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Jim's PERSPECTIVENovember 05, 2014Back in the early 1970s Scott Ross, a disc jockey from New York’s WINS, started a syndicated radio program featuring Christian music in the formative years of the genre known as “Contemporary Christian”, or CCM, played alongside popular music of the day. Scott, now an interviewer on CBN, talks to persons outside Christian circles, and he has been roundly criticized by some for doing so. However, criticism of Scott first surfaced when he conceived the radio program, The Scott Ross Show. He had become a born-again Christian (the subject of his 1976 auto-biographical book, Scott Free), but prior to that he had been a major figure in rock music promotion, having developed relationships among the elite artists—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and others. Without apology he played James Tayler, Joni Mitchell, The Doobie Brothers, and scads of other so-called “secular” artists in conjunction with The Second Chapter of Acts, Keith Green, Love Song, Phil Keaggy, and many other so-called “Christian” artists, making comparisons and contrasts from his own Christian perspective. The show was canceled not long into its run, but just before leaving the airways, Scott commented on the nature of the criticism. It was coming mostly from Christians. That is to say, Christians had been complaining about his playing the secular tunes amidst the Christian ones. Apparently there was not much complaint in the other direction: non- Christians were not the ones complaining about his playing Christian music amidst the secular, popular songs of the era. The story of my own musical life in a “Christian” context involves the use of secular musical forms as vehicles to convey spiritual realities. The following incident serves as an example of the kind of resistance I have been dealing with from Day One. In 1976 I began traveling with Earl Tyson as the musical part of his evangelistic ministry. The very first time was in a little United Methodist Church in Kansas. We spent a week there doing a revival. At the end of the week, a man (probably in his forties) came up to me and said, “Jim, when you began playing on Sunday morning, I couldn’t stand you. But, you know, as the week went on, and the more I listened, I thought, ‘This isn’t too bad.’” He was really serious, but he spoke those words to me in kindness. He meant it as praise. I have an affectionate name for that kind of response: “a back-handed compliment.” That’s when you knock someone upside the head while saying something nice to them. Oh, well, it ended on a positive note. In the 80s I pastored a little church in Southside Virginia. A woman, one the pillars of the congregation, had asked me during the Christmas season that year if I would sit at the piano in the sanctuary and softy play carols and songs of the season while people of the county’s Historical Society and other guests came through the 18th century building on their annual Candlelight Tour. I did, and it went very well. However, just a couple of months later I played one of my songs, “When Jesus Returns,” during a morning worship service. Picture me sitting at the piano with sleeves of my black robe hanging down and touching the keys. By the way, this was the only church in which I ever preached while wearing a robe. I did that to placate the more urban, “up-town” parishioners whose tradition expected the pastor to wear a robe in the pulpit. But that’s another story. At the end of the service, the aforementioned woman was waiting for me in the vestibule. She was angry. She said to me—and this is pretty much a word-for-word quote—“Jim Radford, for the life of me I don’t understand how it is possible for you to play what I myself have heard you play, and yet you insist on doing this MESS that you play in church (and, yes, she emphasized the word “MESS.”). I didn’t actually respond, and I simply made light of it, even laughing it off. But, truth be told, it hurt. However, I was not about to let her see that. This saint (and I mean that) has gone on up to Glory, but of all my parishioners in my plus-thirty-year ministerial career, she was the Absolute-Number-One-Sitting- Atop-My-List-of-Hard-to-Love-People. But I insist that she was a good, Christian woman. And “hard to love” people, of all people, need to be loved, although she did not care for me, and was particularly disdainful of the music I chose to write and play. “When Jesus Returns,” in my own non-humble estimation, is a well-written piece both lyrically and musically. It has a “Black Church” flavor, which I tend to love. I think, as much as anything, the lady had a problem with the song from a stylistic standpoint. It is rhythmically lively, and a “happy” song. Still, it maybe is too much for some churches. A friend of mine describes such songs as “too hip for the room.” In any case, I know perfectly well in my heart-of-hearts that the song is anointed, and that God and Heaven are pleased with it. I’ll have to wait until I get there for this lady, who has gone on before me, and me to work out our differences. The preceding “vignettes” are just two examples of other similar encounters I had while saying and doing spiritual things in a secular musical context. Fast forwarding to now, I wish I could say that circumstances are different in our time. In a sense they are. Baby Boomers are now the elder states-persons, and we grew up during the advent of Elvis and The Beatles. Nonetheless, there are a lot of Christians who do not believe that “secular” music has any credibility or place in the Body of Christ, nor do the “Jungle Rhythms” that serve as the basis for Rock-and-Roll. My brother is a fine piano technician/rebuilder/tuner who once had as a client a fundamentalist Bible College down in North Carolina. The president, just a few years ago, wrote a book about CCM that denounced it as demonic and having the same pagan origins as its secular counterpart. My brother, who also loves music—particularly Rock-and-Roll and jazz— now refers to the Bible College as “a former client.” The question, “Does God use