Prof. John Stackhouse’s Weblog

The single most viewed post on this blog so far has been “Jesus, I’m NOT in Love with You.” As of this writing, it’s had over 8000 views.

In that post, I engage in a little criticism of a certain trend in contemporary Christian music. So, in the spirit of “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness,” I happily recommend a new album by Canadian singer Jon Buller and two of his musical friends. It’s “The Hymn Project” and it’s a simple setting of a dozen or so great hymns and songs for three male voices and a guitar or two.

Here’s the solid gold list: My Hope is Built on Nothing Less - Come Thou Fount - All Creatures of our God and King - Blessed Assurance - Great is Thy Faithfulness - The Old Rugged Cross - Trust and Obey - It Is Well With My Soul - My Jesus I Love Thee - Jesus, Priceless Treasure - Jesus Loves Even Me - I’d Rather Have Jesus - His Eye is on the Sparrow.

I had the privilege of teaming up with Jon, his band, and his group “Hear the Music Ministries” at a worship seminar they held in Winnipeg a few years ago. The highlight for me was borrowing a guitar from Jon and doing my best Eric Clapton impression in a blues his band generously played behind me. Confident as I am that no one actually mistook me for Mr. Clapton—or even for a decent amateur player, which I wish I were—it was nonetheless a blast.

Happily for this album, however, Jon and his friends are much better than decent amateurs, and their beautiful and imaginative vocals and guitars give new life to these fine expressions of worship.

Here’s what I wrote to endorse the album on Jon’s website:

In The Hymn Project, we find what we badly need to find: skillful music and rich lyrics that can fill in the empty spaces left by so many of today’s thin praise songs. What a high standard is set by these deceptively simple arrangements of classic hymns! Older Christians will rejoice to hear these good old hymns refreshed; middle-aged types (such as I) will be inspired by these clear declarations of the gospel; and younger listeners will perhaps finally realize why so many of us miss “the old songs.” This really is an album for everyone.

Now, I’m all for new music and not simply the recycling of the old, no matter how worthy the result. But some old stuff needs to be part of our repertoire of praise, too, and this album proves it. I bought twenty of them to give away over the next year to friends and family. Check it out: It’ll do you good!

For my last birthday, my beloved gave me tickets to see jazz trumpeter Chris Botti in concert here in Vancouver, the last Canadian stop on his tour that takes him next to Poland. Middle son Joshua, studying composition in Chicago, saw him a few weeks ago. Kari, Josh, and I have come to the same conclusion: this guy’s good. In fact, he’s likely great.

Botti is pretty widely known now, after ten albums, for his warm, heavily reverbed trumpeting. He’s drawn the most attention for duets with singers as widely disparate as Frank Sinatra, Sting, and Chantal Kreviazuk. Easily slotted into the “smooth jazz” ghetto with such abominations as Kenny G (see Pat Metheny’s classic estimation of Mr. G’s so-called talent), however, he doesn’t deserve such a fate.

Yes, he used to host a radio show called Chill with Chris Botti—and he has the “FM voice” and quiet wit to do that sort of thing, as the concert showed well. Yes, some of his music does help one mellow out into dreamy semiconsciousness (not a bad thing for music to do, especially for hyper types such as I).

But the boy (he’s two years younger than I am) can play.

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Larry Norman, “father of Christian rock,” has gone home. After suffering a severe heart attack and other ailments, he slipped away at 61.

Larry Norman was the writer of a number of popular Christian songs, including “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” many people’s first encounter with the chilling eschatology of the Rapture. He popularized, and perhaps even invented, the “One Way” gesture of the index finger pointing straight up. He helped launch the careers of many talented artists, including Randy Stonehill (my personal favourite, from whom Norman later became estranged), the Daniel Amos band, and many others on his “Street Level” and then “Solid Rock” labels.

For me, however, Larry Norman in particular was a larger-than-life figure who, with authors C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, helped this Plymouth Brethren teenager, in the backwoods (literally) of northern Ontario, look out onto a larger world of Christian possibilities. Indeed, he helped me to look out onto the larger world itself and feel that perhaps I could actually live there, rather than just briefly venture out into it to evangelize a soul or two and then hurriedly withdraw to the sanctuary of my sect.

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One of the blights upon the hymnological landscape today is the continued presence of what we can fairly call the “love song to Jesus” genre. It’s been around as long as there has been Christian pop music–and even earlier, depending on what you make of sentimental gospel songs in the nineteenth century, eighteenth-century revivalist hymns, and especially a lot of the mystical poetry-cum-lyrics of certain medieval saints.

Today our congregation was asked to sing, “Jesus, I’m in love with you”–a line that shows up, in one permutation or another, in several songs that occur frequently in our worship leaders’ rotation.

Well, I didn’t sing it. It’s wrong, and I try not to sing wrong lyrics.

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Steve Bell has won two of Canada’s Grammy Awards, known as the Junos. Yet most Canadians, let alone people from other countries, haven’t heard of him. Industry insiders admire him, however, as an indie phenom who has supported himself for years by touring and releasing CDs on his own label, Signpost Music. He recently performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and is now touring East Africa on behalf of the Canada Foodgrains Bank, a major charity.

How do I know him? Well, partly because three or four times, I have actually been “The Steve Bell Band.”

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