Hymns are mentioned in the Bible and they have been part of the worship of the church since the beginning. Listen in to the next HAVEN Today as Charles Morris is joined by modern Irish hymnwriters Keith and Kristyn Getty. Don't miss a program with their life story and their music called "In Christ Alone".

March 13, 2007

In Christ Alone (w/Keith and Kristyn Getty)

They are young but they sing music of old. There was a turn back to the hymns of the church and part of that move is lead by a young couple from Ireland. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. I’d like you to meet this remarkable couple, spending 2 years in North America, living in Cleveland before heading back to Ireland. Their names are Keith and Kristyn Getty and we’re calling this program by the name of their most well known hymn, so come and worship with me, “In Christ Alone”.

Song: In Christ Alone
Performed by: Keith and Kristyn Getty

This is Haven Today and we got to hear a hymn that isn’t 300 years old, it was written a few years ago, “In Christ Alone” and with us on the program today are Keith and Kristyn Getty. Welcome to Haven Today, both Getty’s.
KG: Thanks Charles
KRG: Thank you very much
CM: It is good to have you on the air and you’ve been on a few other Christian radio programs but you have music worth hearing over and over again. You guys didn’t live over 300 years ago, but yet you wrote “In Christ Alone”. How did you come to write something that sounds like an ancient hymn but you guys are so young?
KG: Well, I’m not sure. The first time we came over here and played it for, a lady comes up to me afterwards and she says, “Are you Keith Getty?” And I said, “Yeah.” She goes, “I thought you were dead.” And she was just, she was just so disappointed to see me alive. So that’s been a bit of a shock for most people.
KRG: I’m not sure their disappointed Keith.
KG: I guess what we really wanted to do with writing modern hymns was 2 things: we wanted to write a modern form of worship that really taught the scriptures, that taught the great stories of the bibles, the great doctrines of the faith. A real cross-centered sense of singing but also that was relevant to our lives, it was an emotional experience which sang well. And the second thing we tried to do in our songs is write in a sort of what I would call a sort of trans-generational folk like, timeless kind of way, so that 8 year olds and 88 year olds, people in a rock band and people with a pipe organ could use the songs in their format and sing them so that they brought people together under the great truths of the faith, to actually sing together as one body.
CM: And that’s actually been done before. We, a while back when the movie “Amazing Grace” opened, we were giving a lot of emphasis on John Newton who actually had the same idea when he wrote the Olney Hymnal, some of them with William Cooper as well, but same idea. He wanted people to get the breadth of scripture and the story of what the message was from Genesis to Revelation.
KG: That’s right and I think that’s why we call what we do hymns, because there’s no really scientific definition. Augustine said a hymn is a song of praise to God. So there’s no scientific difference between worship songs and hymns but it’s just these 2 emphasis’s that we have in our songs which has made other people and then, I guess, made us just call what we do modern hymns.
CM: You know, a lot of people that write Christian music today go straight to the emotional level. Nothing wrong with that, emotions are just part of how God has made us and even gifted us but you guys in your music tend to go another direction, I mean I’m hearing the scripture come out in your music.
KRG: Well, I think in the context of a worship service when people come in on a Sunday morning their heads are full of all sorts of things and it’s very hard to get people on the same emotional page or emotional track from all those different distractions. But what happens is, whenever you have a song which, or a few songs in the service, particularly at the beginning that would declare the truth then people are lifted beyond themselves. People are released. People come to church and their relieved that they can in fact turn to something greater than themselves and just sort of recheck their priorities and then sing something which actually frees them, because there’s the truth that sets people free. We don’t set ourselves free but understanding who God is and hearing a revelation of who he is enables us then to worship. And so we’ve tried to incorporate both things, things that just declare who Christ is, declaring the truth, declaring who we are as a body of believers when we sing. And then from that background then our emotions then are carried along in the back of that.
CM: Yes, they do go hand in hand, that’s right. Do I detect an accent here Kristyn or Keith?
KG: North Dakota.
CM: North Dakota, I knew I had heard that accent somewhere before.
KRG: We haven’t even been to North Dakota, so we can’t know it.
CM: Well maybe you will. I think we’re on the air in North Dakota so, yes
KRG: Well, we’d like to go there some time.
CM: And I know on the other side of the border we’re on some stations in the prairies so I hope you get there.
KRG: Well, we’re from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
CM: OK
KRG: We both grew up there, both born there. I’m a little bit north of Belfast. He’s a little bit south of Belfast.
CM: You’re dad’s a pastor Kristyn?
KRG: Dad’s a pastor, yeah. And Keith also grew up in the church. His parents were always so involved in the church. His dad plays the organ and piano and –
CM: Well, that could be some of your history on what led you into doing what you’re doing.
KG: I think it is.
KRG: I think it is a big part actually.
CM: Well, we need to listen to another modern hymn for modern day people of the church of Jesus Christ. Pick one for us and tell us a little bit about it.
KG: Sure, well the song, “The Power of the Cross” is a little bit similar to “In Christ Alone” in that it’s also a story song. One of our convictions is that, certainly in Britain, where we are, and I think increasingly, people in church don’t get to sing the great stories of scripture. But also increasing numbers of people who come into church don’t come from as Christianized a society, so many people don’t even know the basic stories of the Bible. So we actually feel that both for our worship music and for our radical witness to those on the outside that telling the stories of the Bible is an important thing. So the song “The Power of the Cross” is a little bit narrative-like. It takes us on the road to Calvary. It affords us time, it affords us time to consider Christ’s sufferings, but I think more than anything else, it asks the question of what it meant for Christ to bear the weight of sin. Many of history’s most famous people, from every religion, every culture, every continent and every period of time in history has had martyrs and people who’ve gone to their death triumphant, sad and in every other form of emotion and yet Christ, what made his death different? So it looks at what it means for Christ to bear the weight of sin.
CM: Wow
KG: And Stuart Townend wrote this wonderful last verse, “Oh to see my name written in the wounds, for through your suffering I am free. Death is crushed to death, life is mine to live, won through your selfless love, this, the power of the cross.”