non-Christians to do his work?” is controversial, to say the least. Consider the Old Testament precedent in which God used Egypt, in the days of Joseph and Jacob, to protect his people Israel during a time of severe famine. Or that He used the daughter of a Pharaoh to care for and raise Moses, the deliverer of Israel. Or, during the diaspora at the time of the Babylonian captivity, that God used Cyrus the Great, a Persian, whom the prophet Isaiah calls a “messiah” (not THE messiah, mind you, it just means “chosen, or anointed, one”) to rescue the Israelites from their captors and send them back home along with money to re-build the Temple in Jerusalem. Most Christians would agree that in that situation God does use “not-of-God” people (read: Gentiles), or “outsiders” to do his will, when it serves his larger purposes regarding the benefit of his people. But there are those who would reject the idea that God would ever use “not-of-God” people to speak to things his own people are not willing to address. For example, Gordon Sumner (aka “Sting”—a bona fide Rock Star), who happens to be a fabulous musician, some years ago wrote what has now become a classic song: “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.” I realize that the following statement is going to meet with disapproval on the part of some Christian brothers and sisters, but I feel the need to say it anyway. Admittedly, while perhaps not with the same weight, or “gravitas,” as God using a nation or its leader to perform a service for the “people of God,” I believe that he has used many so-called “secular” musicians to say things, musically and/or lyrically, that none of “his people” would think to say. I put quotation marks around “his people” to indicate that I meant it as a tongue-in-cheek comment: I would not presume to say who are, or who are not, “his people.” “The Lord knoweth them that are his” is a maxim for me. That would include those who are not yet aware that they are his people, as well as those who consciously may not regard themselves as “his” people, but who God regards as his people because one day they will be. I felt led (that’s right: by the Holy Spirit) to learn and to record the song, “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” and I came up with what I think is a neat, though slightly different, way to do it. While staying true to its structure and those great chords that drive it, I changed the meter and the melody slightly as a better fit for my altered meter of 8/8, or 3+3+2/8. When my brother, the piano tuner who is also a Christian, heard me play it while I was still in the process of learning it, he remarked, “Well, it depends on who Sting has in mind.” I said, “No. It depends on who I have in mind. I’m totally thinking about Jesus.” And anyway, it is less important to me that Sting knows God than that God knows Sting. Again, “The Lord knoweth them that are his…, and, in my world, that means God makes provisions and allowances for those who may not know whose they are. Yet. It’s not just the line, “If I ever lose my faith in you” that makes me want to do this song. In fact, I believe every word of it is true, from beginning to end. I sing without reservation “You could say I lost my faith in the Holy Church” (this is a statement about the corruption of ecclesiastical institutions.)….You could say I lost my belief in our politicians (“they all look like game show hosts to me,” too)….I never saw a miracle of science that didn’t go from a blessing to a curse….I never saw a military solution that didn’t end up as something worse (two true statements if ever there were ones). It has occurred to me that God had to use an agnostic (Sting’s own reference to himself) in order to write a Christian response to an increasingly secular world. I don’t believe that many (if any) of the Christian writers would go down the avenues that Sumner has. Evangelicals, historically, have always been friendly with the military. It would be highly unlikely that a Christian song writer would ever come up with a lyric critical of a military approach to the world’s problems. Furthermore, it makes me wonder why no one seems to be writing Christian songs that protest and confront the world’s orientation. I don’t hear a lot out there that rings true prophetically in tone or in content. The deceased Christian song writer, Mark Heard, came as close as anyone. Canada’s Bruce Cockburn (pronounced KO-burn), who is outside the mainstream of “Christian” music comes close now. Both song writers are examples of those who have “blurred the lines” of secular and spiritual. Interesting to me, and in view of a world in which many believe God to be sovereign, is that even in our present reality—one in which we are living in “enemy-occupied territory” (a C.S. Lewis expression)—even so I believe that God, no matter what the temporary circumstances, is still the rightful ruler of the world and the One who will have the Final Say in all things. I also think that it is ironic, in a world ultimately ruled by God—and not the Prince of Darkness—that in poll after poll, the best song ever written is often said to be “Over the Rainbow” by Harold Arlen and E.Y. (Yip) Harburg. One would think—haphazardly—that God would have orchestrated a way for the “greatest-song-ever-written” polls to list, “How Great Thou Art,” or some other more overtly “Godly” song or hymn that would glorify Himself. But I would venture to say that “Over the Rainbow” is as “Godly” a song—and as “other-worldly”—as one will ever write or hear. And I don’t believe that God would disagree: When all the world is a hopeless jumble I also don’t think that the-God-who-is, the God who would have us pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven….” thinks in terms of secular vs spiritual, or outsider vs insider, or Greek vs Jew, or male vs female I believe that everything is spiritual, and that includes all that is yet-to-be redeemed. - Jim Radford |
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©2013 Jim Radford. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
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