Facing the Music Read online

  I was to arrive the night before, hang out and connect with the kids during the next day, then, the subsequent evening, perform. After a long hot day of driving, I was really looking forward to the solitude of the cabin in the woods he had promised me.

  Back in the day, when we used maps and directions rather than GPS systems, I managed to find my way off the main roads, through the dark woods and into the remote Bible camp. In the late hours of the night, Skip greeted me warmly, then led me to my cabin, some distance from the main camping grounds. All was quiet. The kids were nestled in their bunks somewhere away in the darkness and I was set to enjoy my own private space. I had a hot shower, and, Skip assured me, eight hours of uninterrupted sleep to look forward to.

  “There’ll be breakfast in the morning if you want it, but don’t worry about coming down for us,” Skip said. “Get your rest. And when you’re ready, come down to the main grounds and find me. I’ll be on campus somewhere.”

  Exhausted, I changed into my pajamas and hit the sack.

  I’m uncertain how long I had been asleep when, suddenly, I was startled awake by a banging at the door.

  “Jennifer! Jennifer! Wake up!” It was the voice of one of Skip’s minions. “Jennifer!” More banging. “You’re going to want to see this! You have to get up!”

  I was dazed and suddenly filled with adrenaline. I jumped out of bed and went to the door, where I was told that my assistance was immediately required.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. But Minion didn’t give specifics. He hemmed and hawed, but bubbled with a wide-eyed enthusiasm. Whatever in the world was going on, he insisted that I come immediately and wouldn’t close the door until I agreed.

  Still in my bedclothes, I had to push him out of my doorway so I could get some privacy to put some proper clothes on. “Gimme a minute,” I said in groggy agitation. “Let me at least put a bra on and I’ll meet you outside in a second.”

  Once outside, in the pitch dark of the night, I began to wake and realize that, indeed, something was afoot. In the distance, down the hill toward the main campus, there was a steady stream of what sounded like a frenzied crowd in chaos. Minion led me through the woods toward the ruckus and into a clearing where I could finally get a visual.

  The scene was pandemonium. Flashlights were waving around in the dark. People were shouting. Children were on their knees crying. Someone was blowing a whistle. I stood there watching all this trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. Meanwhile, Minion was tugging at my sleeve trying to get me into the mix, but to what purpose I hadn’t quite figured out.

  I focused on a twenty-something male leader towering over a few young campers kneeling on the grass. He was shouting, “What are you going to do?” while pointing a flashlight at their faces. “Who will you choose?”He was screaming like he was the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket.

  “Jesus is here! He’s here right now! The world is at an end! You must choose this instant!”

  I was so stunned that, for a few moments, I almost believed the end-of-days rapture was actually happening. I had to rub my eyes and slap myself to make sure I wasn’t actually dreaming.

  The children were scattered everywhere. Some fell at the crier’s feet, weeping uncontrollably, but these supplicants were not in spiritual ecstasy. They were sobbing and trembling with terror. All around me, I began to hear the responses of the children in the dark. Many of them were begging for the onslaught to stop.

  “Please, please. I choose Jesus,” I heard one of them acquiesce.

  This isn’t salvation, I thought, this was awful! There was no spiritual revelation in their voices. Those kids were terrified and in distress! The poor things had been shouted out of their sleep with bullhorns and, now, the camp counselors were jeering at them.

  Christ has returned and you are going to die. Choose you this day who you will serve. God or man? Satan or Christ? You will die tonight! Where do you want to spend eternity? Heaven or hell?

  There were only two options for relief from the barrage: to make a confession for Jesus Christ, or collapse in exhausted dysfunction. It wasn’t until a child made his or her proclamation that they would be released from the drill. Confessors were rewarded with celebratory hugs from the more compassionate counselors and escorted out of the terrifying darkness into the light of the camp sanctuary; all others were left trembling beneath the stars.

  At one point during the affair, I caught sight of Skip marshaling the troops. Puffed up, sweaty, and excited, he kept watch over the exercise, interjecting the occasional command. When he saw me, he turned to me. Grinning wildly, he shouted over the chaos, “Isn’t this fantastic?”

  I found myself so angry that I became physically ill. I was stunned by what I was witnessing. It was utterly abusive and unholy. Somehow, I had managed to avoid any spiritual suspicion when I held back from participating, but I still felt guilty. By my silent witness, I felt complicit to a spiritual and psychological crime.

  Skip, on the other hand, was proud. “We are literally scaring the Hell out of them!”

  The kids weren’t the only ones who were scared. I was freaked out, too. I felt powerless to get any of this to stop. I was outraged, for certain, but I had no clue about what I was supposed to do. It felt like a trap. If I didn’t find a way to agree with some part of what I was seeing, then it must have meant that something was wrong with me. Maybe I was spiritually weak? Surely if I were a faithful Christian, this would have made some kind of sense to me.

