Faith in Every Footstep

In 1995, the Church formed a committee, chaired by Elder M. Russell Ballard, to plan the 150th anniversary of the pioneers' 1847 arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. One committee member was K. Newell Dayley — a BYU music professor with an unusual résumé: a jazz trumpeter who founded BYU's celebrated jazz ensemble Synthesis, and the composer of the hymn tune for 'Lord, I Would Follow Thee.'

Elder Ballard later told the story simply: 'Newell Dayley was on our committee and I said, "Newell, we need a song." We didn't know what it would be. I think "Faith in Every Footstep" was born by Newell Dayley as he prepared that song.' The title didn't follow the theme — the theme followed the song.

Dayley's own account of the writing is quieter. His son was preparing for a mission in England — the homeland of some of Dayley's own pioneer ancestors — and father and son were memorizing scripture passages together every day. One morning he woke thinking about those ancestors.

'Feelings of gratitude,' he wrote, 'coupled with a flow of spiritual insights from scriptures I had been memorizing impelled me to begin writing my thoughts in verse.' Nine verses poured out; then a chorus; text and music were finished within weeks. Fittingly, the Church's study resource pairs the hymn not with trail scriptures but with missionary ones — the faith of the footsteps ahead, not just behind.

In 1997 the phrase was everywhere. Elder Ballard launched it from the general conference pulpit; the Tabernacle Choir sang the anthem in the April 1997 conference; and from April to July a re-enactment wagon train — dozens of wagons, handcarts, and hundreds of walkers — retraced the 1,300-mile Mormon Trail from Winter Quarters, Nebraska, to the Salt Lake Valley.

When the wagons rolled into This Is the Place Park on July 22, 1997, an estimated fifty thousand people were waiting. President Gordon B. Hinckley told the trekkers, 'You have brought to the attention of millions upon millions of people across the world the story of the unparalleled migration of our people.' Behind it all, one song kept playing.

'Faith in Every Footstep' outlived its anniversary. The phrase settled permanently into Latter-day Saint vocabulary — Elder Ballard was still building conference talks on it twenty-five years later — and the song traveled abroad, entering the Church's Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, and Romanian hymnbooks before it was ever in the English one.

That was remedied on February 13, 2025, when it was released as hymn #1022 in Hymns—For Home and Church: a sesquicentennial anthem finally given a permanent home, for a people still trying to walk with faith in every footstep.