~Home~ ~Life Lines~ ~Study Surveys~ ~Bibliology~ ~Tracts & Articles~ ~Our Printed Materials~
Singing is so much a part of Christian worship, a part of nearly every service and meeting we have attended throughout our lives in church, that it is easy to take it for granted and fail to recognize its significance. In fact singing has been the very backbone of worship not only throughout the church age but also throughout Israel’s history from ancient times.
Not only are we men endowed, uniquely, among earthly creatures, with the capacity of speech, we can also make music with the voice, and this wonderful ability is to be employed in worshiping the Lord our God. Music has a profound affect upon us (for good or for evil), and the sound of the human voice in singing has down through the ages been the central feature of music. In fact, most instruments merely mimic the sound produced by the vibrating chords of our voices in song.
The Bible stresses the importance of singing in the worship of the Lord in a number of ways:
1) Singing to the Lord was the response of the Israelites in one of the first references to singing in the Bible, the single greatest deliverance of God’s people, the dividing of the Red Sea and subsequent drowning of their former captors and oppressors, Egypt’s Pharoah and his armies:
Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea....And Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. (Exodus 15:1,20, KJV)
2) The prominence of singing to the Lord is evident from the frequency with which the phrase first found in Exodus 15 above, "I will sing unto the Lord" or some form of it, such as, "I will sing praise unto the Lord," or "...to thy name," or "...to thee" occurs in Scripture—some 33 times in all:
But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love; for you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble. O my Strength, I sing praise to you; you, O God, are my fortress, my loving God. (Psalm 59:16,17) I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. (Psalm 104:33, KJV)
3) The prominence of singing is also evident by the many exhortations in Scripture, some 37 in all, to "Sing unto the Lord" (or some form of it, such as "Sing praise [or praises or psalms] unto God [or him])"—and rejoice before Him in song:
Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world. Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel among you. (Isaiah 12:5,6) Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts. (1 Chronicles 16:9)
Sing to the Lord, all the earth; proclaim his salvation day after day. (1 Chronicles 16:23)
Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. For God is the King of all the earth; sing to him a psalm of praise. (Psalms 47:6,7)
Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world. Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel among you." (Isaiah 12:5,6)
4) Besides the references using the phrases, "I will sing" and "Sing to the Lord" in some form, there are 66 more references to singing to the Lord in the Bible, making over 136 in all:
He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40:2,3) I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving. (Psalm 69:30)
Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. (Psalm 95:1,2)
5) Singing was a central part of worship before the presence of God in the Tabernacle and Temple:
So the priests and Levites consecrated themselves in order to bring up the ark of the Lord, the God of Israel. And the Levites carried the ark of God with the poles on their shoulders, as Moses had commanded in accordance with the word of the Lord. David told the leaders of the Levites to appoint their brothers as singers to sing joyful songs, accompanied by musical instruments: lyres, harps and cymbals. (1 Chronicles 15:14-16) They brought the ark of God and set it inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and they presented burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before God. That day David first committed to Asaph and his associates this psalm of thanks to the Lord: Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts....Sing to the Lord, all the earth; proclaim his salvation day after day....David left Asaph and his associates before the ark of the covenant of the Lord to minister there regularly, according to each day’s requirements.(1 Chronicles 16:1,7-9,23,37)
The whole assembly bowed in worship, while the singers sang and the trumpeters played. All this continued until the sacrifice of the burnt offering was completed. When the offerings were finished, the king and everyone present with him knelt down and worshiped. King Hezekiah and his officials ordered the Levites to praise the Lord with the words of David and of Asaph the seer. So they sang praises with gladness and bowed their heads and worshiped. (2 Chronicles 29:28-30)
When the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments and with trumpets, and the Levites (the sons of Asaph) with cymbals, took their places to praise the Lord, as prescribed by David king of Israel. With praise and thanksgiving they sang to the Lord: "He is good; his love to Israel endures forever." And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. (Ezra 3:10,11)
At the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, the Levites were sought out from where they lived and were brought to Jerusalem to celebrate joyfully the dedication with songs of thanksgiving and with the music of cymbals, harps and lyres. The singers also were brought together from the region around Jerusalem—from the villages of the Netophathites, from Beth Gilgal, and from the area of Geba and Azmaveth, for the singers had built villages for themselves around Jerusalem. (Nehemiah 12:27-29)
