Taking Stock of Jesus Rock

NEWS

Three thousand teen-agers and young adults plunked down two dollars each and filed into the Hollywood Palladium one Sunday afternoon last month to hear sixteen music groups cut loose with rock, folk, and soul tunes for five hours. The turned-up amplifiers and the beat were at times reminiscent of Woodstock and Altamont, but the theme was pure Jesus.

It was the second such “Jesus People’s Festival of Christian Music” within a month at the Palladium. Both were sponsored by the Hollywood Free Paper, a Christian underground-type newspaper with more than 150,000 circulation. Publisher Duane Pederson billed such headliners as Pat Boone and his family and street evangelist Arthur Blessitt at the first festival. More than one hundred youths received Christ at the two events, said Pederson, and donations covered all expenses with enough left over to publish another edition of the Free Paper.

For several years young Christians have showed up at the big secular rock concerts to witness about Christ among drug-dazed revelers. Christian doctors and medical students linked up with street worker David Hoyt and his converted hippie friends to operate treatment centers at the 1969 Atlanta International Pop Festival, which attracted

250,000. Christians handed out free food, manned counseling tents, and even got on the program at the West Palm Beach festival; nearly half of the 50,000 attendants gathered to hear evangelist Blessitt, and hundreds reportedly received Christ (see December 19, 1969, issue, page 34).

But last year evangelicals began holding their own festivals, minus the God-empty songs, drugs, and shady promotion practices. The first one was probably the Youth for Christ-sponsored two-day Faith Festival in an Evansville, Indiana, stadium in March, attended by 14,000, Folk singer Gene Cotton, black soul songster Jim Bolden, and Pat Boone and family headed an array of performers. Five months later San Francisco Bay area street Christians and young people of the Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto held a five-hour “Sweet Jesus Roll Away the Stone (Or Rock) Concert” for 3,000—mostly street types—at a Stanford University amphitheater. Numerous conversions were reported, half the police force stationed nearby went home early, and nobody required medical aid.

More festivals are coming, says Pederson, and attendance will soar as word gets around.

Word is already getting around in recording and broadcasting circles that revival is in the air. Both Billboard and Variety predicted that the drug and sex themes of the sixties would be replaced this decade by religion—especially songs about Jesus—as the dominant chord in the nation’s music scene. Current and recent “Top 40” song ratings reflect this trend. In 1969 the Edwin Hawkins Singers—black evangelicals based in Oakland, California—rode to the very top on both rock and soul stations with “Oh Happy Day.” Last year Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” led the list; some of its lyrics were strikingly evangelistic.

Current favorites include the rock opera, Jesus Christ, Superstar (see December 4, 1970, issue, page 38); “My Sweet Lord,” sung by Beatle George Harrison; and “Amazing Grace” by Judy Collins. Bob Dylan in his album “New Morning” sings praise to the Creator and laments man’s disregard for the spiritual.

Several name performers have come out for Christ: Tiny Tim, Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Johnny Cash, as well as Boone and others.

Some disc jockeys openly plug Jesus between songs and commercials. Converted drug-user Scott Ross markets the Gospel in rock-oriented packages to dozens of secular stations (see January 12 issue, page 48). Young people of four Grand Rapids Christian Reformed churches raise $1,000 a month to place sixty-second gospel “spots” daily on the city’s three major rock stations; they say results are worth it.

Owners of most Christian radio stations, however, have banned from their turntables not only rock-type pieces but also sizable chunks of other contemporary gospel music being written by Christian composers. Debate raged at the National Religious Broadcasters convention last month; some owners claimed that the music was suggestive, desecrating, of the devil, and that it dwelled too much on personal experience rather than on doctrine.

Similar views keep many churches keyed to traditional sounds, but hundreds of other churches—notably on the West Coast—are joining the modern Jesus music movement. Evangelical composer Ralph Carmichael, at home writing symphonic passages for strings or thumping out rock choruses, says that last year alone he sold 200,000 copies (equivalent to 5,000 forty-voice choirs) of his folk musical, Tell It Like It Is. Robes and organs are out for hundreds of new youth choirs and ensembles; colorful titles and attire, amplified guitars, and even body sway are in.

