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[interviewer] All right, let's do this.
- All right, guys, we rollin'? - [cameraman] Rolling.
- All right, we're ready to start. - Okay.
Tell me your name and tell me what you do in the music industry.
I'm Amy Grant.
And I have been making music and telling stories since I was a teenager.
[pensive music playing]
[interviewer] There's no really rules about it.
You can be expressive with your hands and that type of stuff.
You don't have to be contained to a box.
- Yeah. - So just be you.
Well, I was "Mike Smith" growing up. [laughs]
- Good. - But Michael W. Smith.
[interviewer] You talk, uh,
but you don't have to worry about where we're going.
I just want... Can you look at the shot and see if it's okay?
- I trust you guys completely. - [indistinct chatter]
[interviewer] I know it's a trust fall.
It's an honor to get to hang with you, man.
Oh, you're more than welcome. Man, I'm easy-breezy.
Can somebody throw me a room temp water,
just to have on the side with paper torn off?
[Lauren Daigle] Hunter, did you get my memo?
- No, I didn't... - Dang it!
[Daigle] I think we're good now.
[interviewer] We good? We rollin'? You good, Chris...
Can I ask y'all a question?
[man] Oh-ho. Okay. Okay. Okay.
[interviewer] That'll look cool.
- [crewman] Oh, this is Silas. - Silas.
[interviewer] How's your fam?
[Joel Smallbone] Quite a chair you have here.
[interviewer] What were your early influences, musically?
[Tobymac] I mean, I love music. I don't think...
People ask me all the time, "How long you gonna do this?"
I'm like, "Till the day I die." I mean...
You know, I don't think music is something that can be put in a box.
You know, I think it's something you just do.
[pensive music continues]
[inaudible]
[Michael W. Smith] I think music is the most powerful,
universal language in the world.
And somehow it comes out of the radio,
or the satellite radio, or on a CD, or on your computer
and you go, "Oh, my gosh, that's amazing.
Great song. That song changed my life."
And you can do all of that in three and a half minutes.
It was a vehicle, for me,
to see the richness of hope land upon someone's spirit,
and embrace the embrace of God. The truth is that God
has some wild way of allowing His presence to be known
via rhythm, rhyme and melody. Sound. I don't understand it.
[newscaster] The Jesus Movement is no longer a California fad.
[newscaster 2] Contemporary Christian music
has become a billion-dollar-a-year business.
Small Christian record companies...
[Michael Sweet] I don't wanna make this thing negative at all,
but, at the same time, I wanna be honest.
It was so much drama in the church, man.
I drove myself into a clinical depression
thinking about how I'm not enough.
You're never gonna please everybody.
I wish I could learn that more.
I have been delivered the message. Thank you, world.
Some of relentlessness is bound up in insecurity.
You work harder because you think you're less gifted.
You know, I've thought that my whole life.
[Grant] I wrote, "I think I have forfeited
every right that I ever had to be on a stage."
[interviewer] Would you change anything about your journey,
and was it ultimately worth it in the end?
I can't believe I'm getting emotional.
[woman] I don't know how to say this, so I'm just gonna go for it.
How do I wanna say this?
[pensive music continues]
[shop door bell tinkles]
- Hey, Doyle. How are you? - Good.
[Smith] I'll never forget getting my first 45 at Davidson's Record Shop
in Huntington, West Virginia.
And it was "I Saw Her Standing There."
And then it was, uh, "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude,"
Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel. The list goes on.
I probably wouldn't be here doing this interview
if it hadn't been for this girl.
[Grant] Really, my introduction to Christian music
was this bookstore and coffee shop.
And every Saturday night, there was live music.
And really, it was just the most beautiful kind of community.
And I was 14.
And I just heard this very acoustic music
and they had Jesus lyrics. And I loved it.
'Cause it was unlike anything this southern religious town had seen.
I don't remember the coffee ever being that great, by the way. [laughs]
It was people that followed Jesus
and they were processing their faith through songs.
But a lot of hymns
are close-your-eyes singing to God.
I wanted to sing songs with my eyes wide open, singing to each other.
I love this record.
Been a long time since I've listened to it.
[Smith] When I first heard that Maranatha record,
I just couldn't get enough of it.
This thing called Jesus Music, which exploded in Southern California,
somehow found its way in my hometown.
And it changed my life.
["Righteous Rocker" by Larry Norman begins]
I don't know what will happen now.
We've got some difficult days ahead.
[Kaiser] My generation had seen all of the civil unrest and the craziness.
Most of us were a bunch of hippies
trying to escape the pain and the misery...
Anything other than the status quo American dream
that was not an American dream, it was an American nightmare.
["Righteous Rocker" continues]
[John Styll] You had the war in Vietnam...
Systematic racism.
Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
[Styll] Assassinations...
[reporter] President Kennedy died some 38 minutes ago.
[reporter 2] Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight...
[Styll] Massive student protests...
[crowd chanting] Power to the people!
[student] Let's go!
This was partly why a lot of us ended up saying,
"Eat, drink and be merry. Tomorrow we die."
♪♪
What's happening is, uh, a basic change in the evolutionary process of mankind.
[man] The people don't realize that before you can spread love around
to anybody else, you've first gotta find it in yourself.
♪ Without love ♪
♪ You ain't nothing without love ♪
[Tommy Coomes] The experiment of drugs, sex,
rock 'n' roll and the hippie lifestyle
pretty much started about '66, '67 up in Haight-Ashbury
and made its way down to Southern California pretty quickly,
and really all around the world.
[Chuck Girard] My philosophy was that God had given us LSD,
and that if you weren't brave enough to experiment with drugs,
you'd miss God.
'Cause I thought that was the secret key.
They're soaked in LSD.
You roll 'em up and smoke 'em and they'll get you high.
I literally took a spice rack off a wall one night,
and rolled a joint out of everything on the rack.
I can guarantee you,
you can't even begin to get a buzz off of any of that stuff. I tried.
We took drugs to discover.
We were trying to find answers.
And our heroes,
like The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin,
they were kind of leading us.
[Coomes] We had two great loves that kind of bound us together.
It was the love of making music
and this really driving urge to find out who God was,
and to find something better than what we'd seen.
[Styll] The peace and love thing had probably its greatest expression
at the Woodstock Festival.
[Walter Cronkite] A rock music festival
that drew hundreds of thousands of young people
to a dairy farm in White Lake, New York, over the weekend
came to an end today.
And that was kinda the end of that, because the next big thing was Altamont,
and that was death and horrible stuff
that happened at that festival in California.
[Laurie] The Rolling Stones are performing,
and they have the Hells Angels doing security
and a couple of people are killed.
[reporter] The Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in California.
Four deaths, including a stabbing.
The flower children had lost some of their bloom.
[Laurie] And then when we saw
our rock stars die before our eyes...
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison,
all dead of incidents related to drugs...
[Dick Cavett] And everybody knows that the Beatles
went through a drug phase.
Did you ever stop and think of it this way?
That the fact that this was known, and the fact that you were The Beatles
might've caused thousands of kids to go into drug problems
that might not have otherwise.
[Coomes] The drugs didn't work.
All the free thinking and LSD and all that stuff
just left people rather hopeless.
We began to hit the bottom.
The war inside didn't go away,
even though we "exercised" our freedom
to be, do, and experience whatever we wanted to experience.
[Girard] I'm still empty, I'm still clueless.
We're sitting there kind of bewildered,
thinking, like, "Where do we go from here?"
And that's when we started to hear about Calvary.
In Southern California, there was a church called Calvary Chapel
that let disillusioned young people come in.
And it seems silly now, but back then,
to go to church in jeans or barefoot
was kind of revolutionary that they would not only let you in,
but encourage you and not look funny at you.
Hippies started accepting Jesus.
In the beginning, we didn't know there was a movement of any kind.
We just heard, "There's this place in Costa Mesa
with a bunch of people like us there.
They love God, and there's this 'hippie preacher' there."
[Duane Pederson] One of the young men, Kathryn,
who has been so used of God,
is Lonnie Frisbee.
I wonder if Lonnie could just share with us some, now.
Well, the people tell me that I'm trying to look like Jesus.
