[ a song to sing ]

The world of contemporary Christian music is a transient one. Songs sung in renewed churches in the 70s and 80s are barely remembered today. Maranatha songs were flavour of the month to be succeeded by Vineyard to be followed by ‘Make Way Music'. Spring Harvest's menu in their Big Top celebrations has changed on a year-by-year basis for over 20 years.

But for that entire time there has been one constant - Graham Kendrick, With a depth and quality almost unique in the hymnody of charismatic renewal, Kendrick might be regarded as the Charles Wesley of our time. Certainly, Kendrick has something else in common with the Methodist brothers in founding a worldwide movement. In the Wesley’s case it was Methodism and their clear intent was not the creation of a Church. Similarly Kendrick played a massive part in founding March for Jesus, which although less important than the creation of Methodism, has nevertheless touched millions of lives.

Kendrick himself acknowledges that in a world of constant change and flux the carrier of the message often becomes the message itself. "As spin doctor politics have exemplified, presentation can be valued above reality."

But he believes that "True Christian worship towers above all this by virtue of one thing, it’s object, it’s centre, and it’s obsession: the person Jesus Christ, and the salvation story’ of his birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and coming reign. Yet this should not be thought of as merely a matter of fact of information, because in the act of true worship, he makes us known through the Holy Spirit and we are invited to experience his presence."

However useful much of contemporary worship is to draw people in who are part of our touchy-feely culture, the intimate, immanent picture they portray of the relationship between us and God is timebound, in a way that the verses which sing of the transcendent God are not. Consequently Kendrick’s Shine Jesus Shine, The Servant King, Meekness and Majesty, and Knowing You, tread a constant tightrope between the ‘intimacy’ commonly found in the renewal movement and the ‘awe’ of other Christian traditions.

Kendrick contends that knowledge of worship heritage prevents extremism. His own musical influences were, on the one hand, the Beatles and, on the other, the Baptist hymn book. The traditional hymns and the popular music of the 60s played an equal part in his musical formation.

He records how clearly in the 60s he experienced the urgency of the times. "It was an era when builders were ripping out and smashing up beautiful Victorian fireplaces to the sounds of The Who, singing 'Hope I die before I get old’ on the transistor radio." He remembers the reality of the threat of nuclear annihilation together with the beginnings of the environmental movement prompted by predictions of population explosion and global mass starvation.

"Along with many of my generation, I seriously doubted whether I would safely reach the age of 30. At the same time I was expending my creative energy trying to
express my Christian faith in the terms of my own generation and defining my place in what often seemed like an ecclesias-tical time warp.

"It took me some years to even realise that I had a heritage as a Christian, let alone appreciate it." As an early worship leader during the first wave of contemporary worship expression, he con-fessed that while he studied the Bible, he gave scant attention to how Christians through the ages had practised it for 2000 years.

In an important article in 1995 (Alpha magazine, September ‘95), he recalled con-temporary music writers to their heritage. "I am convinced that an appreciation of our worship heritage is a powerful antidote to those extreme swings of the pendulum which from time to time are a feature of church life. It would be a tragedy if we forgot where we have come from and where we are going. It would also be a serious oversight if we forgot that the Church consists not only of the believers alive on plan-
et Earth today, but of all those who have lived up to this point in time." Graham Kendrick’s first music album for six years is now available. ‘What Grace’, Make Way~ Music.