Profile: Sing a Song of Justice

Singer and composerKen Medemahas spent years running to and from God.

Last year, Ken Medema gave a 45-minute lecture at a workshop for the Wheaton College music faculty. Or more precisely, he sang the lecture, using the coffee table he sat behind as both lectern and percussion instrument.

Medema, pianist, singer, and composer of contemporary Christian music, urged the music faculty at the Illinois college to help students not just think about music, but to help them think in music by becoming intimate with its expressive forms.

At another point in the weekend, the sightless Medema invited faculty to call out three random notes and three words—any words—around which he promised to improvise, a feat he manages at almost every appearance at the churches and conventions where he performs. As music conservatory dean Harold Best remembers, the composition Medema created not only used the three notes artfully, but “incorporated fugal analogues from, first, Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and second, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, with a third section that wove together melodic strains from both. And of the three words, out of which he improvised a wonderful libretto, he saved the third to come as the piece’s very last word—which made it all quite stunning.”

“Music needs to be like conversation,” Medema will tell you when asked about his unusual presentation to the faculty “as natural to a musician as eating or breathing.”

Ascending the steps to Medema’s second-story apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, it is no surprise to hear strains of music floating from his window, blending with the noise of a hilly street crowded with cars and nineteenth-century Victorian houses. Medema is in his den, hearing for the first time a just-released video of one of his performances, while his publicist and assistant, Beverly Vander Molen, fills him in on the visual action that his sightless eyes have to miss.

Music forms a tangible presence in the Medema household (which includes his wife, Jane Smith, and their 11-year-old daughter, Rachel). The most notable fixture of the room off their kitchen—in most houses a dining room—is an ebony grand piano, where Medema spends much of his time composing. Down the hall, another room, with a mattress and throw pillows, a wicker sofa, and a stereo system, reminds one of a typical den—except that in the middle of the floor is Medema’s Yamaha D×7 synthesizer, ready whenever the urge to play sneaks up on him.

And there, surrounded by music, in the midst of the doubts and questions that sometimes trouble him, Medema often experiences something, he says, that makes him “realize again the calling of God.”

“It happened this summer,” he remembers. “I was traveling back from Lausanne II [where Medema had been music and worship leader] and one morning I couldn’t sleep. I got up, put on a recording of the Call [a rock group with secular airplay and subtly Christian lyrics], and I knew, when I heard their song ‘Uncovered,’ that I have spent all these years in some ways running to and from God. I realized that every time I ran from him I was always seduced back by the story, by the promise, by a glint of sunlight down the road.”

Not only do the sounds of music fill Medema’s waking hours, he seems to think in notes and melodic phrases as easily as most people think in words or images. Music is like a second language for Medema. “There’s something about his mind, his imagination, and his musical ear working in consortium that is amazing,” says a fellow musician and friend. Medema’s darting, aimless blue eyes have never seen a musical score, but if anything, blindness has honed his musical sharpness and sensitivity.

To watch him in concert confirms the impressions about Medema’s peculiarly passionate relationship to rhythm and melody. He seems to listen out loud, to give voice and movement through his words and his fingers to a world of sound within. Usually Medema uses a synthesizer, an electronic drum machine, and a grand piano. At times he layers pop melodies over Latin-flavored backbeats. At other times he juxtaposes blues riffs with soft balladlike refrains, assembling a patchwork of keyboard, vocal, and percussive sounds. His baritone voice can belt out jazz-tinged rock or softly draw out the lines of an old hymn.

He even pushes the tonal qualities of his piano to the limit, occasionally reaching into the soundbox to pound or strum the exposed strings with one hand while chording its keys with the other, providing a haunting, rhythmic background for a song about the Gerasene demoniac’s meeting with Jesus.

Medema’s fascination with music stretches back into his childhood. “When I was eight,” he remembers, “some people asked us to store their piano for them. After a few weeks of listening to my persistent pounding on that thing, my parents decided I should have lessons.” Since then, music has been much more than a hobby for Medema; it has been a means of primal expression. Music also gave him an early entrée to social acceptance. As the only “blind, ugly, fat, baby-faced classical musician in my neighorhood,” he says, he soon discovered that writing pop songs brought him a measure of popularity.