I can't think of anybody else I'd rather look like.
[laughter]
[Coomes] So that was one of the attractions of all these kids,
it's like, "Well, here's somebody like us, who looks like us,
who's lived through this lifestyle, who loves Christ."
Jesus Christ willingly went to the cross.
And he died. He gave his life.
I came to see Lonnie Frisbee, the hippie preacher,
and I got Chuck instead, Chuck Smith,
you know, the 42-year-old balding guy.
He did exude love,
and it was so different from what I thought it would be.
And it was so powerful, the atmosphere in there.
There was a great power of God in that building
and I was overwhelmed by it.
It was so pure.
[Coomes] Within a couple weeks we had all went to Calvary Chapel.
We all got radically saved.
And that spun the whole thing around.
So for me after that, man, there was no turning back.
This wasn't just a good idea.
This was darkness to light, and loneliness to joy.
[spiritual music playing]
And the church, for so long, has been expecting
a certain mold of what a Christian should look like
or what a Christian should be,
or what a Christian should say.
And God is blowing everybody's mind,
because he's saving the hippies,
and nobody thought a hippie could be saved.
[spiritual music continues]
[Styll] As the movement began, a lot of these folks were musicians,
they didn't wanna stop doing music,
but they started trying to express their faith through music,
an expression of faith that they could relate to.
[upbeat rock music playing]
[reporter] More and more these days,
young people are turning away from dangerous drugs
and turning onto Christ instead.
[Thompson] So as millions of these kids are becoming Christians,
this soundtrack emerges.
And Calvary Chapel was the place on the West Coast
where that really took root.
But the group that really stood out to me was Love Song.
[Coomes] For us, we just kinda continued
the same kind of music that we loved
with a whole different heart, a whole different attitude.
So we went in to see Chuck and see if he'd let us play.
They say, "The Lord gave us a song."
Now, usually when a musician says the Lord gave them a song,
and you listen to it, you wonder,
was that because He didn't want it?
He said, "Nah, you guys are hippies,
rock 'n' roll, drums, not in my church."
Because you gotta remember, up till that point, what was church music?
The hymn book, choir, organ.
But at the end of the little "interview,"
he said, "Well, let me at least hear a song."
So we played a song called "Welcome Back."
- [vocalizing] - ? Welcome?
♪ Back ♪
When they began to play for Chuck, it was like, "Wow!"
[vocalizing]
[Girard] Chuck Smith hardly ever shed a tear.
But he was moved.
So the next thing we hear is, "Can you guys play tonight?
It's youth night, and Lonnie's preaching."
And I can't think of many pastors
that would've allowed something like that to happen on their stage.
[song ends]
[Laurie] Every night it was something new,
a new band would form with new songs.
Within six months, there was 12 bands.
I saw contemporary Christian music born right before my very eyes.
[rock music playing]
[Smith] I remember when I walked into a thrift store
and there was a record bin there.
There was this one record in that bin,
and there was this big red "Maranatha" sign on a white cover,
and it was called The Everlastin' Living Jesus Music Concert.
I picked it up and I turned it around,
it was all these people with long hair.
And I could tell all these songs were about Jesus.
And I'm thinking, "That's what I wanna do."
[Girard] We made the album for about $4,00 0 with mastering and everything.
And it went on to sell 200,000 units, you know, which is unbelievable.
There was no contemporary Christian music industry at all.
That was just Chuck Smith saying,
"These kids need a record so that when they go somewhere
and nobody gives 'em money, they can at least sell the record
and can have enough gas money to get home."
That's how Maranatha started in 1971.
[upbeat music playing]
[reporter] The Jesus Movement is no longer a California fad.
It's a song-singing, hand-clapping, full-fledged, old-fashioned revival
that's sweeping the country.
[Styll] It was quite a thing.
I mean, the Jesus Movement made the cover of Time magazine.
[Coomes] That just started happening in other places, too, like Seattle,
El Paso, Kansas City.
[Girard] Northern California,
back east there were little pockets of people that were discovering Jesus.
[Styll] Another great artist got his start in Ohio. It was Phil Keaggy.
[playing blues guitar lick]
[laughs]
There were different expressions of contemporary Christian music
from other parts of the country, and even abroad,
like the Resurrection Band...
[upbeat rock music playing]
[Thompson] They come out playing Zeppelin-y, hardcore, Chicago rock blues.
[Kaiser] When you play at about 14 0 dB,
they either listen or they leave.
[Thompson] But then you find out that all of the profits go into this ministry.
That's the most punk rock thing I ever heard.
["For Him Who Has Ears to Hear" by Keith Green playing]
Keith was a musical whiz.
A Keith Green album is an essential album.
Keith Green was an extraordinarily talented rebel.
He was not a very popular person in the industry.
He recorded a record where he could've made a lot of money off of it,
and he was giving it away for free.
♪ You put this love in my heart ♪
[Laurie] And then bands like The 2nd Chapter of Acts from Los Angeles.
[Smith] Just the harmonies.
I'd never heard anything like it. It was set apart.
[Matthew Ward] People would say, "You guys were pioneers."
Oh, you don't know you're a pioneer of something when you're doing it.
[Styll] Andrae Crouch is another one.
Can't even begin to estimate his importance.
Andrae was probably one of the very best bridges.
[Kirk Franklin] We do not acknowledge the type of architect,
and type of pioneer of bringing worlds together
that Andrae Crouch was.
[Gaither] Many of his concerts
was what Heaven should be like, you know. [laughs]
[Andrae and backup singers] ? Hallelujah?
[vocalizing]
[audience cheering]
[Laurie] It was so many musical styles happening at the same time.
There was such diversity of music.
[Grant] I mean, it was just all word of mouth.
"Have you heard this? Have you heard this?"
It just felt like it was all so...
underground.
- [instrumental music playing] - [applause]
[announcer] From California, ladies and gentlemen, Larry Norman.
[crowd cheering]
[Girard] Well, Larry is the single most important figure
in contemporary Christian music.
[Thompson] Larry Norman, who most people call the Father of Christian Rock,
was definitely not the first person to ever play
rock 'n' roll with a Christian message.
But, certainly, was the first rock star
in Christian rock, undeniably.
My dad has always believed that "the secular world"
stole church music, turned it into rock 'n' roll.
And my dad actually felt
part of his mission was to bring it back into the church.
[Larry Norman]? Why don't you look into Jesus??
♪ He got the answer ♪
[Styll] The early stuff he put out,
Christian radio today, no way would they play it.
Go back and read some of the lyrics. I mean, it's crazy stuff.
"Sippin' whisky from a paper cup."
"You drown your sorrows till you can't stand up."
"Shootin' junk till you're half insane, broken needle in your purple vein."
"Gonorrhea on Valentine's Day."
"You're still lookin' for the perfect lay."
That may not even make it into this documentary.
♪ Why don't you look into Jesus? ♪
♪ He got the answer ♪
He was sort of rebellious,
rebellious to the culture that wanted everyone
to go down the road of drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll.
And he's a guy saying "It's Jesus."
But he was also rebellious in church culture,
'cause he was criticized for this devil music.
He wrote a song about it called...
♪ Why should the devil have all the good music? ♪
- [laughter] - [Larry] Whoo!
[Laurie] And that appealed to us,
because my generation was sort of a revolutionary generation.
♪ Jesus is the rock and He rolled my blues away ♪
But that was just Larry. He was rough around the edges.
Is he a complicated character? That's putting it mildly.
Some people felt he wasn't truthful.
Some people felt like all the liner notes,
even the ones that sort of praised him,
were written by him.
One time we were putting him on the cover of the magazine.
Larry was a photographer
and very particular about the photographs that were used.
And I don't think he was happy about the selection.
He drove down to my house, which was in Orange County,
from L.A. where he lived,
showed up at my door at, like, 1:30 in the morning,
with strips of two-by-two pictures in a loop
so we could pick out a different cover.
1:30 in the morning, at my house.
He didn't like CCM Magazine.
Sure wanted to be on the cover, though.
But that's just kinda how he rolled.
He was a bit of a difficult person.
I knew Larry better than Larry probably wished I'd known Larry.
