This is an interesting text about living the Reign of God where we are – if that happens to be a city. Shirley Murray went to different places in her texts and this is one of them. She was the most prolific social gospel text writer I’ve heard of, maybe even surpassing John Bell.
It is in Alleluia Aotearoa. I have been linking to Philip Garside Books, which seems the easiest place to buy the pdf version of this hymnbook, but of course they have migrated their pages to a new site to leave me with lots of dead links. This link is live for now. It is worth it for the Shirley Murray songs on their own.
The text and sheet music are at Hope Publishing. In this case they both use the same setting, WELLINGTON by Colin Gibson. If you look at the sheet music there, you may understand why I didn’t slavishly follow the backing. I’d love to hear it played as written because it looks wild, but I noticed it would fit a drone pattern on Dm for most of this song and used that instead. Maybe the city is a pastiche of Mumbai.