The Israelites who were present in Jerusalem celebrated the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days with great rejoicing, while the Levites and priests sang to the Lord every day, accompanied by the Lord’s instruments of praise. (2 Chronicles 30:21)
Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. (Psalm 100:2)
The Lord will save me, and we will sing with stringed instruments all the days of our lives in the temple of the Lord. (Isaiah 38:20)
And you will sing as on the night you celebrate a holy festival; your hearts will rejoice as when people go up with flutes to the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Israel. (Isaiah 30:29)
The trumpeters and singers joined in unison, as with one voice, to give praise and thanks to the Lord. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, they raised their voices in praise to the Lord and sang: "He is good; his love endures forever." Then the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God. (2 Chronicles 5:13,14)
6) Although we have no specific worship scenes described in the New Testament church like we do for the Old, singing, nevertheless, is often prescribed and commanded for Christians:
Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. (James 5:13) Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord. (Ephesians 5:18,19)
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)
7) Echoing the greatest single act of deliverence in the Old Testament, we read in the book of Revelation of the great future deliverance of the persecuted saints and their worshiping in song before the throne of God in heaven:
And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire and, standing beside the sea, those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and over the number of his name. They held harps given them by God and sang the song of Moses the servant of God and the song of the Lamb: "Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages." (Revelation 15:2,3)
8) After the institution of the Lord’s supper, a memorial of Christ’s death to be observed in all ages of the church until He returns and the most outstanding act of worship given to us in the New Testament, we read:
When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. (Matthew 26:30)
We need to think on this until it settles in on us—Jesus sang a hymn with the apostles the night He was betrayed after instituting this great memorial. Can you picture Jesus singing? I don’t know about you, but it does something to me just to think about it. I am sure you as well as I have been moved by songs and anointed singers many times. What would it have been like to hear Jesus sing? And surely this is not the only occasion on which He sang, seeing He was raised in and took an active part in Jewish worship and celebration in Nazareth and in Jerusalem, which necessarily would have involved singing.
Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says, "I will declare your name to my brothers; in the presence of the congregation I will sing your praises." (Hebrews 2:11,12)
9) The largest book in the Bible, The Psalms, is a book of songs, for the word for "psalm" in Hebrew means "song of praise." Many of these 150 Psalms were used in Israel’s public worship. In other words the Bible comes complete with its own song book. The Psalms served as a hymnal in Christian churches from the earliest times and in English-speaking churches up until the late 1800’s. Isaac Watts published probably the most popular versions of the Psalms in English in 1719, setting them in modern forms of rhyme and meter so they could more easily be sung in English churches. The singing of complete Psalms has since fallen out of favor, yet portions of many of the Psalms are still sung today in the form of choruses. By the number and placement of the Psalms in the canon, God shows how much emphasis He puts upon singing praises to Him.
10) At the close of the book of Romans, which is the most complete formal account of the gospel he preached in the New Testament, Paul closed his presentation with two Old Testament prophecies which foretold of the acceptance of the gospel primarily by the Gentiles and not the Jews. These two prophecies of this major point that Paul makes that God foreknew the rejection of the gospel and the Messiah by His own people Israel speak of the Gentiles singing praises to God:
For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God’s truth, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs so that the Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy, as it is written: "Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles; I will sing hymns to your name." Again, it says, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people." And again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and sing praises to him, all you peoples." (Romans 15:8-11)
Let me try to make this clear: God would bring salvation through Jesus Christ, which is the theme of the book of Romans; this salvation would primarily be received by Gentiles; and the result of this salvation would be that the Gentiles would sing praises to the true and living God. This again indicates the importance of the place that singing has in the church and in the Christian life.
We may have often thought of what it must have been like to hear Jesus or Paul preach, but have we ever considered what it would have been like to hear them sing? As we have shown, Jesus probably sang on many occasions, but we know for sure He sang a hymn the night He was betrayed with His disciples after the Passover and institution of the Lord’s supper. We also know that Paul sang hymns with Silas when they were bound in prison at Philippi:
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. (Acts 16:25)
Again, it does something to me to think of Paul singing.