I almost never confronted him because I knew other people that had.
He made some pretty lousy choices.
So have I. So have you. So has everybody.
[Styll] He always said he was too secular for the Christian crowd,
and too Christian for the secular crowd.
And he made great music.
I mean, Only Visiting This Planet
has to be one of the greatest albums to come out of Christian music, ever.
He was, undeniably, hugely influential on a whole generation of artists.
♪ He's got the answer ♪
- [holds note] - [song ends]
Well, here comes the Jesus Movement,
and a whole lot of us had encounters with the living, risen Jesus Christ.
And then, we showed up in traditional churches.
I would have to say the majority of whom were going,
"Whoa, persona non grata," you know.
"You look weird. Your music is weird."
Three songs in,
gray-haired deacons in suits and ties with their necks red and veins popping,
were coming down the aisle to shut us down, man.
They wouldn't let us in church doors, man.
We were like, "Play that electronic music of the devil.
It had a beat."
Their pastors would tell their flock,
"This group's gonna be in town tonight.
By God," you know, "mm-mm."
And that was a lot of people's attitude.
You know, like, If these guys are really Christians,
why don't they shave their beards, why don't they cut their hair?
[Coomes] We didn't get invited in the church, we just went.
And a lot of times people would go, like,
"Who let these people in here?"
Time after time,
we'd be shakin' our boots, goin', like,
"Lord, we have nothin' in common with these people.
And they're obviously judging us."
[Laurie] But not every church was open to what God was doing.
So what was needed was someone that we trusted, who would speak up
and give a stamp of endorsement
for what was happening in the Jesus Movement.
And it turned out to be Billy Graham.
[upbeat rock music playing]
[reporter] Nearly 100,000 youths have descended on Dallas for Explo '72,
ranging from the very clean-cut to the Jesus freaks.
More than 25,0 0 0 had to find their own housing when they arrived.
A large group wound up in what is being called Tent City.
The honorary chairman of Explo '72 is the Reverend Billy Graham.
After arriving in Dallas,
he immediately went into the streets to carry the message of Jesus.
He said he wanted to become part of the new worldwide youth movement.
I wanted to come and identify with 'em.
Because I believe that this is a great and historic gathering.
And this is going to be a moment in the history of Dallas,
and a moment in the history of the world.
[reporter] Final construction is still underway for the grand finale...
A seven-hour Jesus Music festival.
More than a quarter of a million people
are expected near the downtown area of Dallas.
The music will be mod.
The Reverend Billy Graham calls it "A Christian Woodstock."
[reporter 2] This week you made a reference
that this would be a religious Woodstock, and the city officials in Dallas
were hoping to stay away from that kind of reference to Woodstock,
and that has worried them just a bit. Could you comment on that, please?
Uh, I didn't mean to worry the city officials of Dallas.
What I meant was
that the crowd is going to be a huge crowd of young people,
but gathered for a totally different purpose.
[funk rock music playing]
Campus Crusade had been doing this for a while,
but when they had their event in 1972,
they invited not only known Christian artists like Larry Norman,
but they also invited Andrae Crouch,
and they invited Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.
[Laurie] You had Love Song, and Rita Coolidge, and others.
So it's like, "Wow. What an eclectic lineup of people."
That thing blew up.
I've heard different numbers,
but maybe 200,0 0 0 people end up converging on Dallas.
[Larry]? I'm not talking religion?
♪ I'm talking 'bout Jesus ♪
[crowd member]? Oh, Lordy?
[Larry]? Let the people know that Jesus cares?
♪ You let the people know that Jesus cares ♪
[vocalizing]
Just to let you know it's rock 'n' roll.
[vocalizing electric guitar lick]
[woman] We'll always remember about Explo,
is the wonderful loving kindness that God has shown through all the people here.
[Johnny Cash] Think of all the places I've ever had the privilege of performing,
this is probably the most important to me,
and one of the biggest thrills in my life
- to be able to be here. - [cheers and applause]
[Graham] Explo '72
has been one of the greatest experiences of my life.
I've been so excited, I almost started dancing.
And I saw something here in Dallas yesterday that I'll never forget.
I saw three energetic young witnesses downtown
and had a policeman down on his knees, praying.
[cheering]
True faith must be applied
to the social problems of our world.
Today, Christian young people ought to be involved
in the problems of poverty, ecology, war,
racial tension, and all the other problems of our generation.
This is a Christian happening.
It's a demonstration of the love of God
by tens of thousands of young people to the world,
that are saying to the world, "God loves you."
It's the Jesus Revolution that is going on in this country.
[cheers and applause]
Rock 'n' roll is the music of rebellion.
So parents were like, "Oh, this is bad."
Billy Graham gets up and speaks,
and all of a sudden they open their minds to this idea that,
this music that was born out of rebellion,
maybe this could be incorporated into something the Holy Spirit could use.
And it was sort of an affirmation. It was a seal of approval.
If Billy will get up and speak after hippies sing,
maybe it's okay to have drums. Maybe it's okay to have guitars.
[Thompson] Movements need catalyst moments like that.
Explo '72 definitely seems to have been one of those catalyst moments.
[Laurie] It probably was the culmination of phase one of Jesus Music
and the Jesus Movement.
Maybe it was the end of a phase,
the end of a certain explosion of music
and change in art and culture,
and the introduction to a new phase of what it would become later,
for better and for worse.
[all]? And they'll know we are Christians by our love?
♪ By our love ♪
♪ Yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love. ♪
[tape fast-forwarding]
[upbeat synth-pop music playing]
[reporter] Thanks in part to the young people
who've made contemporary Christian music a force to be reckoned with,
gospel music is finally coming of age
as the fastest growing segment of the music industry in the nation.
Last vestiges of what we think of as Jesus Music
are kind of fading into the ether,
and CCM as a brand is coming into its own.
[reporter] Who'd ever thought that in a day when Americans
seemed to worship the materialism of Madonna or the sexuality of Prince,
so many of them would be buying records about how to get to Heaven?
But they are.
Last year Americans spent $75 million buying Christian music.
This year, they'll spend even more.
[Styll] The '80s was go-go time for Christian music.
It had gotten over the growing pains of its birth.
[Roger Mudd] On stages across the country,
out of radios and tape recorders and record players,
missionaries in tights are banging the drums
and slashing at their guitars for God.
[Bill Reeves] The industry was lovin' it, 'cause the industry was growing.
Where I was feeling the pushback in the old guard
were the pastors who didn't get it.
The deacon body would say, "That's devil music."
That's where I felt the pushback.
[applause]
Satan always goes too far in his...
in his greed to steal and to kill and to destroy.
He gets too perverted, too damnable, too dastardly.
So he changes course
and then millions fall for it all over again.
And today it's called... listen carefully...
Christian rock music.
[glam metal music playing]
The metal scene in the '80s, man, was decadent.
It was brand-new, I think would be fair to say.
The discussion wasn't, "Was this music good or not?"
The discussion was, "How can this be Christian music?"
Christian metal wasn't just, like, part of the pie.
There was a pie of CCM music,
and then under that pie was a plate.
And under that plate, there was a floor.
Under the floor, there was a basement.
And then under the basement, there was a crypt.
And in that crypt, there were Christian metal bands.
["S.O.S" by Bloodgood playing]
[Thompson] Christian metal was still so offensive to most church people.
[John Cooper] If you've ever heard of the people
who say that Christian rock music was straight from the pit of Hell,
that's the family I grew up in.
My parents would rather me have gone to jail for murder
than be a Christian rock singer.
♪ S.O.S. ♪
[holding note]
[song ends]
I grew up around church music, classical music.
And when I first heard rock music, it changed everything.
[playing upbeat rock music]
[reporter] DeGarmo and Key, as you might know them,
or as I sometimes often call them,
"The Boys." [laughs]
[Cooper] Eddie's one of the coolest people in the world.
He had the hair. Sideburns were as long as my beard.
[in raspy voice] You know, and he talks like this, right?
[laughs, in normal voice] Everything sounds cooler when you talk like that.
- All right to hold the coffee cup, right? - [interviewer] Absolutely.
Whatever you want.
My parents were like, "This guy is evil.