  I tried to recall any verse of Scripture that could help me understand how God could find this exercise redemptive, but I just couldn’t see it. Honestly, how could this be holy? I remembered back to the day when I first responded to the Gospel. It was nothing like this. It was a moment of rest, of peace. In those moments I felt relief that I had truly been lifted out of a pit of despair. It wasn’t like this at all.

  Thankfully, the camp eventually yielded to exhaustion. By the wee hours of the morning, all the youth had been rounded up and ushered into the chapel, where Skip took his proud and accomplished self to the front of the room.

  Softly now, in his most tender and pastoral voice, he began to speak.

  “What happened here tonight, kids, was a drop in the bucket compared to Judgment Day.” His tone of comfort did little to quiet the sniffles and faint sobbing still coming from the crowd. “If you think you know fear,” he gently warned, “think again. There’s always hell.”

  At this point, I really had come to doubt whether I could find any portion of Skip’s faith to empathize with. That kind of polluted message of grace was so far removed from the Gospel I had responded to. Through Christ, I heard the voice of compassion, not coercion. Skip seemed to disagree.

  “For those of you who finally realized tonight that Christ is the only way? Welcome . . . to your new beginning.”

  While Skip’s end-times exercise was an extreme example of evangelical altar calls, his wasn’t an anomaly in terms of ideological practice. As I was discovering, my calling as a musician inside the church, especially within the evangelical community, came with the expectation that I was there not just to sing about my experiences with my faith, but to win souls for Jesus. I struggled, however, to find my footing in terms of such an evangelical mission. I didn’t like the idea of putting people on the spot to make such an intimate, personal decision about their faith publicly. I thought there should be room for those of us who respond best to hours of quiet contemplation.

  Throughout that long, hot summer, I had been asked countless times to participate in leading people to Jesus. Most churches called me a music minister, but I had no inclination to be anything other than a musician. I was happy to sing my songs and even say a little about my personal experience as a Christian but, when it came time for the invitation, I found myself making all manner of excuses to get out of the responsibility of telling people that they needed to
accept Jesus then and there.

  When I got back to my home church in Pittsburg, after weeks away, I would often be greeted by my pastor: “So, how’s your ministry going? How many people did you lead to the Lord?”

  The first time he said it, I thought he was joking.

  “How many?” I asked quizzically in return, “I don’t understand!”

  “If God is working, you’re bound to see the fruit of it in the souls of those you lead to Christ.” He smiled, but it felt like a reprimand. In that instant, I felt as though I had failed to be honorable to my calling.

  Not only did I have no numbers to report, but I’d stumbled into a profound theological quandary as to how to speak responsibly about my faith. Something inside me didn’t agree with the idea that a person could only find their faith the way my pastor and my evangelical peers prescribed, but I hesitated to admit it aloud.

  On the surface, I understood the premise, but had difficulty with executing the mandate. My home church, at that point, was of a Baptist denomination that taught that there was only one way to know you were a true Christian: confess (preferably with witnesses) that Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Savior, be baptized, and serve Christ through all things in your daily life. I had come into Christianity this way and hoped to succeed by following the same standards, but it didn’t stop me from being uncomfortable about insisting to others that they take the same path that I had taken. To me, it was a way, but I wondered, was it the only way?

  Unlike many of my churched peers, I hadn’t grown up believing all this. I wondered if my discomfort was more cultural than theological? Maybe they were just used to talking about God and Jesus all the time, while I was still getting used to such things.

  It wasn’t that church was completely alien to me. With few exceptions, my family made certain to attend Christmas and Easter services. It wasn’t that my family rejected God, we just didn’t use the same kind of language and style that my new evangelical friends did. Faith, however it came to us, was ultimately a private experience. Church was for Sundays and the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) was the ideal we were encouraged to keep. We prayed together as a family at Thanksgiving meals, but we explored our doubts and human suffering, quietly, on our own.

  I had taken deliberate steps in following Jesus, and that made sense for me. Still, I was nothing like the supposed good people that I had seen in church when I was growing up. I saw myself as broken and in need of serious renewal. There were times when my Christian peers described my past life as debauched, and I felt judged when my friends celebrated my new life by calling me a redeemed harlot. I knew how it felt to be called a sinner so fallen that only God had the power and mercy to love me, while those who called themselves my friends could not look past my weaknesses.

  In the end, what moved me to continue on was the waiting grace that I finally saw in God. I was inspired by what Jesus had said and done, forgiving all, loving all. I not only wanted to be the beneficiary of that kind of grace, I wanted every person I met to know they were loved. I wanted to stand in front of the Skips of the world and sing of a different story. I wanted to tell a story of hope rather than that of shame. I wanted to sing a song of joy rather than that of anger. I wanted to join together with others who were willing to wade through the religion and look for something real and life changing. To me, that was the spirit of what sharing one’s faith meant. To pay forward, in action, the essence of the love we know that we have received.

  ten

  My faith, along with my music, was evolving.

