Remembering and Wondering

Lately I've been scouring the Internet for CDs of Christian music from the 70's. At first I attributed this urge to revisit that music as simple nostalgia. Now I'm coming to realize that my spirit is trying to make connections and bring them to the surface. It's the beginning of an excursion into why things are different now. Is it that I'm different? That the world is different?

As we were going to sleep last night I was talking to my wife Barb about a set of videos I ordered during one of these online searches. It's a two-volume set called First Love. Several sites offer it, but it was produced by Steve Grieson's company and can be bought from them here. It came in the mail yesterday and once I put volume one in the player, I couldn't stop watching it. It's a curious mix of documentary, interview, and music. Grieson assembled a group of artists who are associated with the Jesus Movement of the sixties and seventies: Chuck Girard, Barry McGuire, Annie Herring, Randy Matthews, Honeytree, Melody Green -- names everyone who came to know the Lord during those decades would recognize -- and has them just talk and sing.

The impact of the content blew me away as I watched people like Terry Clark and Annie Herring talk not just about their music but how they got to their music. I'm still reeling from the emotions that bombarded me. Things are so different now. Chuck Girard commented that people come up to him these days and ask him to listen to their demos or to give them advice on how to break into Christian music. He commented at one point that he is reasonably sure that Keith Green couldn't even be signed to a label today -- he would be considered too confrontational.

Several things struck me as I watched, and I'm still sorting through them, but here are a couple of observations.

First, what is now an industry began as a simple response -- an externalized expression of what had happened internally in these peoples' lives. None of them had "Christian recording artist" as their goal. Their music was the sonic rippling from the Holy Spirit's disruption of the status quo. God was moving and their music poured out -- like a firehose -- from deep inside their spirits as lives were changed.

Second, these were broken people. At one point Annie Herring remarks that everything that could be taken from her had been taken and that she was totally empty. In what is probably the most poignant point in the video, Terry Clark tells a sobering story of how his experiences in the military brought him to the point where he decided he no longer wanted to be identified with humanity. He became, for all intents and purposes, an animal because of the horrors he had seen and experienced. At his lowest point, when he had been committed to an institution and diagnosed as being beyond hope of recovery, God said to him "I know what you've been through -- I know how horrifying humanity can be. The difference between us is that, while you decided you no longer wanted to be a human being, I decided to become one." Out of this kind of brokenness God birthed something new -- not just in individual hearts but for a whole generation.

So why are things different now? Barb and I talked for a while into the night about it, and I realized that, even if I haven't sorted it all out in my mind yet, I do know that one thing hasn't changed. The Church has moved on and what was once alive and fresh seems now to have become institutionalized. We are stale and have wrapped ourselves in a subcultural cocoon to shield ourselves from a world we consider a threat. But the Holy Spirit who moved hearts then has certainly not changed. God is the constant across all the variability. In the late sixties, he chose to begin a work using a generation whose culture had rejected it -- "filthy hippies" with drug addictions and criminal records who had lived on the streets and were deemed worthless by both the Church and society.

We'd do well to take a long hard look at that.