You cannot speak with him." So I liked his music.
[Degarmo] The church didn't really accept us.
It took us, in the early days of Christian music,
a lot of thick skin to make it through that.
I mean, I had tomatoes thrown at me, man.
Thankful it wasn't rocks. [laughs]
Rock 'n' roll, believe it or not, started in the church.
[audience cheers]
And the problem was, is that the church didn't want it.
[techno voice] ? Je... Je... Je... Je...?
♪ Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus ♪
♪ Jesus, Jesus loves you ♪
♪ God gave rock 'n' roll to you ♪
♪ Gave rock 'n' roll to you ♪
♪ Put it in the soul of everyone ♪
[Chris Tomlin] Petra. That was the first band I heard, and I thought,
"Oh, my gosh. What is this?"
♪ God gave rock 'n' roll to you ♪
- [Stryper member] Hello, Tokyo! - [audience cheering]
Stryper rocks for Jesus Christ.
[metal music playing]
♪ Oh! ♪
Stryper had such a theatrical mindset.
[Thompson] Their skills were great.
Their stage presence, their swagger...
They figured out this look with the yellow and black.
[Cooper] Stryper comes on and honestly, you would've thought
it was a Satanistic killing ritual or something.
My mom was like, "Oh, in the name of Jesus!"
Like, "Get to your room!"
♪ Jesus ♪
[Thompson] I see them at a show and they're chucking Bibles
and one of 'em hits me in the face, and I was like,
"I literally just got chucked in the face by a Bible."
[metal music continues playing]
[Smallbone] Every second of that performance
was so thought out, and so intentional.
And you were always seeing something new.
They were over here, and then they were over there.
So if you look at for KING & COUNTRY now,
it's basically Stryper.
[vocalizing in high pitch]
[Sweet] My brother started watching
Jimmy Swaggart on the television.
He was really drawn in to Jimmy.
There was something about Jimmy he really liked,
and he started asking us, "Hey, guys, check this out.
Watch this with me."
Jimmy said the Sinner's Prayer, and literally we all, like,
looked at each other and said, "Let's bow our heads."
[Swaggart] Now let us pray.
[Sweet] We repeated these words after Jimmy.
And we said the Sinner's Prayer. That was it. The whole family.
We accepted Christ.
In front of the television. Literally.
Jimmy pretty much became our pastor.
[Swaggart] Jesus' blood can make you free...
for He saved the worst among you,
when He saved a wretch like me.
[glam metal music playing]
[Sweet] We were a rock band who became Christians.
So what we did, instead of change everything that we were...
the look, the hair, go burn all our albums in the backyard,
we changed the lyrics.
[reporter] If God rules over rock concerts,
these must be his missionaries, dressed up like killer bees.
They call themselves Stryper.
Stryper was like, "No, no, no. We're talkin' about Jesus."
I don't think there's ever been
a more evangelistic crossover band
in any of Christian music history than Stryper.
[Laurie] They're like evangelists with lots of hair.
So some preachers were blasting them,
but other preachers I knew embraced them
and thought what they were doing was a great thing.
They had this cover with these flowing manes of hair,
and, like, yellow and black spandex.
It's pretty violent, but they were all holding weapons.
But the funny thing is, is they're little pellet guns from Japan.
[laughs]
["Calling On You" by Stryper playing]
Our first video got airplay on MTV in '85.
MTV used to always come back and say,
"We can't play your video because there's too much Jesus in it,"
or "too patriotic" or too this or too that.
They started Dial MTV.
Then it wasn't up to the program directors,
it was up to the people, the fans.
[Adam Curry] Hi, you're on Dial MTV.
Have you ever heard of this band called Stryper
who have sold over a million albums of their new one?
[caller] Oh, yeah, man. Man, it's just the best.
We killed all the other bands on the countdown.
Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, killed 'em all.
Went to number one like that and stayed at number one.
Things were happening that was really humbling and miraculous
that didn't happen to other bands.
There was something going on with Stryper that I can't explain,
other than God was just really blessing the band.
[applause]
God said, "I want you to cry out and cry out loud,"
and this is just a little tiny part,
against this so-called contemporary rock 'n' roll,
so-called Christian music in our churches.
[TV audience cheering]
[Sweet] Once the band made it,
that's when we started watching Jimmy hold up our album saying,
"This band right here, Stryper, they are of the devil.
They're wolves in sheep's clothing."
And we would watch that and think, "Oh, my God."
It hurt.
Because to me he was like family.
He was instrumental in saving me, saving my family.
I was in tears, man.
[Mylon Lefevre] I'm watching TV and Jimmy's on.
He holds up this magazine.
It was Contemporary Christian Magazine. CCM.
And he basically said, "There's no anointing in that music."
I got my glasses, was sitting on the table,
to see who it was, and it was me.
Rejections from the world is no big deal.
Rejection from the church? This is your family.
The rock music scene in America today is not just a fad.
It is a diabolical scheme of Satan
that has mutilated, decimated,
damned, denigrated, degraded, and destroyed.
[Sweet] We started all rebelling a little bit more towards the church,
and even towards God.
Instead of having an open heart, it was more like,
"Okay, we're just kinda done with hearing this stuff. We don't wanna hear it."
We started drinking more heavily.
I saw it start to affect negatively my family.
That's when I started wanting to do something about it.
And I felt like, "Okay. You know what?
If my family's gonna suffer from this and it's gonna separate me from my family,
then it's time for me to leave."
And I did.
[somber music playing]
I remember it was a really difficult time.
It affected my brother the most,
'cause I think Robert always thought, and as did I,
that we would be together forever.
And that day came when we weren't.
[Styll] So these two factions were kind of at war with each other,
part of the church and the Christian rock groups.
There needed to be something that could bring people together.
In Nashville, a new artist was emerging.
And really, an unlikely star was being born.
[Jim Bakker] How're you doing?
[Grant] I'm kinda nervous,
to be really honest about this.
[Bakker] Oh, don't be nervous.
[Styll] Amy Grant put out her first album, and it took off huge.
Unexpectedly huge.
It had kind of a bad cover.
She didn't sing great.
But people loved her and they loved those songs.
[Grant] I started writing songs when I was about 15.
Unbeknownst to me, someone took a tape of my little songs
and showed 'em to a record producer.
And they came to me with a contract and said, "Please sing for us."
And I thought they were making a joke.
Me? And, it just started from there.
["I Have Decided" by Amy Grant playing]
"Hey, somebody called from Denver, Colorado,
and they want you to come and do a show, and it's $300."
And I went, "God, $30 0?
It sounds great, but if I blow $300 on one gig,
I've got nothing for college."
[laughs] And he went, "No..."
That tells you what I felt about my skill.
I thought I had to pay them $300 to come sing.
And he said, "No, I think they're gonna pay you."
I was a sophomore in college
and I had gotten a call from Bill Gaither
and he wanted me to come do some shows with him.
They would do these huge arena things.
They came and picked me up in a private plane.
I was a sophomore in college.
He was talking about Sandi Patty had been their guest many times
and "She just brought the house down.
It was a standing ovation. She would finish a song..."
[holding note in high pitch]
[cheering and whistling]
And I said, "Well, if you're looking for a standing ovation,
you've got the wrong girl." [laughing]
I said, "My music is more like a good, comfortable pair of house shoes.
And if that's what you're looking for, we got it." [chuckles]
[soft piano music playing]
Every time a door would open, I would go,
"This is just really bizarre." [laughs]
But I worked hard, I worked on my craft,
I worked on my songwriting.
I didn't worry about record covers
or what I looked like or what people thought.
Early on, I quickly took the focus off of my ability to wow the crowd.
I've just always been somewhere in the middle of the pack.
But I have a chance to create a music world
with the kind of music that has moved me.
Music was a lifeline to me.
I think that the reason Amy was so poised
to be the perfect breakout artist for Christian music
is that she sings in a very demure kind of style,
which is the way that the church, I think, liked women.
If you need to be on stage, just appreciate your place
and be humble about it.
Little did they know who she really was,
and the talent that was really forming in her all that time.
She was like a Trojan horse, like, she snuck in.
