaim" in her diary, seeing her own new-found calling in the words: "To India's climes the tidings bear,/And plant the rose of Sharon there."

Many of these hymns were British. One of the most beloved missionary hymns in the 19th century was "Jesus Shall Reign Where e'er the Sun," a paraphrase of Psalm 72 written by the prolific English Calvinist hymn writer Isaac Watts in 1719. The hymn confidently expresses the hope of Christ's coming kingdom:

Behold, the islands with their kings,
And Europe her best tribute brings:
From north to south the princes meet
To pay their homage at his feet.

This was the hope that fired early American missionaries. Jesus was going to physically return and inaugurate a new world order. The spread of the gospel through missions signaled the approaching dawn of this new kingdom described in Watts's hymn, where "Peace, like a river, from His throne/Shall flow to nations yet unknown."

Topping the charts in that era was the hymn "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," written by the Anglican cleric Reginald Heber in 1819 and introduced to the American public in the early 20s. It was reprinted in 19th-century American hymnals more often than any other missionary hymn. At the Jubilee celebration of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1860, the crowd publicly affirmed the board's commitment to missions and its vision for the future by spontaneously bursting into the song all knew by heart:

From Greenland's icy mountains, from India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains roll down their golden sand,
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error's chain.

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