Medema grew more serious about performing in 1970 when he began composing original material for his work as a music therapist in a psychiatric hospital. “My concern was to create the right environment, a climate where music would draw people out of themselves, where music would be therapeutic. We went into a room and we started making music, either banging on rhythm instruments or singing songs or playing in a little band together. In a sense, I’m doing now what I did as a music therapist.”

In 1973, shortly after his first recording with Word Records, Fork in the Road, Medema made composing, recording, and performing a full-time preoccupation. With 120 concerts a year ever since—mostly in churches—Medema has also kept busy with over a dozen recordings, first for Word, then the GlorySound label, and finally, Briar Patch Music (his own label, based in Grandville, Mich.). The years of composing and recording have had one constant: The styles Medema has made his own have never stayed the same.

To see the crowded cabinet of compact discs in his den is to glimpse an eclectic range of influences. Asked to identify the styles that have shaped him, Medema has difficulty being brief: “Bach, Mozart, Bartók have all been very strong influences … the driving rhythms of Bartók especially. When I was a kid I listened to a lot of jazz—Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck. And there are folk influences—the gentle sort of guitar strumming of Peter, Paul, and Mary or Pete Seeger, and the wonderful story-telling qualities of that music. In terms of pop music, I would name Peter Gabriel, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Winter, Bruce Cockburn.” Early American folk hymns—songs like “I Will Arise and Go to Jesus,” and “Brethren, We Have Met to Worship”—have also left an imprint on his music. Medema has absorbed the essences of an almost haphazard array of musical expressions.

Medema’s musical technique is complemented by the biblical images that fill his lyrics. Early recordings are filled with obvious biblical allusions. “Those songs were very much oriented to a personal salvation ethic,” he reflects. “But I very much feel that the track I’m on now is toward less God-talk and more what I call people-talk. Sunday’s God seems not to know a whole lot about Monday. We need instead to look at Monday’s realities in the light of Sunday. I guess that makes me real cagey about God-talk. I don’t trust a lot of it, even my own.”

The “people-talk” of Medema’s recent songs includes regular references to social injustice, American militarism, and Third World oppression. He can often now be found performing at benefits for Bread for the World and Habitat for Humanity, or singing at anti-apartheid rallies. “My dream,” he says, “is that social concern is the place the church and world meet. It’s a logical place for the two to come together and say, ‘Let’s work on that together.’ ”

Although he was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of “very devout, churchgoing Christian Reformed parents,” he has been distancing himself somewhat from conservative theology at the same time he has been increasingly attracted to social causes. This change has made him something of an enigma to evangelical audiences. He defines himself as evangelical only in the sense that the root of the label means “good news”: “An evangelical is a person who is preoccupied with the fact that there is good news, that there is hope.”

Medema admits that his faith now has more affinities with liberalism, a fact not lost on the churches where he performs. “I am in many fewer Southern Baptist churches now, but in a whole lot more mainline Presbyterian churches.”

“My sense about the ‘onlyness’ of Christianity,” Medema continues, “is one of questioning. But I do associate classical liberalism with a lack of excitement and evangelical fervor. I certainly am excited about my faith in the way evangelicals are, and I’m enough of an evangelical to want to ‘spread the word.’ I want to tell people about it.”

Medema realizes that by omitting explicit references to Christ “dying for sins,” he may be losing an essential element of the message of Christianity. But his current definitions of Christian faith may not be the final word. Medema’s theology, like his music, has undergone consistent change, and the images and questions so creatively expressed in his music may yet carry Medema back to his theological home.

For all his questioning and soul-searching, Medema still feels committed to the church, does concerts under its roofs, and feels called to unsettle lukewarm Christians’ complacency with what he terms his “preoccupation with shalom and Jubilee.” Indeed, he regularly helps to lead the small band of worshipers that gathers every Sunday at the church where his wife is associate pastor, San Francisco’s Delores Street Baptist Church (Southern Baptist). There, or at a large gathering of Christians, or before a concert designed to mobilize action against apartheid, Medema is likely to be found singing his questions and convictions, much as he does in one of his poignant songs:

When my disappointment turns to understanding,

When a hated enemy becomes a trusted friend,

When the life I wanted gives way to one much better,

When a bad beginning becomes a hopeful end,

Words of praise are all I can say.

And when the words have died away,

Then my heart will still be praising you.

For you are the mystery of love in whose life I live and move,

And I will praise you night and day,

And that is all that I can say.

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