The Story Behind: Our God Reigns

by Don Chapman and Taylor Brantley

Sometimes God waits until we have nothing left before He shows us everything He has planned. It is a hard truth, but a merciful one, for the bottom is often the only place where we finally look up. Our God Reigns, one of the most beloved worship choruses ever written, was born at exactly such a bottom: an unemployable schoolteacher, a stack of unpaid bills, and a Bible opened to Isaiah on a grim evening in 1973.

A Boy Between Two Churches

Leonard Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1942, at the Naval Hospital, the only son of a career Marine and a devout Catholic mother. The Smith household held an unusual Sunday arrangement. Lenny’s mother attended mass faithfully each week, but at the insistence of her non-religious husband, she dropped her three children off at the local Protestant church on her way. So it was that a Catholic mother’s son received his earliest faith in a Protestant pew.

It was at a Bible class at Blackwood Terrace Community Church that young Lenny heard the story of Jesus and His death on the cross, told simply with a flannelgraph board. “As I watched the story unfold, I was filled with emotion,” he later recalled. “She gave us the good news of the gospel, and I believed it. That day my life was changed.”

When Lenny was twelve, his father left the family. The boy began attending the Catholic church alongside his mother, and there he grew fascinated by the faith she had quietly kept all those years. By the time he finished high school in 1960, Lenny had set his heart on the priesthood, and he entered seminary to pursue it.

A Lonely Seminarian and a Guitar

Nine years of study followed, ending at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where Lenny earned his degree in classical philosophy. The seminary years were years of deep loneliness for Lenny, and it was that very loneliness God used to shape him. To fill the empty hours, Lenny taught himself the guitar. To comfort his aching heart, he turned to the Psalms of David, a man who knew something of loss and pain himself. Soon Lenny was setting Scripture to melody, writing songs for the guitar masses being introduced at the seminary. He had no idea that this humble habit, born of heartache, would one day carry a song around the world.

Lenny left seminary in 1968 without taking holy orders, for God had a different calling in mind. In 1969 he met a young woman named Marian, just two weeks after she had left the convent where she had spent six years as a nun. A former seminarian and a former nun; only the Lord could write such a love story. They married in 1970.

Fired for Too Much Jesus

Lenny took up teaching, and by his own cheerful admission, he was terrible at staying employed. “I was fired from every high school I taught in, public or Catholic,” he said. “I would have kids finish their assignments in four days and on Fridays I asked them to bring their Bibles. All day long we studied God’s Word. I brought my guitar, and we sang songs together. I had a great time, but it was too much for the school authorities to handle. So, they all fired me – from four different high schools.”

At one school, his dismissal came after he stood up for a mistreated student, a stand that cost him dearly with the administration. At the others, it was simply too much Jesus talk in class. Lenny found the whole matter perhaps a bit naive on his part, thinking that talking about Jesus was more important than teaching Latin or English literature. But history would prove his priorities exactly right.

By 1973, Lenny had rendered himself unemployable in the classroom. He had a wife, a young son, an apartment, a car, and lots of bills to pay. A highly educated man, he sought whatever work he could find, painting houses and doing carpentry, and often he could not find even that. Depression settled over him, and it settled deep. So low did Lenny sink that he later described it as reaching bottom. But it is at the bottom where we finally look up, and Lenny was about to look up.

Ten Minutes and Isaiah 52

One evening, Lenny came home in a grim and dejected state and sat down to read his Bible. He had been working through the Book of Isaiah, and that night his reading brought him to Isaiah 52:6-7:

“Therefore, my people shall know my name: Therefore they shall know in that day that I am he that doth speak: behold it is I. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!”

As Lenny read the words “Thy God reigneth,” his heart began pounding in his chest, for God was speaking directly to him: “I will bring you through this, and you will shine as the sun. Everything is fine.” The dark cloud lifted. Lenny picked up his guitar, and in about ten minutes, he had one verse and a chorus:

How lovely on the mountains are the feet of Him
Who brings good news, good news
Announcing peace, proclaiming news of happiness
Our God reigns, our God reigns!

Our God reigns! Our God reigns!
Our God reigns! Our God reigns!

Lenny never claimed much credit for those ten minutes. “It wasn’t so much that I wrote it as I received it,” he said. The depressed and jobless teacher had been handed a gift from heaven, and he did not yet know just how far that gift would travel.

How Our God Reigns Spread Around the World

A few weeks later, Lenny presented the song to his church. Not long after, Bob Mumford, one of the most widely traveled Bible teachers of the charismatic renewal, visited Lenny’s congregation in New Jersey and heard the song. Mumford loved it, and as he traveled from church to church and conference to conference around the world over the next few years, he taught it everywhere he went. The popular singer Evie Tornquist soon recorded it, greatly accelerating its flight. In 1979, an Australian publisher included it in the songbook Scripture in Song Volume I, carrying it to congregations across the globe. Church by church, country by country, the little chorus written in ten minutes was becoming one of the founding songs of the modern worship movement.

The song still had only one verse, and here the story takes a curious turn. A pastor in England decided to add verses of his own. Lenny asked him not to, but the pastor insisted, and his version spread through the UK all the same. Rather than growing bitter, Lenny let the episode spur him on, and over the next few years he completed four more verses of his own, verses drawn from the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53: the Lord who was despised, rejected, and led like a lamb to the slaughter, all before rising in triumph. What began as a simple Scripture chorus had become a full gospel hymn.

In the late 1970s, all three of the big Christian music publishers passed on publishing the song. It seemed a closed door, but by now Lenny knew what God does with closed doors. He kept his copyright and founded his own company, New Jerusalem Music, a decision that provided for his family for decades to come. Indeed, it was the very fulfillment of the promise God had spoken to him over that open Bible: you will get through this, and you will do very well.

The hymn’s reach eventually extended to the highest places in Christendom. Pope John Paul II called Our God Reigns “his favorite liturgical song in English,” and it was sung during his historic 1982 visit to Britain, where the song became especially beloved in Scotland. In 2010, it was sung at the Papal Mass for Pope Benedict XVI at Bellahouston Park in Scotland. Lenny, the former Catholic seminarian turned Protestant songwriter, noted that the Catholic publishers remain the only ones who print all five of his original verses; it seems some are hesitant to sing of meekness and the slaughter-house, but the Catholic hymnals kept the whole gospel arc intact. Today, Our God Reigns has been recorded on over 55 albums, printed in 35 songbooks and hymnals, and translated into more than 20 languages.

Crucifixion Before Resurrection

Looking back on his life, Lenny came to be grateful for every firing, for each was a door God closed before opening a better one. “We must not forget that suffering is the very thing God uses to refine and strengthen us,” he wrote. “Jesus set the pattern that crucifixion comes before resurrection.” The loneliness of seminary gave him the guitar. The ache of hard years gave him the Psalms. The lost jobs gave him the bottom, and the bottom gave him Isaiah 52.

Wherever you find yourself today, whatever door has just closed in your face, remember the unemployed schoolteacher with his Bible open on a dark evening in 1973. The God who reigned over Lenny’s closed doors reigns over yours as well, and He may be only ten minutes away from showing you what He has planned.

“The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”
– Isaiah 52:10