["Wise Up" by Amy Grant playing]
[reporter] She's probably the first artist
to dance on stage in leather pants,
no shoes, and a leopard skin jacket while singing about Jesus.
[Thompson] She's played nice long enough.
Then Unguarded comes out.
That leopard jacket and hair flying around,
and she's playing for the big leagues, at that point.
["Wise Up" continues]
[Steven Curtis Chapman] People responded to it because there was an authenticity.
This isn't somebody telling me how I oughta be and live.
This is somebody saying, "I'll just tell ya my story."
[Daigle] She has this incredibly eloquent way
of expressing human desire in pretty universal ways.
Here we go!
[upbeat synth music playing]
[Smith] Well, I met Amy in probably early 1981.
I don't know how it really happened.
I found myself in a room with her and Gary,
writing songs for the Age to Age record.
[Grant] And he had an idea, and he was playing something,
and I thought, "God, you're such a great musician.
That's a great idea."
And then he had another idea. And then he got up and run around,
and he had another idea. [laughs]
He just jumped around a lot.
He talked fast, and he was so energetic. And just... you know?
"What about this? What about this?"
- He was really hyper. - I was crazy.
And I remember just thinking, "Whoa."
He was this fire hose of creativity.
I mean, no wonder he had zero body fat.
He just was like, [mimics machine gun] you know?
There was something in the craft of those songs
that I think was moving Christian music forward.
Come on, let's face it, you know?
If I was gonna have a man crush,
I mean, the dude's, you know, he's a good-lookin' fella.
[Smith] That writing moment with Amy
began a friendship that has lasted all these years.
I wouldn't be sitting in this chair
if it hadn't been for Amy taking a chance on this kid from West Virginia.
[Grant] For the better part of this last year,
I was on the road with a young man that's been a friend for about 10 years.
I found out that he was in Atlanta tonight,
and there's no way we can be in the same town
and not be on the same stage.
So would you please welcome Michael W. Smith.
[Smith] And Amy and I would end the show
with "Friends" every night.
[Smith]? And friends are friends forever?
♪ If the Lord's the Lord of them ♪
♪ And a friend will not say never ♪
♪ 'Cause the welcome will not end ♪
♪ Though it's hard to let you go ♪
♪ In the Father's hands we know ♪
♪ That a lifetime's not too long ♪
♪ To live as friends ♪
♪ No, a lifetime's not too long ♪
♪ To live as friends. ♪
[audience cheering]
[Thompson] Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith,
they're kind of the king and queen of the prom of '80s CCM music.
If it wasn't for them, I'm not sure where the bar would be.
[Styll] For a lot of the people who got involved, the goal was,
"Let's make music that's good enough to get on pop radio."
We want our message to be out there
where people who need the message can hear it.
But it didn't happen until Amy Grant made it happen.
And she's sold now over 10 million records.
She burst onto the mainstream pop charts
with an incredibly catchy tune called "Baby Baby."
- "Baby Baby." - This is Amy Grant!
♪ Baby, baby ♪
♪ I'm taken with the notion ♪
[Grant] Something shifted in the mid-'80s.
All I remember, it was just so much fun.
Whatever that energy feeling of running with headphones on,
I feel like I could run forever,
just add that with the massive wind that was carrying you.
[Jennifer Cooke] TV performances,
radio interviews, international... We were like,
"This thing's blowin' up in Japan and Singapore."
[Thompson] Then the fact that the video blows up on MTV, and radio,
VH1, all that stuff.
Well, my first hit was on VH1.
[Degarmo] Mike Blanton actually called me
and played me "Baby Baby" over the telephone.
And he goes, "What do you think?"
And I said, "You know, it's a really good song. It's really catchy."
And I said, "You're gonna catch a lot of hell."
"Some people are gonna understand it,
and probably more people are gonna go with you,
but there will be a minority of people,
usually with very loud voices,
that will oppose you."
[Thompson] I remember there being a lot of people inside the Christian music world
that were, like, trying to make that record fail.
I mean, the arrows were flying.
Amy Grant was always a little bit controversial,
as strange as that seems to say.
She always attracted controversy because she's a huge target, you know.
She's massively popular
and the most popular ones get the most criticism.
God forbid they have a song that the world loves.
Did we actually miss the part
that we're supposed to go into all the world and make disciples? [chuckles]
"But, oh, my gosh,
you didn't say 'Jesus' enough times."
[Smith] If you scream loud enough, they're gonna hear ya, you know.
I mean, I had people say things about Amy and myself
that are completely not true, you know.
They don't even know who we are.
I sorta wanted to go duke it out with the critics. [laughs]
I could tell that it was sort of weighing on her,
and sometimes I'd just go in her dressing room and just sit.
I didn't... Sometimes I wouldn't say anything.
Just say, "I'm praying for ya. It's gonna be okay," you know.
"Doesn't matter what those people think."
["The Great Adventure" by Steven Curtis Chapman playing]
[Thompson] If the '80s was when Christian music came into its own,
then the '90s is when the machine is just perfected.
It was just this wide, open canvas.
You had grunge and you had the pop thing,
and you had rock, and you had hip-hop.
Just this hodgepodge of creativity going on in the world.
Music was at an all-time high.
[Bill Reeves] It was everything
from the spiritual competitiveness to the business competitiveness
to these bigger-than-life egos and personalities.
Definitely the competition was very fierce.
[Degarmo] There was a huge changing of the guard
that happened in the early '90s.
[Reeves] Amy and Michael and Steven
really opened the door for other bands.
It was as aggressive as Christian music had gotten.
That's why it's continued to blaze a trail.
["The Great Adventure" continues]
[Bart Millard] It was kind of this sense of, "We're here."
This genre is being defined.
["The Great Adventure" continues]
Obviously, the band that really had the biggest impact there was dc Talk.
[instrumental music playing]
[Tobymac] I don't know any other way but to be relentless.
I mean, I realize that I will push it on the relentless level
further than anyone I've met.
- So I drive 'em crazy. - [interviewer] Yeah.
I drive them utterly crazy.
It could be more roundy. [vocalizes guitar lick]
I mean, if you wanna jack with it as a guitarist, it's fine,
but it just needs to fill that space.
Now that you're playing other notes, I think I do like my notes.
[interviewer] Who is the driving force?
Who is the one that cracked the whip, keep it going?
Oh, Toby, hands down.
[interviewer] With... With Toby being
very driven, perfectionistic,
- sometimes controlling. - Yeah.
How did that work in the early days?
It obviously didn't work. [laughs]
♪ Jesus is still all right with me ♪
♪ Jesus is still all right, oh, yeah ♪
♪ Jesus is still all right, you know that He's all right ♪
They became icons by the '90s.
- dc Talk! - dc Talk.
This is dc Talk.
[Thompson] They ended up finding themselves in a very big platform,
relatively quickly.
And I'm not sure that all of them
wanted to be where they found themselves.
Yeah, there was tension on dc Talk.
They were held together with duct tape and prayer.
♪ Oh, he's so, he's so, he's so, he is so... ♪
[Tait] Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Here's the deal.
This thing on paper shouldn't have worked.
[hip-hop music playing]
[Tobymac] I didn't know contemporary Christian music existed.
So when I wrote my first Christian lyric,
I thought I made this whole thing up.
[Tait] Toby and I went to rival high schools.
I sang in chapel one day, and Toby walked up to me
in these black penny loafers and these white socks.
I was like, "What do we have here?"
Said, "Hey, man, you got a great voice.
Can I buy you a sweet tea from Hardee's?"
We started talking and talking and talking.
And we never stopped talking.
He was truly my first vanilla best friend in the whole world.
[Tobymac] I was like, "What are you doing this summer?"
He's like, "I'm gonna do concerts at all these churches.
I'm gonna book a whole tour."
And I said, "Well, I need a job this summer. Can I go with you?"
He's like, "If you'll run sound, you can come with me."
Imagine that. Toby's running sound for me.
And doing a kind of okay job. Wasn't the best. It just wasn't.
He was still learning, but I forgive him.
We went on the road for months.
We've had the best time. We had no clue. But we were young boys, you know,
living out our lives and playing in churches.
The next year we heard about this freshman that could sing.
