The author of the hymn Amazing Grace led an extraordinary life. At one point he was virtually a slave himself on a tiny island off the coast of Sierra Leone. Later he captained slave-trading ships on three voyages. But the greatest portion of his life was spent as one rescued from the slavery of sin, in serving others through his deep desire to serve Jesus Christ. Newton was born in London on 24th July 1725. His mother, Elizabeth, was a religious woman while his father was a ship's captain who worked for the East India Company. Converted during a severe storm at sea, Newton struggled alone to live a new life. He immediately stopped swearing and began to treat others with respect. But he grew very slowly in spiritual understanding until he met a Christian captain in St Kitts who explained the gospel to him more fully.

© John Newton Project

Newton then worked for 9 years as Tide Surveyor in Liverpool docks, where he felt called into the ministry. He became the minister of a church in Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he lived for 16 years. One New Year’s Day in Olney he preached from a passage in 1 Chronicles 17 on David’s prayer of thanksgiving, and wrote a new hymn specially to accompany his sermon. This hymn, Amazing Grace, was first sung on Friday morning 1 January 1773.

Through his friendship with the Christian philanthropist John Thornton, Newton got to know Thornton’s sister Hannah, and, through her, her young nephew William Wilberforce, who had come to live with them for a while.

When Newton later moved to London to be the rector of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, it was to mark the beginning of a long and close friendship that would have a profound impact on the entire country and stretch across the seas.

One Sunday evening a very troubled young man came to his vestry door to deliver a letter: “Sir, I wish to have some serious conversation with you… Remember that I must be secret.”

William Wilberforce, MP for Yorkshire, made an appointment to meet Newton at his home in Charles Square, Hoxton, on Wednesday 6 December 1785. Wilberforce was in a spiritual crisis, wanting to return to the faith he had once known, but wondering if this meant he should leave politics. Newton persuaded him not to do this. He explained that God had deliberately brought him into such a position of national influence in order to do good. “When I came away,” wrote Wilberforce, “I found my mind in a calm, tranquil state, more humbled and looking more devoutly up to God.”

For the next twenty years, Newton gently mentored the young man for whom he had been praying since he first met him as a child. Wilberforce invited Newton to stay at his home and he visited Newton often to consult him, to pray with him and to learn from him.

On Sunday 28 October 1787 John Newton was in Wilberforce’s home where the two men were in deep discussion. Wilberforce wanted advice from his mentor on a very demanding project. How could he gain essential support from the wide range of people he would need to work with, without compromising his Christian faith? They talked earnestly about his project. That night Wilberforce wrote in his journal, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the reformation of manners and the abolition of the slave trade.”

Newton was so moved by the conversation that he wrote a few days later to Wilberforce with some guiding principles. His letters to the young MP, soon to be published by The John Newton Project, reveal enormous support and encouragement throughout the twenty-year struggle and are filled with wise spiritual counsel, great compassion, friendly humour and astute insight into national affairs.

“If therefore you meet with some unkind reflections and misrepresentations, from men of unfeeling and mercenary spirits,” he wrote at a particularly difficult time for Wilberforce in the abolition struggle, “you will bear it patiently, when you think of Him, who endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself.”

With his inside knowledge of the slave trade, Newton’s objective evidence given before parliament’s Privy Council carried much weight. The Privy Council commended him for his final voyage on the African, during which he lost no crew and no enslaved Africans – a statistic unheard of on ordinary voyages in those days let alone on slave ships. But praise for the consideration he practised while engaged in a commerce “so iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive, as the African Slave Trade” embarrassed the former captain deeply.

His church being in the heart of the city, just a few yards from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, and situated in Lombard Street (which was teaming with financiers, bankers, with the famous Lloyd’s coffee-house nearby), Newton had the ear of some of the central movers and shakers of the nation’s economy. He preached directly on the atrocities of the slave trade and its complete unacceptance by Christian standards.

His Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, published in 1788, was distributed by the Anti-Slavery Society to every Member of Parliament.

When the first reading of Wilberforce’s Motion for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was carried by 124:49 in 1804 Newton wrote immediately to him, “Though I can scarcely see the paper before me, I must attempt to express my thankfulness to the Lord, and to offer my congratulations to you, for the success which he has so far been pleased to give to your unwearied endeavours for the abolition of the slave trade, which I have considered as a millstone, sufficient - of itself sufficient - to sink such an enlightened and highly favoured nation as ours to the bottom of the sea.”

The Bill gained Royal Assent on 25 March 1807, just a few days after Newton’s anniversary of his own spiritual “redemption from slavery” during that storm at sea on 21 March almost 60 years earlier.

John Newton died that same year, on 21st December 1807, aged 82. He composed his own epitaph, which states aptly, “a servant of slaves”.

The John Newton Project is promoting the Christian teaching and principles which were the crucial foundation for the transformation of society through Newton and his colleagues.