Today we not only sing as a congregation in public worship, but we have professional singers and those who can lead the congregation in song (some of whom are paid), as well as those who sing well enough to do a "special" number in public meetings. This is much the same as it was in Israel’s worship in the Old Testament—they had "professional" singers and song leaders:
Kenaniah the head Levite was in charge of the singing; that was his responsibility because he was skillful at it. (1 Chronicles 15:22) And from among the priests....The whole company numbered 42,360, besides their 7,337 menservants and maidservants; and they also had 200 men and women singers. (Ezra 2:61,64-65)
And he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine and oil prescribed for the Levites, singers and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. (Nehemiah 13:5)
We do not know exactly what the Psalms sounded like when they were originally sung in Israel, but we do know that the Jews were Eastern people (the nations around and including Israel are today referred to as the Middle East). Sometimes we forget that Israel is part of the Asian continent. No doubt their music originally sounded like that of India and the East, quite a lot different from what our ears are accustomed to. The Hebrew language is vastly different from ours also, both in written form and the sound of it. Scholars agree that Hebrew songs did not have a definite tune or regular rhythm like our songs do. Today we have a number of styles of music that are available to us, and the thinking of most people, it seems, is that any style or form of music is suitable for worship as long as the lyrics glorify God. But this is a great shift in thinking from generations past. In fact, not so many years ago, the strongly contemporary flavor, even rock style, of charismatic worship music would not have been accepted in church services. A few years back there was still a lot of debate concerning rock music and its suitability in the church, whether for worship or for outreach. Those who opposed rock music were eventually overcome by those who argued that "all music is God’s music," and that we should avail ourselves of it all if we wanted to stay relevant to our generation. I will deal with this subject in more detail as we go on in this series, but right now I would like to relate what has happened to me in recent years concerning music and song.
In the past few years, I have become somewhat of a fan of "Southern Gospel" music ("southern" because of its origins in the southern United States around the turn of the century), which has meant quite a change since my orientation before this for the most part was "contemporary" Christian music. I grew up in the Assemblies of God denomination with the songs from their hymnbook, Melodies of Praise (and an even earlier hymnbook of theirs in my younger years). But in my youth in college in the 1960’s I got involved in the "hippie" movement of rock music and drugs and was not truly converted until I was 21, a drop out of my senior year in college. Elvis Presley and the whole rock and roll movement broke upon the American scene in the mid-1950’s while I was in Junior High School. I never liked Elvis and had only a periphial involvement in popular music through my high school years, but I did listen to the radio a lot. My real love affair with rock music began when the Beatles came over to America from England in 1964 when I was a college sophomore. I was very much captivated by their sound and their energy. In my next few years of college, I exposed myself to a variety of music including classical, folk, and early country, but ultimately it was rock music that really took me over.
I was introduced by some of my fellow students to drugs as a form of music enhancement and to "acid rock" (LSD-inspired rock) through a locally popular band which led to my dropping out of my senior year in college at the University of Texas in the fall of 1966 and heading for California to seek a career in a rock band. Because of the fervent prayers of my mother and other women in our church back home, God turned me around in a hurry and I was saved while driving my car near Los Angeles on my way back home to Texas. I had no desire for rock music from that moment forward. I recognized that it was this music and groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones that had played a large part in my becoming involved with drugs.
When I got saved in 1966, there was no such thing as "contemporary" Christian music. It was either the "inspirational" style of George Beverly Shea and all the singers with Word records in Waco or "southern gospel" groups and quartets like the Blackwood Brothers, the Happy Goodmans, the Florida Boys, the Dixie Echoes, etc. I still remember watching the "Gospel Singing Jubilee" featuring these groups on television on Sunday mornings before church and the "Gospel Singing Caravan" led by the LeFevres. I enjoyed this music but it didn’t really captivate me. It’s just that this was the only music there was at that time that glorified the Lord, so I liked it for that reason. I remember going over to my pastor’s house for youth activities, but since I was a few years older than the rest of the kids, I spent a lot of my time in the den listening to my pastor’s records. I liked the Happy Goodman Family the best; there just seemed to be more of the Lord in their singing than in the others. My pastor’s wife told me the Happy Goodmans were Pentecostal people and that Vestal would get blessed and shout in the recording studio sometimes. I liked the Goodmans more for their spirit than for their style of music, but their blend of traditional southern gospel music with a decidedly country flavor was appealing.