  In 1992, I was an eager, yet fragile, convert, dependent on others to inform my faith. By 1995, I was starting to develop my own sense of responsibility and ownership of my individual spiritual identity. Although I didn’t see myself necessarily out to convince people they should follow into Christianity as I had, I was developing a vision as to how I could contribute to the conversation of spirituality. Despite the times that I found the church and religion bewildering, I had also found incredible stability and comfort. I was going on three years sober, my grades in college had dramatically improved, and my head was starting to clear enough that I started dreaming about my future again.

  My friend Byron had spent the previous couple of years trying to encourage me to consider a professional career as a performer. In 1994, he had the grand idea to make some home-studio recordings of my early songs.

  On nights after class and weekends, when I wasn’t traveling, I headed over to Byron’s little farm house in Scammon, Kansas. He set up a four track reel-to-reel tape machine and a couple of old microphones through an old eight-channel Mackie console. I had never before considered recording my original songs, but we were off. I sang four original songs and one arrangement of the classic Sunday school tune “Jesus Love Me.” Byron sent the master recording off to a vanity press, where the whole thing was packaged into a nifty shrink-wrapped little cassette tape, titled Circle Back.

  Byron ordered hundreds of those cassettes, convinced that this was only the beginning of a career he thought was to be my certain destiny. Personally, I thought he was a little nuts. I couldn’t imagine how in the world I was going to sell so many tapes in the short term, let alone see myself as having enough talent to make a career of it.

  I was astounded however, when, only a few months later, Byron announced that we needed to order more copies. Now that I was performing on a regular basis, I was selling tons of them at shows. Byron had also been sending them to Christian coffeehouses, youth camps, and churches, so that he could give folks a sample of what I sounded like. Along with references from my church and other faith leaders I had worked for, he sent out packets and made cold-calls to every place he could think of, looking for places that would hire me to play.

  Byron’s efforts were paying off. I had practically spent the entire summer of 1995 traveling and the fall was starting to fill up as well.

  The good news was that I was getting so much work that I had to start taking my minicareer seriously. Thankfully, I was earning enough with concert fees and selling my cassettes that a bit of the financial sting had been taken out of being a college student. The bad news was that I had so many gigs booked for the coming school year; it was going to be tricky to figure out how I could travel for work and continue to go to college.

  Up until then, financing school had been a tight-rope act. When I had entered school in late 1992, I had done it on the back of music scholarships. The scholarships covered most of my direct school costs, but did little in terms of providing for my food and housing. There were times when all I could afford for groceries was a twenty-five-cent packet of knockoff mac’n’cheese. The rest of my funds went to sharing the rent with my roomies whom, I hoped, didn’t notice or mind when I “borrowed” their butter and milk.

  I worked as many part-time hours as I could, but keeping up with my school load made it difficult to make ends meet. For the last several years, I struggled to balance the demanding classroom and performance requirements of my music education major. Besides coursework, I was busy attending my own private lessons on trumpet, performing for multiple ensembles that included the symphony, marching band, and orchestra, not to mention the vocal choir that rounded out my obligations for keeping my scholarships. Between the demanding practice hours, performances, classes, then the part-time minimum wage job I had schlepping burgers at Hardee’s, I was exhausted most of the time.

  As I looked at the prospects for the coming 1995–96 school year, I admitted something had to give. Excitingly, it was already looking like Byron had many of my weekends booked with gigs, but I was going to have to choose whether to forego the scholarships by missing out on my required marching band performances or work singing my songs. I couldn’t do both.

  The truth was that I hadn’t been the same trumpeter since entering college. From the moment I had haphazardly entered the Pitt State music program, I had always been two
steps behind. I had spent the first year drunk, the second year sobering up, and the third year focusing on giving my life to Jesus. By year four, I was at a crossroad.

  If I was to stay in school as a music education major, I was going to have to stress through another year of financial crisis and curtail my singing gigs. If I accepted the opportunities that were becoming available to me as a Christian artist, affording school would be easier, but I’d have to give up my music major and switch to something more compatible with my schedule.

  I chose to take on Byron’s challenge and get serious about my Christian music prospects. I changed my major to psychology, traveled on weekends to various gigs, and kept writing more music. Mondays through Fridays, I was a psychology undergrad and fast-food chef. Fridays through Sundays, I was a traveling troubadour.

  Life, for me, was starting to become more vivid.

  Gigging through the weekends, I enjoyed watching how music seemed to give people permission to express their own experiences. After shows, I talked for hours with my peers who were starting to become regular, supportive fans. We’d discuss our doubts, our faith, and our convictions, and compare how our individual experience might compare to the experiences of others. It felt good to have a growing audience, but more so, I enjoyed connecting with others about spirituality on an intellectual level.

  If I were to be a Christian artist, I needed know more about its music as well. Before Captured and Byron’s influence, I never knew it existed. Everybody called it contemporary Christian music (CCM). To my ears, most of it sounded like wanna-be knockoffs of mainstream music. Most styles sounded similar to rock-and-roll or pop, but with syrupy, trite lyrics, which, to my ear, often sounded like religious propaganda.

  I cringed when I realized that my early songs didn’t sound too different from that: