Fred Kaan

The Reverend Dr Frederik Hermanus Kaan (27 July 1929 – 4 October 2009) was a clergyman of Dutch origin who served in the Congregational Church in Britain (subsequently part of the United Reformed Church) and a prodigious hymnwriter.

Early life Kaan was born in Haarlem, Netherlands, and his teenage years coincided with the Nazi occupation. His parents were committed anti-Nazis who were active in the Dutch Resistance; guns and fugitives were hidden in the family home. The family were affected by the Nazi induced famine in early 1945, when three of Kaan's grandparents died.

Ministry Kaan had become a pen-friend of an English Congregationalist and through this contact was attracted to the denomination. In 1952 he commenced studies at Western College, Bristol, and in 1955 he was ordained as a Congregational minister and took up his first pastorate at the Windsor Road Congregational Church in Barry, south Wales. In 1963, he was called to Pilgrim Church in Plymouth, where the congregation were particularly responsive to his writing talents. During his pastorate in Plymouth, the first edition of Pilgrim Praise was published in 1968, going into second and third editions in 1972 and 1975. Paul Oestreicher commissioned a hymn for Remembrance Sunday, sung for the first time in Coventry Cathedral, but (in Oestreicher's opinion), freeing it of its anachronistic nationalist theology; Kaan's "For the Healing of the Nations" inspired the title of his biography by Gillian Warson.