And I said, "Well, let's check out this kid, Kevin Max."
Really, I was kinda critiquing, making sure he wasn't better than me,
[laughs] 'cause couldn't have a new singing boss on campus,
I kinda had campus locked down on the singing side of things.
We went and saw him sing and, man, he could sing.
Undoubtedly, one of the best singers,
to this day, that I've ever heard in my life.
I remember them coming up to me and saying,
"We want you to be in the group." Immediately I was like,
"This is not gonna work at all."
I think 1988, maybe early 1989,
our fourth partner brought us a tape,
a group called dc Talk and the One Way Crew.
["Nu Thang" by dc Talk playing]
[Smith] All three of these guys were completely different.
If you think about it, you're going, "How's this gonna work?"
["Nu Thang" continues]
[Tobymac] We were just doing what we loved.
We weren't trying to market it to anybody.
Like, we just loved this kind of music.
[Degarmo] A lot of people said, "How did you get to sign dc Talk?"
Well, nobody else would. [laughs]
And the king bowed down before them.
Because three young men dared stand alone.
[upbeat rock music playing]
[Smith] Billy says,
"If we're gonna reach the next generation, we gotta change the programming up.
And we're gonna have a rock concert."
[laughs] Basically.
[Tait] I was always thinking to myself,
"Okay, we're gonna come in as young cats,
bouncing all over the stage,
sweatpants on and hats turned sideways."
Okay, they do know what we do, right? [chuckles]
[Smith] It was met with lots of opposition.
It did not sit well.
There were a lot of people that thought he was not making the right decision.
But Billy was adamant, said we gotta do it.
October 1994, Cleveland Stadium.
There were 85,0 00 kids in the stadium.
I remember showing up and it was like,
"Wow, we are making history."
Me and dc Talk at a Billy Graham crusade.
And then all of a sudden, Billy walks up to the podium
and the place just explodes.
[audience cheering]
Billy gave one of the most compelling sermons I've ever heard him preach.
[Tait] He read the lyrics to "The Hardway" a s part of his message.
Toby had just finished that song
and it just absolutely tore him apart.
Toby cried, man. I cry thinking about it.
I thought, "Man, I'm walking on stage right now with Billy Graham,
who I saw as a kid."
It was overwhelming.
I start crying. Toby's crying.
It was like a dream. It was surreal.
And then I thought, "This is the first of many.
So here we go."
[Tobymac] What we were doing said so much to people across the world.
He turned the page for all of us when it comes to music
and how we can express ourself in the arts.
We don't have to do it the way it was done before.
We can do it the way we wanna do it.
And Billy Graham said that's valuable.
[dc Talk]? What will people think?
♪ When they hear that I'm a Jesus freak? ♪
- ♪ What will people do? - ? Freakshow ♪
♪ When they find that it's true? ♪
["Jesus Freak" by dc Talk continues]
[narrator] Deep-seated in the American citizen...
born of the concept that all men are free and equal.
[Styll] This is the epitome of what people like me
had been hoping for, for years.
So when an album like Jesus Freak comes out, you go,
[scoffs] "That's it. They did it."
[Degarmo] "Jesus freak" was not a complimentary term.
And I was so grateful that Toby was able to redeem it
in such a way that he did.
And it became an anthem for a whole age of people.
♪ I saw a man with a tat ♪
♪ On his big fat belly ♪
♪ It wiggled around like marmalade jelly ♪
♪ It took me a while to catch what it said ♪
♪ 'Cause I had to match ♪
♪ The rhythm of his belly with my head ♪
♪ "Jesus Saves" is what it raved ♪
♪ In a typical tattoo green ♪
[Tobymac] I loved the push.
It says everything we feel.
♪ What will people think ♪
♪ When they hear that I'm a Jesus freak? ♪
♪ What will people do when they find that it's true? ♪
It felt right to sort of stick your chest out and say, "This is what we believe."
We tried to create something that hadn't been created before.
[Tait] When Jesus Freak came out,
it went gold a little over a month.
And back then, that was unheard of.
But it did not come without a lot of thought,
a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Trust me.
[Tobymac] I felt no inhibition.
I just felt, let's just go. It's on.
Think of the wildest imagery you can think of
and put it into words. And go.
[Tait] But there was times when I knew
we weren't in the right place in our heads.
[Tobymac] I don't think you're ever ready for a lot of success quickly.
When it hit, it happened fast.
It was just too much.
[distorted guitar playing]
[interviewer] What was the moment that made you decide,
"We need to take a break"?
Um...
I've never shared this with anybody,
so, I would... I would want to retain the right
- to not put it up there. - Sure.
[Tait] I would not wish fame, fortune, notoriety on anybody.
Anonymity is not a bad thing. Trust me.
[Tobymac] I would demand things,
like push, push, push for you to see this.
And if you didn't, you were an idiot. [laughs]
The friction I had with Toby usually played out on stage.
It was more like, you know, he'd give me a death stare.
Toby and Mike would literally argue over anything.
[Tait] Kevin can be a handful, at times.
Kevin and I, when we love, we love hard.
We fight, we fight hard.
We took the harder route mostly every time.
[Max] One time, Mike and I got into a really big argument in the tour bus
and we were yelling and pushing each other so much
that the bus was, like, going back and forth, rocking.
The show would start and I wouldn't come on stage.
- Kevin. Where's Kevin? - Haven't seen him.
Kevin's missing. That's nice.
[show manager] Kevin!
- Opening night, Kevin's gone. - Kevin!
We were just three individuals performing on stage.
Not a tight, close unit like we'd been throughout the years.
Became very apparent that we were all just kind of, like,
going through the motions, at a certain point.
[Tobymac] I felt like, "it's time to take a break."
I just wanted some peace.
[Tait] My only regret with dc Talk is that,
and I mean this, is that it was so short.
Ten years in,
we were approaching our peak, I believe.
And we just...
Let's take a break. Let's take a "intermission."
And here we are, 19, 20 years later, and the intermission continues.
[Tobymac] Where I fell flat on my face was the end of dc Talk.
I realized that I didn't do it all right.
I put product in front of people
and the most important thing is people.
To be honest, I remember Toby telling me in private one time,
saying, "Tait, if you wanna keep this thing going, I'll keep it going.
But if you guys wanna go solo,
then I'm gonna do the same thing, but I'm not gonna look back."
He didn't look back and the rest is history.
[dc Talk] ? So long, my friend?
♪ We know exactly where you are, and you're gone. ♪
[interviewer] Tell me your name and what you do in music.
All right. My name is Michael Tait,
and I'm the lead singer of a band called the Newsboys.
[rock music playing]
I've been in Newsboys now longer than I was in dc Talk. How 'bout that?
That's a little factoid for ya.
And Kevin did his thing.
Poetry books, and lots of music.
And that was the road we took.
[Max] And I feel like it's informed me as an artist, more than anything,
is to be able to be somebody
that's seen ultimate success and ultimate failure,
and to live in the valley of that.
[Tobymac] I thought my thing was gonna be
a meager little offering,
as compared to these vocal powerhouses, Michael and Kevin.
But I was gonna work.
I was gonna outwork anybody.
[rock music playing]
TobyMac as a solo artist? Incredible.
[Thompson] There's just nobody like him that's ever done this genre.
There's so much heart in it. There's so much skill in it.
[Stuart] He's the one person
that shaped Christian music more than anybody.
He never gives up. He's a workhorse.
It's unbelievable what he's done.
[Tobymac]? This is the one?
[Tait] These words were Toby's, "Success is the best revenge."
He didn't just win. He conquered.
♪ We gonna bring it like it ain't been brung. ♪
[interviewer] Is it a closed chapter, with dc Talk?
I don't have to... Do you have an answer?
Yeah, yeah, no problem. You're good, man.
Uh...
I...
[rock music playing]
[Dan Haseltine] Artists were wanting to be innovative.
We all recognize that our goal
was not to just be the Christian version of something else,
but it was to own our space in the musical landscape.
There was some really cool stuff happening. We had no idea.
There was a big, heavy kind of turn to bands.
[Stuart] That's just how we felt, you know, as young musicians.
We're like, "You can't tell us what to do. We're gonna do it our way."
But I think we were just given wings
to explore what could be.
[Chapman] It was such an exciting time,
because nobody really knew where this was gonna go.
[Haseltine] I mean, that was the golden age.
[chuckles] It was the golden age of Christian music.
And now here come Kirk Franklin.
Wait! What? Yes!
♪ Get ready for the revolution ♪
♪ Come on, come on, come on ♪
♪ What you say now? Come on, come on ♪
[Reeves] There's no question that Kirk Franklin
is the most important gospel music artist of our time.
I mean, Kirk came in with a bang.
Here are Image Award winners Kirk Franklin and the Family.
[Thompson] Kirk has been an amazing presence
as an artist, as a songwriter, as a producer.
I don't know that we deserve him,
but I'm sure glad that he hasn't given up on us.
I love Kirk Franklin.
First of all, he's crazy. [laughs]
Please welcome Kirk and Tammy Franklin.
[audience cheering]
Yes!
Kirk is just, like, timeless.
[Tait] Kirk is a bridgebuilder.
He's a bridgebuilder and beyond.
[Lecrae] Kirk is a father, he's a husband,
he's a leader, he's a musical genius.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is my man, Kirk Franklin.
[audience cheering]
[Franklin] Doing music, for me, never was in the goal of ever having a career.
I never thought that I was going to have a career.
I could just tell that people liked it.
What drove me in life was being liked.
'Cause I just wanted to be liked.
When the world of success came,
it just meant too much to me,
and it became too much of an identity.
[women]? The way I do my life?
[Franklin] I remember the hole in my soul,
even as a little kid, not having a father.
[somber music playing]
Realizing that I was adopted.
When my mother made the decision that she didn't wanna be a mother,
I think I was about two or three.
And the lady that adopted me, her name is Gertrude.
She was born not being able to vote,
or not being able to drink where other people could drink,
not being able to walk where other people could walk.
I remember her singing hymns in the house.
[woman humming]
At the very front of the house, there was a piano.
And I still have that piano.
It was something very romantic between that piano and myself as a kid.
But there would always be ideas and songs about Jesus.
The idea of God pulled on my heart very early.
I'll never forget hearing my biological mother
arguing with the lady that adopted me.
She said, "I didn't want him."
[somber music continues]
I remember climbing on top of the house
and having conversations with God at night, and the stars.
Looking at the stars and having these really personal conversations.
I can remember the fabric of those moments.
But there was nothing religious about it.
It was very easy to have this conversation.
I could tell early on
that there was something interesting between me and songwriting.
I started writing songs
for the choirs that I would work with in the neighborhood.
I tried to get a record deal.
Couldn't get signed for anything in the world.
People told me that the music wasn't good,
the songwriting wasn't strong enough.
And I got really discouraged.
I was playing at an event where the guest artist there was Daryl Coley.
This guy was the Black Pavarotti of gospel.
And I gave him my demo tape.
His wife signed me for $7,000.
I was able to get double racks.
I was up to making that money. I was ballin'. I was ballin'!
You know... [laughs]
Yeah. That was the beginning for me.
["Stomp" by Kirk Franklin playing]
♪ Whoo! ♪
In the '90s, Kirk Franklin came out with "Stomp."
♪ GP ♪
♪ Lately, I've been going through some things ♪
♪ That's really got me down ♪
I mean, they play "Stomp" in the clubs, like, in the club-club.
I'm watching people dancing to "Stomp"
in the way I know you ain't even supposed to be dancing to "Stomp."
I'm like, "You can't dance like that to this song."
[Thompson] "Stomp" was a hit on mainstream radio.
And people hear it on The Tonight Show and places like that.
[Franklin] By this time, Cheryl "Salt" James from Salt-N-Pepa,
she and I became good friends
'cause she was really kind of growing in her Christian faith.
And I sent her the record, and she went bananas.
Not only did she do it, but she flew to Dallas to do her rap.
♪ Can ya help me? ♪
♪ When I think about the goodness ♪
- ? And the fullness of God? - ? Come on?
♪ Make me thankful ♪
♪ Pity the hateful, I'm grateful ♪
♪ The Lord brought me through this far ♪
♪ Tryin' to be cute when I praise Him ♪
♪ Raise 'em high... ♪
I believe that "Stomp" became big in the Christian community
because it became big in pop culture.
"Stomp" became so big in popular culture
that it had to be acknowledged
by the white Christian community.
[Thompson] Some people liked to think of that
as being a moment when CCM music got a little bit more integrated.
You're too late to the party to claim that you had anything to do with "Stomp."
I'm sorry, CCM. That's not your song.
That's Kirk going to the mainstream and you guys playing catch-up.
It was an uprising. It was a problem.
It was so much drama in the church, man.
It was a lot of negative feedback.
♪ Stomp. ♪
[Franklin] I remember going to a church conference,
and there were about 60,000, 70,00 0 people at this event.
There was a pastor whose sermon was basically against me.
I remember going upstairs to my hotel room, sitting on the floor.
"Man, God, I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to be criticized.
I just wanna be liked."
I just remember being very upset at God.
And the Lord spoke to my heart.
"If they don't have nail prints in their hand,
or scars on their forehead,
you owe them no explanation."
I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation,
one of the shameful tragedies that 11 o'clock on Sunday morning
is one of the most segregated hours,
if not the most segregated hour in Christian America.
[Thompson] There was a chance for CCM music
to have been integrated from day one,
'cause they had Andrae Crouch.
CCM music could've said, "You know what?
We're not gonna be white and Black gospel.
We're gonna be this."
[Franklin] If people consider me a bridge,
then he was a freakin' city.
[Thompson] Why is it that there's only one Andrae Crouch?
And as Christian music has evolved,
it's become more and more segregated.
Didn't have to be that way. We had a role model.
[Lecrae] And then you go to CCM
and it's like, you don't sing, you don't have a guitar.
You're a Black dude, so you're also a minority,
so you don't quite fit there. And then I'd go to hip-hop,
and it's like, you do rap, you do got the visible tattoos.
But you're talking about God and faith and love and...
It's like, where do I belong?
I don't have a home. I'm just in exile.
[Mandisa] The tension that I feel often is, I grew up hearing,
"Why are you talking like a white girl?" And I'm not!
It's how I was raised.
Then I hear things like, "Well, she's too gospel,"
or, "It's too Black."
And, gosh, when you hear that as a Black woman,
you just start to think, "I'm not enough or I'm not good enough."
[Franklin] You wanna find a loving way to be able to have
these conversations about racial reconciliation.
There's still not a tangible plan to address
this separation between these two worlds.
And until that is addressed,
we will never find the healing that is really needed for this country.
[Lecrae] If the church truly believes that we are one body,
the church will tear down those racial divides.
[Tait] 17 years ago, I was in Tracy City, Tennessee,
and we stopped off at this little store.
I get to the counter, guy said, uh, "Is that all you want, boy?"
And I go, "Yeah, that's it."
He goes, "Man, it's getting dark around here.
You better get outta here 'cause it's getting dark here, son.
We'll hang you. We'll hang you around here, boy,
you don't get outta here by dark."
I said, "You gonna hang me in the 21st century?
In 2 0 03, you gonna hang me?"
He says, "Yeah, we'll hang you, buddy boy. After dark."
[tense music playing]
Think about my forefathers, the Blacks that had no voice.
And here I am, a guy that's made it,
I've made money, I've got Grammy Awards,
I've made music, I've been successful.
And that one comment, in that one moment,
in that one town, in that one minute,
made me feel less than... less than human.
And it hit me like a truck loaded with steel.
Healing will never start until the healing begins where the hurt is.
We've got to be on the same page.
[Franklin] If we are the light of the world,
no wonder why the world is so dark...
because our light is fragmented.
[Tait] Kirk always had an interest in race reconciliation.
He speaks about it from stage.
I'd rather have Kirk say something that's gonna change
the course of some kid watching or an adult watching,
'cause he's speaking truth
about something that needs to be said by a man of color.
[Franklin] I wanna say something to everyone
in the spirit of humility.
There's chaos and calamity in the world.
And there's so much hurt and distrust.
