Tuesday, June 13, 2023 Adventures of a Young Christian, Part 10

Becoming a Christian also meant discovering a whole new genre in music, the contemporary Christian music scene. I had heard Amy Grant before my conversion, but other than that I really didn’t know much. Early on in the dietetic internship, my friend Tamie was playing an album of Amy Grant’s and I told her, “Oh, I like Amy Grant! I’d love to copy your album onto a tape.” At this point, she politely informed me that copying music was illegal. Oops – I’d always seen and read those little legal notices, but completely ignored them. I guess being a Christian meant living up to a different standard than the one to which I was accustomed.

Some people at our church wanted to go see a couple Christian musicians in concert up in Minneapolis. I’d never heard of either of them, but was enthused about going along, so I got tickets, too. The headline act was Leon Patillo and the opening singer was Michael Card. It turned out that everyone in our group came to see Michael Card, at that time not very well known, but a musician that I came to appreciate quite a bit. This was the first, but not the last time that I saw him in concert. My husband and I went to see him twice more, once at a large venue in Fort Wayne, and once in a teeny tiny church in a small town in Minnesota. His music was so steeped in the Scriptures that you could tell he was a man who studied and loved God’s word.

The Leon Patillo part of the concert was quite a bit stepped up in energy and amplification – it was loud and rowdy! I was intrigued by the sight of people lifting up their hands while singing along – what was this all about? I asked my friend Jodie later and she told me that for some people it was like reaching out to God in praise and worship. Hmmm…well, there are those places in the Bible that talk about the lifting up of our hands in prayer, so I could see that. And then came the altar call. By the time Leon Patillo was done talking to us, I was sure I hadn’t been very serious about my faith and needed to rededicate myself to the Lord. Altar calls were hard on naive introspective people like me. As I matured in my walk, I realized that I didn’t need to respond to those altar calls for rededication because there’d never be a time when I didn’t feel like I was falling short in some way. The Lord covers me and is sanctifying me – hallelujah! Philippians 1:6 brought a lot of comfort: “I am confident of this very thing: that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” All that aside, I enjoyed the concert so much that I bought one of Leon Patillo’s tapes afterward and played it a lot. “God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world…but that the world might be saved through Him.” Scripture set to catchy and bouncy music was okay by me.

In general, I really loved what I was hearing in contemporary Christian music. Someone gave me a tape of two early Phil Keaggy albums that I listened to over and over. “Oh, I can’t wait to see you Jesus, face to face. Nothing in this world can take Your place. All the pride of men laid low, and all his works of gold – Nothing can compare with what You are. Let everything else go.” I also had an album of Michael W. Smith’s that I played so much that my next-door neighbor in the internship learned it by hearing it through the wall between us. She told me she like it, so that was a relief. This is apparently a new form of evangelism – hassling your neighbors through loud music. Ha ha! I began learning some of the songs on my guitar and found such joy in singing songs of praise based on Scripture. What a change from the sometimes sad and depressing songs I used to sing, or songs that just focused on romantic relationships. When our dietetic internship class graduated, I sang the song “Friends” by Michael W. Smith as part of the ceremony. “Friends are friends forever, if the Lord’s the Lord of them. And a friend will not say never, ‘cause the welcome will not end. Though it’s hard to let you go, in the Father’s hands we know, that a lifetime’s not too long…to live as friends.”

Of course these songs and songwriters are not the apex of Christian expression in song – that place belongs to King David who wrote the psalms. And they certainly aren’t meant to be held up on the same level as Scripture (unless they literally are the Scriptures put to music). Of course, there are some Christians songs (and hymns!) that contain really awful theology, and I learned to spot those as I grew in my own knowledge of the Word. But the music that I listened back then was pretty solid; it played an important part in my early growth and edification as a Christian and holds a fond place in my heart to this day.

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I’ll probably rededicate this post in the morning.

If you want to start at the beginning of this series, here you go:
Adventures Part 1
Next up:
Adventures Part 11