The movement is gaining a wide hearing. The Certain Sounds of First Baptist Church in Van Nuys, California, sang their way through the Philippines and Japan with great response; other young people from the church went along to help with follow-up of the hundreds who professed Christ—including the principal of Manila’s largest high school. The New Sounds of suburban San Diego’s Skyline Wesleyan Methodist Church performed in South America before audiences of upper-society people and government leaders whom missionaries called “unreachables.”

The movement is not confined to the churches. At Detroit’s MacKenzie High School, a forty-voice gospel choir was formed by students, says director Dennis Walker, 17, when the Holy Spirit recently brought revival to the campus. It now outdraws the regular school choir at concerts. Pianist and co-founder Joyce Mouldon says it’s just a matter of “singing the songs God gives you from the heart, not singing for the world, but for him.” After receiving Christ, folksinger Bengie Killen felt led to keep her contract with a Washington, D. C., nightclub; her new Jesus songs evoked invitations to discuss the Gospel with several ambassadors and their families.

Students at John Brown University created the Sound Generation and spent the past two summers at Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, where a million visitors heard their songs and testimonies. Campus Crusade’s New Folk continue to sing on hundreds of campuses. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s Eric Miller has a multi-media production he calls “Twentyone-hundred.” It employs slides, rock music, and flash-on grafitti to convey to college students: Jesus saves.

Part of the Christian music revolution is a by-product of the burgeoning spiritual awakening among young people. Entire rock groups, such as the Love Song in Southern California and the Wilson McKinley in Spokane, have forsaken drug circuits and dedicated their talents—and instruments—to Jesus. Their new songs have such recurring themes as the death of Christ, his sufficiency for life’s needs, his second coming; most are “message” pieces that challenge unbelievers to turn to Jesus. The groups and individual performers find receptive audiences at coffeehouses, street rallies, high-school assemblies, and some churches.

After the Love Song lured a staid Lutheran congregation into spirited participation, the pastor said the joyful hand-clapping was “the first we’ve ever had in this church.” Southern Baptist pastor Barry Wood of Beverly Hills First Baptist Church has summer-night rock concerts at the church to reach Sunset Strip drifters for Christ. He plans to hold a training clinic next month for youth ministers and lay workers on how to use rock.

“Rock” is a catch-all term that many Christian performers dislike. There are hard or acid rock (Jimi Hendrix style) and soft rock (later Beatles variety), plus folk, soul, and country modes. Most Christian groups eschew the hard-rock medium because, they say, it is too enmeshed with psychedelic overtones and too sexually suggestive. Chuck Girard of the Love Song prefers the “Contemporary Gospel” designation coined by Atlantic Records; it covers the field, he says, without raising the bad specter of acid rock.

The new music, while causing division in some ranks, is nevertheless a remarkable vehicle of Christian unity. The lilting choruses of Audrey Meier, a middle-aged song stylist, are heavy favorites among young people of all denominations. John Fischer, a Wheaton College graduate and staffer at Peninsula Bible Church who sings at evangelist Leighton Ford’s crusades, made business boom with his album “Cold Cathedral” at F.E.L.—a Los Angeles supplier of contemporary hymnals and records for Catholic churches. In fact, said spokesman Fran Farber, as a result of Fischer’s influence the company’s initials no longer stand for “Friends of the English Liturgy” but for “Faith, Evangelism, and Liturgy.” Nine of Fischer’s songs will appear in Volume Two of an F.E.L. hymnal that has hit the four-million mark in sales. F.E.L.’s chorus, “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love,” is sung by Christians throughout the world.

Popular street-Christian singer Larry Norman (album: “Street Level”) says: “A spiritual renaissance is taking place today. The Holy Spirit is at the root of it … and kids are expressing their deep happiness through rock music.”

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