Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

I was really into Jesus when I was 14 years old. I was already writing songs and performing them in church. My Sunday School teacher, Rico Dunsmore, was a card carrying Jesus Freak. He was always loaning me his records (vinyl LPs) and introducing me to Christian rockers. He changed my life when he loaned me a small stack of Larry Norman albums.

Half the songs were acoustic guitar driven folk/protest music (Dylan), and the other half were rockin/pop songs (Stones, Beatles). They all felt so heavy with meaning that the net result was like a religious experience to me. I drank his music in like it was the elixir of life. My songs started having underlaying meanings and layers of lyrical complexity, I started wearing black, grew my hair long and dyed it blonde. I had already known that I wanted to be a Christian and a singer/songwriter, I knew that I wanted to be in full time ministry, but now I knew something else, too. I wanted to be Larry Norman. (more…)

Hey, brother, let me tell you about Jesus … Hey, wait a minute … where’re you going?

Speaking the message of Jesus Christ to modern ears can be a tricky thing to do. In a lot of ways it sounds contrary to the things that we have been told are true. We are several generations deep into ideas like “there is no absolute Truth, whatever works for you is fine,” and, “There are so many religions, who is to say that there is only one way to God,” and “Science, facts, what I can see and hear, these are the things that are true and can be trusted, everything else is merely opinion.” Words like “Jesus,” “Church,” “Worship,” “Sin,” “Preaching,” and many others carry so much negative baggage that most people stop listening at the first mention of them. In fact, they think they already know everything they need to know about it, and they wish they knew less. (more…)