Song: The Power of the Cross
Performed by: Keith and Kristyn Getty

The song is called, “The Power of the Cross” and we’re with the Getty’s, Keith and Kristyn who are from, as you can tell if you’ve joined us on Haven Today, from Northern Ireland, Belfast. And I’m Charles Morris here on Haven Today. I’m cognizant listening to that song of how Christ died for me, but the power of the cross is not just when I met Christ as my Savior, but the power of the cross is every day in my life if I’m to live the Christian life. There are some times in all our lives where the power of the cross needs to become more real and sometimes those are sad times. Has there ever been a time for either you Kristyn, or you Keith?
KRG: My dad planted a church when I was 8 and we, I’ve grown up in that church. He’s been the pastor of it for all these years and I think the light side of all the difficulties of growing up in a young church and how they, you know, deal with all the fresh situations that can come on top of them. And when I was 16 my mom had breast cancer, and that was a particularly trying time for me as the eldest and my siblings, trying to work it all out as to why something like this would happen, trying to deal with the fact that mom wasn’t well and couldn’t do all the things she used to.
CM: Yes
KRG: But also looking at my dad and watching him. He understood the situation so much more than we did. We were protected very much from all the details of it. But watching dad leading this young church and then struggling with the questions as to why things like this happen and what were God’s purposes in it? Mom went to gain full recovery, it’s a wonderful story. And for me, being able to watch my dad work through that and his faith to be even stronger and watch, he was always very, very, very steady, but just watching him grown and change and become softer in some ways. It was actually he that inspired one of the songs which is “There is a Higher Throne”. And he, you know, spoke to me one day and he said, “Kristyn, you know, we need to write a song about the fact that there is a higher throne. No matter what happens in this world, that there is a higher authority and there isn’t just a throne, but there’s a king seated on it.” And it put my attention on Revelation 7, where the great multitude stands before the Lamb
CM: Yes,
KRG: And he loved this idea of the Shepherd, the Lamb becoming the Shepherd King. He said, “You’ve got to get that into your song.” And I just met Keith a little bit after that.
CM: You weren’t married yet.
KRG: No, I was 18 at the time.
CM: Oh, OK
KRG: And a year or two after that Keith and I were actually writing a song for a project in the UK. And I said, “I’d love to try and get this idea into a song.” And he had this melody and I brought the lyric. And it was actually the first worship song that Keith and I wrote together. It’s called, “There is a Higher Throne.”

