Top Twenty Jesus People Songs

I recently read Larry Eskridge's wonderful God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (2013). I highly endorse this informative and insightful book.

Eskridge rightfully points out that the Jesus People movement did not just begin and end in California in the late 1960s. Rather it eventually spread to middle class evangelical youth across the United States in the early 1970s.

A major tool of the dissemination of this message and movement from West coast counter-culture to evangelical suburbia was the great music that has since laid the foundation for Contemporary Christian Music.

I recently promised my lifelong friend and fellow lover of Jesus People music - Chris Rossetti - that I would offer my Top Ten list of Jesus People songs. But I could not stop with just 10. So here are my Top Twenty choices.

Country Faith - Ballad of the Lukewarm

Love Song - Front Seat, Back Seat

Children of the Day - For Those Tears I Died

Malcolm & Alwyn - Fool's Wisdom

Debby Kerner - The Peace That Passes Understanding

Honeytree - Clean Before the Lord

2nd Chapter of Acts - Which Way the Wind Blows

Larry Norman - I Wish We'd All Been Ready

Tom Stipe - Come Quickly Jesus

Jamie Owens Collins - Hard Times

Love Song - A Love Song

2nd Chapter of Acts - Easter Song

Malcolm & Alwyn - Tomorrow's News

Love Song -Think about What Jesus Said

Day By Day - Original Cast of Godspell

Love Song - Welcome Back

Marsha Carter (of Children of the Day) - Can I Show You

Church Girard - Sometimes Alleluia

They Will Know We Are Christians (By Our Love) - Everyone who sang it

Pass It On - Everyone who sang it

I also want to strongly recommend the "A Decade of Jesus Music 1969-1979" presentation at the One-Way.org web site. Check it out and leave a message of appreciation.

Cut-Flower Civilization

David Elton Trueblood, a Quaker theologian, wrote in his 1969 "A Place to Stand,"

"A quarter of a century ago a few of us began to say that faith in the possibility of a cut-flower civilization is a faith which is bound to fail. What we meant was that it is impossible to sustain certain elements of human dignity, once these have been severed from their cultural roots. The sorrowful fact is that, while the cut flowers seem to go on living and may even exhibit some brightness for a while, they cannot do so permanently, for they will eventually wither and be discarded. The historical truth is that the chief sources of the concepts of the dignity of the individual and equality before the law are found in the Biblical heritage. Apart from the fundamental convictions of that heritage, symbolized by the idea that every man is made in the image of God, there is no adequate reason for accepting the concepts mentioned. Since human beings are often far from admirable in their actual behavior, man's dignity is fundamentally derivative in nature."

This metaphor of a "cut-flower civilization" severed from its cultural roots and left seeking a moral center remains a powerful image of contemporary American society.

I am not advocating an unthinking portrayal of the founding of the United States as an intentional Christian nation. Rather I am simply observing that Western civilization - in both its European and American expressions - is rooted in Greco-Roman culture and Judeo-Christian religion. Even with the sea change of modernity in the Enlightenment and industrialization and now with the "post-modern turn" away from the "Enlightenment project", American values, laws, and institutions have continued to reflect - sometimes in a thoroughly secularized form - "the fundamental convictions of that [earlier] heritage" that at least historically have provided "the chief sources of the concepts of the dignity of the individual and equality before the law."

The Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote in apocalyptic terms of a time when "anarchy is loosed upon the world" and "the center cannot hold" - when "the best lack all conviction" and "the worst are full of passionate intensity."

This description does not sound too foreign in our world of sound bite truths, partisan punditry, and polarizing rhetoric.