For unto Us a Child Is Born

Susan H. Peterson (1950–2004) was an American mathematician, Christian missiologist, editor, and prolific modern hymn writer. Blending an analytical educational background with a deep passion for global missions and disability rehabilitation, Peterson spent the final years of her life executing a unique literary project: systematically writing 100 scriptural hymns set to time-tested, historic melodies.

Early Life and Academic Foundations

Susan Peterson was born on October 17, 1950, in Port Angeles, Washington. Because her father was a dedicated employee of the National Park Service, her childhood was uniquely shaped by the natural beauty and history of various National Parks and Historic Sites across the United States.

Demonstrating early analytical brilliance, she attended Stanford University, where she graduated in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. Though initially planning a career in the burgeoning field of computer science, she pivoted toward Christian service, completing a one-year graduate program at the Multnomah School of the Bible (now Multnomah University) in Portland, Oregon, earning a Certificate of Bible in 1973.

A Career Dedicated to Missions and Literacy

Peterson chose to apply her analytical and office skills directly to global Christian ministries rather than the corporate tech sector. Her life’s work spanned editorial consulting, tech-based Bible translation, and service to the disabled.

Global Missiology and Editing

In 1976, Peterson traveled to East Africa to serve in Tanzania under the auspices of the Africa Inland Mission. Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest, she mastered word processing, editing, and desktop publishing. For over a decade, she served as a key editor for the Missions Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA). She typeset and polished foundational global missiological texts, including:

• Working Your Way to the Nations

• Too Valuable to Lose

• Send Me!

• Global Missiology for the 21st Century

• Doing Member Care Well

Bible Preservation and Digitization

For several years, Peterson partnered with Wycliffe Associates. She worked on specialized technical teams tasked with keyboarding and digitizing physical Bibles and New Testaments that had been printed before the advent of computers. Her work migrating these texts into digital databases allowed modern translation networks to easily update, adapt, and print the Scriptures for diverse language groups globally.

Advocacy for the Visually Impaired

Driven by a desire to serve vulnerable populations, Peterson went back to school in 1990 to study blind rehabilitation. She graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1991 with a Master of Arts in Rehabilitation Teaching of the Blind. For the next ten years while living in Fort Collins, Colorado, she balanced her day job as an editor with spare-time volunteer work teaching independent living skills to blind and visually impaired adults.

The Centenary Hymn Project (1997–2004)

In 1997, Peterson embarked on a structured creative endeavor: she set a personal goal to write exactly 100 original hymns.

As a mathematician and biblical scholar, her songwriting process was highly methodical and structured. Rather than composing new music, she utilized the historic framework of metrical hymnody—the practice of writing poetic stanzas to match the exact syllable counts (meters) of classic melodies. Her formula was elegant and consistent:

1. Select a specific passage of Scripture.

2. Draft a precise, poetic English paraphrase of that text.

3. Match the poetic meter to an enduring, historic hymn tune that complemented the text’s emotional and theological tone.

Through this method, Peterson successfully wedded direct scriptural translation with timeless melodies that had already stood the test of time, creating a massive body of music that was both doctrinally rigorous and easily sung by local congregations.

Notable Metrical Hymns by Biblical Category

Praise Be Unto Our God (Based on Ephesians 1)

Praise be unto our God and Father of our Lord,

Who has in Jesus Christ blessed us with one accord.

He chose us in Christ space before the world began,

That we should holy be, blameless before His hand.

Susan Peterson moved back to Oregon in 2002, where she continued her digital missions work until her untimely death at the age of 53 on July 23, 2004, in Peralta, New Mexico. Her finished corpus of nearly 100 hymns remains a staple on digital hymnological databases like Hymnary.org and Hymntime.com, serving as a monument to a life that beautifully balanced mathematical precision with a servant's heart.