Indelible Grace Performer Matthew Smith Coming to Macon
By Rodney Manley, The Macon Telegraph, Ga.
Apr. 26–Matthew Smith and other Christian artists are introducing a whole new generation to the old hymns.
The folk-rock sound might not be what church folks have grown accustomed to hearing with the
songs, but the spiritually rich, centuries-old lyrics are the same.
“It’s good music, but it’s also good lyrical content and good theology,” said Stephen Mixon, a musician and song leader at North Macon Presbyterian Church, where Smith is scheduled to perform Sunday.
Smith records and performs under the Indelible Grace Music umbrella, which was born out of the Reformed University Fellowship, the Presbyterian Church in America’s campus ministry. Over the last decade, Indelible Grace has released four albums of rewritten hymns, all performed by former students and alumni affiliated with the ministry.
The albums have been popular not only with college students but also with many older church congregations.
“There’s a cultural shift with my generation — people 30 and under — to connect with something in history. These hymns do that,” said Mixon. “If you put that music to an American folk sound, that resonates with us.”
Indelible Grace is reviving a tradition of putting the traditional hymns to new music. The Nashville, Tenn., group is led by the Rev. Kevin Twit, the Reformed University Fellowship campus minister at Belmont University and a musician/recording engineer.
The revised hymns aren’t always received warmly. On the Indelible Grace Web site, Twit recounts an episode from several years ago at a national meeting of the denomination. A worship group played a version of Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can It Be” that didn’t sit well with one gentleman. He protested that the music wasn’t as “majestic” as intended and that Wesley had to be “turning over in his grave.”
The group’s organist pointed out that Wesley might not have even written the hymn to music and that the tune associated with it was actually a bar song.
Smith helped found Indelible Grace while a student at Belmont. The movement inspired other Christian groups, such as Jars of Clay, to record similar music. Reformed University Fellowship also has a hymn book of revised hymn arrangements.
Mixon said the spiritual nature of the hymns lead Christians to turn to them for funerals and the like.
“Church worship should be no different,” he said.
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