Not more than two years after my conversion the "Jesus movement" (an awakening of sorts among the youth of America, especially those who had been involved in the drug scene as I had been) hit the nation, and with it some big changes in gospel music. For the first time, folk and rock strains could be heard with a gospel message. Because of my rock orientation, this was more of my style of music although I felt that most of the groups and singers lacked something spiritually. None of them appealed much to me until I heard Andre Crouch for the first time in the early ‘70’s. I felt (and still feel today) that he was genuinely anointed of God. I liked the songs he wrote, which possessed that special blend of depth of meaning expressed in simple lyrics that characterizes all great songs and song writers. Before long Andre got a little wilder, much more like heavy rock, which caused me some concern because I spoke very strongly against rock music. But I tolerated this in Andre because I thought he was "spiritual" enough to pull it off without people getting caught up in the music and missing the message. None of the other "contemporary" groups that quickly sprung up seemed to have much effect on me except possibly Dallas Holm and a couple of others.
In these earlier years, I led the singing in church quite a lot and reacquainted myself with the old songs in the song book. We would sing a few of these first before going into the more popular choruses that we had heard in charismatic meetings and elsewhere. Some of these possessed a folk-type flavor, especially the "Scripture" choruses, but none of them was really "contemporary" Christian music. I also sang and traveled some with a music group made up of teens in our church. They did sing contemporary gospel songs by Andre Crouch and others while I sang some of my own compositions, mostly in a folk-rock style. In the 1970’s I didn’t listen to "southern gospel" much any more. Singing groups rarely came to our church, we had the McDuff brothers trio from Texas City not far away and a couple of other groups. I enjoyed this but my mainstay on the radio and in what records and tapes I purchased were of the more contemporary style.
In 1975-76 when I attended Rhema Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of my friends and I would gather in a side room after and between classes and play our guitars and other instruments and sing songs. Often I would break out in a kind of medley of songs one after another out of the old song book. I remember Vep Ellis, Jr., who was on the staff of the church where the school was held, once stuck his head in the room, listened a while, and said with a grin, "Somebody in here was raised in the Assemblies of God." He came from a similar background and recognized that the songs came from the A/G song book. Vep’s dad, Vep Ellis, Sr., was one all-time great southern gospel songwriters.
While we were pastoring in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, my wife and I listened to, purchased, and sang contemporary gospel music. I didn’t care for southern gospel quartets at all, until one day in about 1994 I happened to catch a few minutes of a thirty-minute promotional advertising the Bill Gaither "Homecoming" videos. The first thing that impressed me was the immediate presence of the Spirit of God. I remember saying to myself, "God is in that place" where they were singing. The anointing of the Spirit of God was quite strong and evident. This in itself was an unusual experience for me in that since we made our change from the charismatic faith movement, very little of what I saw on Christian television had any affect on me at all, that is, in a positive way. But I knew immediately that God was uncommonly present on those clips of Gaither videos I saw. I saw parts of similar promotions again over the next few months, and I felt the same way about them. Then one day one of our men in our church remarked that his mother had bought one of these videos. I immediately told him what I thought about them and asked if I might borrow it from her. He assured me that I could and in a few days I took it home and watched the video, "Turn Your Radio On." I cried through the whole thing, God’s presence was so real. Since then I have seen all the Gaither videos; in fact, we have almost all of them on loan in a video library at our church. Often with projects like this, the first few are really good and then each new one that comes out is progressively less so; but with the Gaither videos, it seems the latest ones are just as good or better than the first. I still weep somewhere in every one (and not necessarily in the sentimental portions), and it leaves an imprint of the Spirit of God upon me that lasts sometimes for hours.
You can’t watch the Gaither videos without becoming aware of the history of southern gospel music. Bill features some of the all-time great singers that are still alive as well as video clips and photographs of the old groups of the ‘40’s, ‘50’s, and ‘60’s. This sparked the desire in me to look at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions for vinyl LP records made by these groups years ago. I started with my favorites, the Happy Goodmans, and the Statesmen Quartet. I’d find some of them, bring them home and play them, and just get thrilled out of my mind. I called my mother and had her to bring me the dozen or so records we used to listen to years ago including five Happy Goodman albums, one by the Florida Boys, and one by the Blackwood Brothers. It seems I couldn’t hear enough of this good old southern gospel music, and my collection of records has grown in the last three years to over 1,000. Most of them I’ve gotten pretty cheap, too, especially compared to the 15 bucks or so you have to shell out for compact discs. I’m sure that for the 1,000 records, I have averaged far less than a dollar each. So, I say that I’m somewhat of a southern gospel music fan because I don’t like the newer groups today so much as I do the old ones—the Statesmen, Happy Goodmans, Florida Boys, the Hemphills, Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters, the old Oak Ridge Quartet, etc. And, again, inspired by the Gaither videos, we now have an "All Day Singing with Dinner On the Ground" the third Sunday of each month at the church where, after a good covered dish dinner, we learn and sing old "convention" style songs in full four-part harmony just like they do on the videos, and we are really having a time.
So, my taste in gospel music has gone through a pilgrimage just as my Christian life and theology has. Having spent 17 years in deep involvement in the "faith movement" (charismatic teaching led by Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland as originated by E.W. Kenyon) and subsequently been graciously and miraculously delivered from this error by the Lord in 1985-1987, my theology became much more conservative. So has my approach to more practical issues of the Christian life including my taste in music. On leaving the faith movement, I was blessed by looking to great authors of the past and what they had to say about salvation and the Christian life, especially John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, John Bunyan, and writers in the earliest centuries of the church. What they taught stood in stark contrast to today’s fads and trends in teaching, and I found myself identifying with little being said today. This change also affected the way I approached worship. The newer songs and choruses, for the most part, seemed shallow and lacking in content compared to many of the old hymns and gospel favorites. We had never fully abandoned our hymn books even when we were in the faith movement, but we used them sparingly in worship. But now the old songs came to life again for us.
The faith movement insists that the hymn books and most of the old favorites are, as some of their most popular teachers liked to express it, "embalmed with unbelief." It was quite common for them to break into a tirade against some great old song or hymn, ridiculing it as being totally unscriptural and harmful to one’s faith. The songs we had heard and sung for years in our churches, they insisted, was one of the greatest sources of unbelief when it comes to healing and prosperity (mainstays of the "faith" teaching). Since Kenneth Hagin had a background in the Assemblies of God, the songs he castigated were quite familiar to me. The songs he and others who follow him railed against were those that spoke of trials and troubles, poverty and sickness, the anger of God, anything contrary to the revelations of E.W. Kenyon, and anything "negative" in general. These included, "Where Could I Go?," "We’ll Understand It Better By and By," "We’ll Talk It Over," "The Old Account Was Settled," "Standing Somewhere In the Shadows," "Standing On the Promises," "Mansion Over the Hilltop," "I Know Who Holds Tomorrow," "He Brought Me Out," "Farther Along," and "A New Name In Glory." I am confident I could argue against each point brought up by faith teachers and defend each of these songs Scripturally, but I will not take the time and space to do so here. When we got delivered from the faith message, we could sing these as well as many other songs again and be blessed by their message. They are unscriptural only if you accept the false premise that the conditions in our life are created by the words we speak. Once you have rejected this basic principle of mind science as we have done, you can sing these songs again with joy and recognize the Scriptural, spiritual, and practical truth they contain.
Recently I was in a Goodwill second-hand store looking over the used books. A woman nearby said, as I pulled a hymnbook off the shelf, "You have to be careful about the books in here because a lot of them have a lot of false teaching." And seeing that I had a hymnbook, she added, "And there’s a lot of ‘death’ in those old hymnbooks, too." I knew by this terminology that she was a faith message devotee, so I cut right to the chase and said, "You’re not a follower of the teaching of Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, are you?" Faith people hate to admit that they follow these guys, insisting they are only following "the Word," but she reluctantly and partially admitted she was. By "death" she meant that the hymnbooks contain a lot of talk about disappointments, trials, tests, heartaches, troubles, etc., in this life but everlasting joy and peace in heaven. Faith movement people are repulsed by this because their emphasis is upon material and physical blessings in the present life. I challenged her with this fact: the book of Psalms is an ancient Jewish hymnbook, and we know that these songs, since they are part of Scripture, are inspired by the Spirit of God. Yet, they are full of references to trials, disappointments, heartaches, troubles, etc. Should we, then, also avoid the Psalms because they are full of unbelief? My purpose was to point out that the faith message principle that we should not "confess" these negative things because we will create them in our lives is false and utterly unScriptural. And the only complete remedy for these trials and the assaults of sinful and evil men laid out in many of these same Psalms is the coming and still future day of God when He through the Messiah will subdue all powers and reign on the earth. In fact, once you get delivered from all this false teaching about faith, you can see just how much the Psalms resemble the old songs in our song books in their theology and how opposed they are to what is emphasized in the faith movement. Many of the songs that are such a great blessing on the Gaither videos are the very ones most ridiculed by faith teachers.
Our own local area, Southwest Missouri, has its own claim to fame in southern gospel music, as one of the all-time great writers, Albert E. Brumley, lived most of his life no more than 40 miles south of here in Powell, Missouri. Powell is a tiny but beautiful country community nestled in an Ozark valley beside a clear, spring-fed creek. Here Brumley wrote over 600 songs between the 1930’s and his death in 1978, including his most famous song, "I’ll Fly Away." Other favorites of his include "He Set Me Free," "Jesus Hold My Hand," "I’ll Meet You In the Morning," "The Blood That Stained the Old Rugged Cross," "I Found A Hiding Place," "The Sweetest Song I Know," "The World’s Greatest Story," and "I’ve Never Been Sorry," all of which we have sung at our church. In 1969 he and his sons started an annual "Sundown to Sun-up Gospel Sing" another 35 miles south of Powell in Springdale, Arkansas, at the Parsons Rodeo Arena. I attended last year for the first time one the three nights and enjoyed it so much I purposed to go and stay the whole three nights this year at the 30th Annual Albert E. Brumley Memorial Gospel Sing. Many of our congregation attended at least one of the nights.
The event now features a dozen or more of the nation’s top quartets and groups. Several years ago the Brumley sons started including a Saturday morning talent contest for amateurs and semi-professional groups. This year a men’s quartet and a teen girls trio from our church were among the 27 contestants, which included some really good and experienced groups. To the delight and surprise of us all, the girls were received enthusiastically by the morning crowd of 2,000 or more and were awarded second place by the judges! The trio was made up of Maria Velten, Lynsey Blood, and my own daughter Deanne with my wife Darlene accompanying them on the piano and Mark Cloud on the bass. Besides a beautiful 3-foot tall trophy, the girls received $50 cash and a $200 certificate to buy commercially produced accompaniment sound tracks so they can add other songs to the ones they sing.
I realize that a lot of what the professional groups do is more entertainment than anything else. But I was especially blessed at the Brumley sing by J.D. Sumner and the Stamps. I have not been much of a fan of theirs nor of J.D. I’m sure, and by his own admission, he has been all over the map morally and spiritually down through the years in his career. But I like the changes I see in him and some of the other greats of the past through the Gaither videos. On a recent video, J.D. said people come up to him all the time wherever he and the Stamps sing and tell him how the videos have changed their lives. He said, "They don’t know how much they have changed mine." I’m glad that God in His mercy has given some of these old time singers of the past a chance to make things right with Him before they leave this world. I was particularly moved by the songs and recitations J.D. did in Springdale, Arkansas.
A don’t care for a lot of what the groups do on stage, and I don’t like everything on the Gaither videos. They do some of the songs with too much of a beat, too many wailing instruments, a little too "contemporary" for me. But I like the videos because of the songs they sing on them, especially the old troupers like the Goodmans, Jake Hess, and others, and the unmistakable presence of God I feel in them. I’ve heard Howard and Vestal Goodman in person at Gaither concerts, and they can still make you get up on your feet and shout for joy. Not everything nor everybody in these and other concerts like the Brumley sing is on a high spiritual level, but there are three things at least that I like about them that make them a joy. First, every song lifts up the Lord and glorifies Him. That can’t be bad. Second, it is, relatively speaking, a "rock-free zone." Some of the songs may have a little too much contemporary beat for me, but they are still a long way from the rock music and much of the Christian music of today. Third, it is a "faith message-free zone." Most of the songs would be included in the "embalmed with unbelief" category by faith teachers. You can listen all night—three nights in a row at the Brumley sing—and never hear a song or a testimony that espouses the faith message. You’d think they never heard of Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland and positive confession.
The Gaither videos have played a big role in
the revival of song in my personal life and in our church, and we
thank God for it.
Leon Stump, Pastor of Victory Christian
Center
Background from Greenfield Graphics.