CM: Keith, I’m listening to Kristyn telling this story about her mom. Do you say “mum” in Ireland?
KRG: Yeah, “m-u-m”.
CM: OK, “mum”, alright, tell about her “mum”. And I guess we’re cognizant of this, we read it in the scripture but so many Christians that I run into and I find this coming out of myself sometimes, we don’t always remember that we are weak and Christ is strong. And so we’re on the throne, not Christ on the throne, the reality. I don’t know, have you had to deal with that yourself? And then you wrote this hymn with Kristyn.
KG: Well, yeah, most of my participation in this song was really the music and then being a bouncing board for her lyrics.
CM: Yes.
KG: But one of the principals we’ve had from the start of our whole work is that when we read the Psalms and indeed when we read the New Testament and look at how Paul feeds the early church, he constantly reasons from the position that we are eternal beings, all of us are eternal beings. C.S. Lewis said, you know, the great kingdoms of this earth, the great moments of history, they are finite. It’s the person who sits beside you in the bus is an eternal being. In all our songs we’ve tried to bring this eternal heaven dimension. There’s been a great lack, certainly in the British side in the modern worship movement of songs that actually talk about Heaven, Hell, judgment or the even the fact that we’re eternal beings. And yet the Bible seems to always reason, and resolve –
CM: It’ keeps going back to it
KG: And it’s the only way to resolve every situation.
CM: Yes
KRG: Yeah
KG: Whether it’s a deep, deep situation of doubt or despair, trying times like Kristyn had, whether it’s how we look at ourselves or whether it’s how 2 people in the church resolve a conflict. It’s the fact that we’re eternal beings. So that’s been – all our songs will have a dimension of that to try and give people a bigger expansive understanding of faith.
KRG: Because that releases people, it sets them free. You know, rather than everything being so temporal and self focused or focused on the moment.
CM: There’s never any freedom in me. It’s always in Christ.
KRG: Yeah
CM: Keith Getty, I would like to ask you if you would mind leading us in prayer. Sometimes we ask guests on Haven Today to do that and some of our listeners know Christ, some don’t know Christ. Would you mind just leading us in prayer for both?
KG: Sure, sure, no problem.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for all the gifts that you give us every day. And Father, we thank you that in you is found all the treasures of wisdom, of knowledge of life, of culture. We thank you that in you is life, and that in you is light and that light is the light of all men. And so Father we pray for all the listeners today. Father, we pray wherever that darkness is in our lives, whether it’s a relationship, whether it is something from the past or something in the future, Father we pray that you will be a light into that darkness and Father we’ll learn to trust you in that. And Father, we pray for those people who maybe don’t know you yet, Father, that they will see you in your words and in your deeds, but in your death and resurrection, hope, forgiveness, freedom and new life, in your name, amen.
CM: Many thanks for leading us in prayer Keith Getty with your wife Kristyn joining us on a Haven Today called, “In Christ Alone”. Have you heard that new hymn? It sounds like it could have been written a few hundred years ago, and I don’t mean that in an offensive way, because the hymns of the church keep the church alive and a new hymn of the church is something that I relish and welcome and so I must say it was a joy for me to get to meet Keith and Kristyn and share with them. And they’ll be back with us again tomorrow. “In Christ alone, my hope is found. He is my light, my strength, my song. The cornerstone, the solid ground, firm through the fiercest drought and storm. What heights of love, what depths of peace when fears are stilled, when strivings cease. My comforter, my all in all, here in the love of Christ I stand.” Isn’t that beautiful? I’d like to share their music with you and at the same time I would like to invite you to become a better friend, a closer friend of Haven Today. Would you partner with us in ministry? I’d love for you to have a copy of this album by Keith and Kristyn, “In Christ Alone” and I’d love to send it to you, and will, as a thank you for your financial gift to Haven Today. You can call us at 1-800-654-2836, 1-800-654-2836. Or go online and we have that album there on our homepage at haventoday.org. “In Christ Alone” is the name of the album and it’s also the name of their most well-known hymn. Haventoday.org. When you get in touch with us, would you also be kind enough to let us know the radio station you’re listening to as well. That helps us out a lot for planning purposes. One other thing, if it’s been a while since you’ve written to us, or perhaps you have a prayer request, I’d like to share with you our mailing address. Here it is:
Haven Today
Box 79997
Riverside, CA 92513
Haven Today
Box 79997
Riverside, CA 92513
In Canada we’re:
Haven Today
Box 6800
Vancouver, BC V6B4C9
That’s:
Haven Today
Box 6800
Vancouver, BC V6B4C9
I’m Charles Morris. Come back again tomorrow for more of the Getty’s. “In Christ Alone” here on Haven Today.