A One-Hit Wonder?
Aaron Shust became an overnight success with the smash hit "My Savior My God." But there's more where that came from—and Shust hopes to keep singing for a long time.
by Andree Farias | posted 7/24/2006
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Of the 40-plus new artists trying to make their mark in Christian music 2006, the one with the biggest success story doesn't live in Nashville, the genre's mecca. He isn't even signed to a Christian label. Aaron Shust is an unassuming worship songwriter from Atlanta whose debut, Anything Worth Saying (Brash), has scanned over 50,000 units—a relative success in a niche market where listeners have grown more selective. More notable than the album itself, however, is his chef d'oeuvre, "My Savior My God," a smash hit that was originally written in—get this—1873, but that, thanks to some tweaking, has become a modern worship anthem in its own right. In this interview, Shust describes how an old hymn evolved into an instant classic, what he thinks of theology in worship, and his thoughts on being dubbed a one-hit wonder.
I'm sure you're sick of this question already, but what's the story behind "My Savior My God"?
Aaron Shust I was one of the worship leaders at a Presbyterian church in 2000. They place a very high value on hymns. As worship leaders putting together sets, we would often joke tongue-in-cheek-but-half-dead-serious that we had to at least have two hymns in every worship service. So after two months, you can definitely exhaust the standby hymns. So we started to dig a little bit deeper and get a hymn that's remotely familiar and just put a new little arrangement to it. Or we'd find a hymn that's completely obscure and try a new melody because we knew we wouldn't offend anybody by changing the old melody.
So I was flipping through a book, The One-Year Book of Hymns, and I found this hymn "I'm Not Skilled to Understand." I thought it was a very strange title for a hymn, so I read through it and it just blew me away. It really focused on [the fact that] I don't have to understand the mysteries of theology. I don't have to understand God's perfect plan. I don't have to understand why Uncle So-and-So got cancer and died last year. I want to, but I don't have to if I truly trust that God is in control.
I hadn't even heard of this hymn, but I figured it wasn't a familiar tune. And I started a really basic melody, 'cause I wanted people in the church to sing it right away. So all we would sing was the verse and the little pre-chorus.
What about the chorus?
Shust Well, [at the time] the pre-chorus was the chorus, I guess. Two years later I wanted to sum up all these words of straight theology in a nutshell so we could sing the chorus and also take the energy up another notch, and be able to sing, "My Savior loves, my Savior lives, my Savior's always there for me. He was, is, and is always going to be."
So I was sitting at a red light at 11 o'clock at night after a rehearsal, and the words kinda hit me upside the head. And I jotted them down on the passenger seat before I took off. That was in 2002, I think. I'd been singing it at church for a while before it got recorded, long before it hit radio.
Do you think the advent of contemporary and modern worship has shifted the focus away from theology and hymns?
Shust In my church, absolutely not—there's definitely a regard for [hymns]. I think because of the freshness of the choruses that have come out in the last 20 years, churches can go to the other extreme and forget the past and disregard some quality songs that have been around for hundreds of years, songs that have stood the test of time. We've been singing a song that's been around for a thousand years—"All Creatures of Our God and King"—or "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," a song that's been around for three or four hundred years.
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