Continuing the “10 albums that influenced your musical taste” thing I got from my wife and daughter.
As I jot down the backstories associated with this pair of albums, I realize they aren’t probably going to connect with anyone but church folk… but that’s a risk I’ll have to take.
I grew up in church and learned to play a number of 80s & early 90s “church songs” – hymns, praise choruses, and occasional hits in the Contemporary Christian Music genre. A lot of that was to entertain or bless my parents and friends of the family.
Some of it was because our Associate Pastor was a phenomenal pianist who I’m told played backup keys for some high-profile names in the 60s and 70s before coming to Jesus. (I’m trying to find proof of this, but you don’t often see “backup keyboardist” listed anywhere.) Regardless, it was always a treat to see Pastor Bob get rockin’ on the baby grand, and I wanted to learn to be at least half as good as him.
But imitating someone’s style isn’t the same as pouring out your heart in a song. While I prayed a prayer at a young age and professed faith in Christ all my life, I went through an all-too-typical teenage back-and-forth of commitment and complacency or even apathy about my faith.
After joining the Air Force in late ’94, I went through almost two years of training before I got to my first duty station in September ’96. By then I had gotten myself into trouble with a combination of more credit card debt than I knew how to handle, and less responsibility or attention to detail on the job than the Air Force expected of its members. Everything seemed to be falling apart, and at what felt like the bottom, I turned back to God.
Basically, I admitted that if I was going to do this “believe in Jesus” thing, it had to be real or else what was the point?
There was a little church off base that welcomed me in even though I was smoking in the parking lot. They seemed to care more about me than about telling me off for how messed up I was.
When I said I wanted to go there again, the acquaintance who gave me a ride said, “I don’t go there often, but I know someone who goes every week, and she lives in the dorm next to yours.”
I met a lovely young lady named Jami that day who offered to give me a ride to church each week… and later allowed me to talk through a lot of the stuff I had to deal with in my heart in order to grow up (at least a little). She also happened to be one of maybe two or three sincere Christians I knew at the time who felt like peers, so we talked a lot about scripture and spiritual growth. Soon after, as we spent more and more time together, we decided to officially call it “dating,” and a few months after that, I asked her to marry me.
Jami had some albums by this guy, Dennis Jernigan, who sang songs that felt more honest and deep than a simple “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it” that we might sing in the congregation at church.
Jernigan is also a pianist, and something of a psalmist. He is prolific in his songwriting, and the subjects aren’t all the happy Christian music you might expect Ned Flanders to listen to.
All the Jernigan albums are great if you care for this kind of music and message, but this album, Break My Heart O God, particularly changed my musical tastes.
A friend of mine from my new church asked me to accompany him on “You Are My All In All,” which he wanted to sing as a farewell to the congregation before he moved back to the States. I was happy to play, but as we practiced in private, I also sang along.
“Dave,” he said, “you should totally sing too. We could harmonize. It would be great.”
I was convinced my voice was best left unheard, so I resisted at first, but eventually I agreed. That invitation and encouragement led to me joining up with the worship team, not just to play keys but to sing–and eventually to leadership positions and paying positions in music.
If I had to pick one album that represented the shift in both my heart and my musical taste toward incorporating praise and worship, it is “Break My Heart O God.”
However, not long after joining up with the team, the worship director introduced us to some new songs and a couple of albums that came out from some obscure Christian group with a website called WorshipTogether. Seemed like a bunch of (relatively) edgy stuff from churches and musicians in the UK.
There were these folks I hadn’t heard of before, like Matt Redman, Martin Smith and Delirious?, Stuart Townend, Tim Hughes… eventually David Crowder and Chris Tomlin, among so many others.
This music felt different than the book full of short praise choruses from labels like Integrity’s Hosanna! or Maranatha. And while Hillsong was taking over so much of that market share with what I thought was also good music and meaningful worship, all of this stuff being imported from the UK seemed like where it was at.
(Maybe I should make a Cutting Edge joke here, since that album from Delirious? is almost a tie for deserving the ninth slot. Anyone still reading probably does get that reference.)
This makes me think of one of the best periods of music ministry that I’ve experienced. We would jam out a worship set for almost an hour, listen to the pastor preach for about an hour, and then close with a song… which often turned into another half hour or hour of people just wanting to worship and praise God through singing, dancing, clapping, or just bowing there before the altar.
Not everything about that time was perfect, but it set the bar for what I think of as solid, spontaneous, Spirit-filled worship with a sense of the presence of God… and that’s a place I’ve been returning to as often as possible since.
A few weeks back, I wrote a song — something I haven’t done in quite some time — based on a similar theme coming to me from several angles.