And I have a lot of friends in this room of many different shades of colors
that I've walked our life for the last 23 years with.
When we say something, we wanna bring it together.
When police are killed, we need to say something.
When Black boys are killed, we need to say something.
We have the spirit of redemption when we speak.
And when we don't say something,
we're saying something.
At our concerts and our churches,
I beg of you,
let's ask the people that we are accountable to stand in front of
to pray with us for racial healing.
Let's don't stay silent on it.
[somber music playing]
[soft piano music playing]
- ? Pray for me? - [audience cheers]
[audience member] Yeah! Pray.
♪ I'm afraid that I'm about to lose it all ♪
[audience member] Thank you, God!
♪ Pray for me ♪
♪ I don't need gravity for tears to fall ♪
I think Christian artists versus country, rock, pop
face the same challenges,
but their audience is different.
This is gonna sound really strange,
but the country audience, the pop audience
is more forgiving.
[Smith] If there's anything dark,
it's how judgmental we've been.
You just feel like, "Where's the love?"
What you did at the BET Awards was nothing but a sham before God.
Yeah, let's open up the Word of God together
and let's break the Word like the Word says, "Iron sharpens iron."
- Okay. - And let's open up the text. Fair?
I'm not gonna shake your hand, sir.
Amy Grant committed rebellion by divorcing her husband.
And Vince Gill committed rebellion by divorcing his wife.
And they both got married to each other one year later.
That's witchcraft.
[Styll] With each decade, Amy's career just continued to rise.
And by the 2000s, she had sold something like 30 million albums.
And she became a cultural icon, both inside the church and out.
The Christian community felt like they owned Amy.
So for her marriage to fail, for her to have
what they considered a moral failing, was a bridge too far for some people.
When you met, you both were married to other people. What happened?
[Degarmo] Divorce is painful for anybody that has to face it,
especially if you're a Christian music darling, like Amy Grant.
People were so quick to assume the worst when Amy got remarried to Vince,
never mind the fact that today they've been married for 2 0 years.
It was hard for me to watch.
You have a great friend that hurts, you hurt, too.
[Styll] It hurt her career.
A lot of stations took her off the air.
I'm just remembering this drawing that I did.
I used to, all the time, draw cabins and little getaways.
And I had drawn one, and it was completely overgrown,
like, you couldn't even find the path to it.
And I think somewhere in there, the cabin was probably me.
You lose yourself.
You lose your way, you lose your integrity.
You find that you have lied, you've let people down.
I took this drawing, and I wrote,
"I think I have forfeited every right that I ever had to be on a stage."
[Chaz Corzine] We were very protective of Amy,
making sure that she didn't get blindsided by some interview.
I do remember that one slipped through.
Guy turned on his tape recorder
and I think his opening statement was like,
"You're deceitful, you're awful, you're a liar, you're horrible."
And before I could even say anything, Amy looked at him and said,
"Oh, I'm so much worse than you think I am.
But by the grace of God I get up every day...
and put one foot in front of the other."
There was a tour being discussed between three artists.
I was one of them.
I'd gone through a divorce. People were not playing my music.
When the managers put this tour together,
they were gonna do a big split between the two other artists.
But because I was kind of damaged goods,
I was gonna get a tiny bit.
And it really made me angry.
I just said, "I'm not doing that tour."
And so I pulled out.
And the next thing I did, I went to Bart and said, "I'll open for you."
[Millard] Amy got a divorce and people were pulling her albums off shelves.
Radio stations were telling, so, not only were they not gonna play her music,
but they may not play ours because of the tour.
And I remember when Amy caught wind of this possibly hurting us,
she immediately tried to pull out of the tour.
She's like, "I'm not doing this to you. I'm out."
I was angry at everyone,
'cause this is like a big sister. This is like my hero.
I remember telling her, saying, "Amy, there's no way we're letting you leave.
Because if these people pull our tickets or pull our songs or don't come,
they're the people I don't want to be at my show or play my music
or sell my music, in the first place. I don't care."
And she just started weeping.
Then it was kind of a cry fest for me.
Like, "Man, you don't understand everything you've done in my life."
[Styll] Russ Taff had a great career,
and put out some of the best albums by an individual male artist
that have ever been put out in Christian music.
Super talented. But his dad was an alcoholic,
and it turns out he was an alcoholic.
[Russ Taff] It was a very chaotic childhood,
very traumatic childhood with Dad
who was a Pentecostal preacher, but also an alcoholic.
I got my humor from him.
I got my charisma from him.
But he also wrecked my life.
Music was the thing that held me through all those crazy years.
Mama taught me the song, and I sang it.
One of my first songs I sang is,
[voice breaks] "I need no..." I'm sorry.
"I need no mansion here below
Jesus said I could go
To a home beyond the clouds not made by man
Won't you come and go along?
We will sing the sweetest song
Ever played upon the harps in gloryland."
So even as a child, I was looking outside myself
for something to fill that hole on the inside.
Growing up with the messages, daily,
"You're not worth the bullet to shoot yourself with"
and, "You'll never amount to anything."
And after a while, you start believing it.
I would go down to the church after 1 0:30
and feel my way to the front of the church.
There's a little lamp at the front of the church
where I could turn a little light on.
And I would sit there,
kneel at the altar, sit there, play my guitar,
and just talk to Jesus.
Somebody told me He was a friend, and I could talk to Him.
And I would tell Jesus how scared I was.
I didn't know a lot about Him. There was no grace.
The only Jesus I knew was...
I was hanging over by a thread, over Hell.
It was all based around guilt. And so I had that Jesus.
But then there was that Jesus that I would go down to church late at night...
and tell Him how scared I was.
That was my only safe place.
That and music.
You're carrying all this angst, all of this chaos in your own head.
After my first solo record,
I had kind of started with the alcohol.
There's no chaos anymore. All of those voices got quiet.
My deal was, I would never walk on stage with alcohol on my breath.
I would have it in the room waiting for me,
because my body demanded that I have it every day now.
And it started this journey to Hell.
Music starts going further, further, further and further away.
And it's not that comfort that it used to be.
It's not that wonderful place that I could fellowship with God,
because I hated myself.
Tori told me, "I'm not gonna live with you anymore like this.
I've had it. I'm done."
I walked into this room and there were 17 people.
And I knew every one of 'em closely.
And each one of 'em went around the room,
and told me how they loved me.
And told me, "We're gonna lose you.
Don't go down this road."
I can remember afterwards,
the first thing I wanted to do was go to him and say, "Are you all right?"
And I guess I was kind of half-apologizing for it.
He said, "Oh, no," he said, "I understand what's going on."
I said, "Well, I just want you to know I'm here.
I'm your friend. And I love you."
[Styll] We were preparing to do a cover story on Russ in the magazine.
And he said, "So I got somethin' to tell ya."
And he told me about his substance abuse problems.
He said, "So...
if you wanna not proceed with this cover story, I will understand."
I said... [scoffs, chuckles]
"If I were to take everybody out of the magazine
who had some sin problem in their life, we'd publish blank paper."
I just love anybody who embraces their past,
good and bad.
Praise and worship writers, I always kid 'em, I say,
"You just wanna rip off some of David's positive lines,"
which is about 10 or 15% of the Psalms.
The rest is, "Oh, God, where are you?" [laughs]
You know, "My heart is breaking."
[reporter] Christian rapper TobyMac's oldest son, Truett Foster McKeehan,
who was an aspiring rapper himself,
died unexpectedly on October 21st.,
Davidson County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed.
Medics responded to a cardiac arrest at Truett's home.
He was 21.
[sad music playing]
Walking through losing True...
every day is different.
Some days... I'm determined to build on the rock.
And other days, I'm just wiped out...
by thoughts and memories and regrets.
There's only two ways. Either you don't believe or you do, at this point, for me.
And, if I do believe,
I have to believe in a God that's good.
So how can I get to the point
where I believe that that's good for my son, somehow,
and it's good for me?
That's the fight.
[sad music continues]
[Styll] I think at a level, we who are the audience
want these people we look up to as artists,
to be somehow better than us.
But when one of them falls,
it reminds us of our own fallibility.
You know, I'll never forget Jerry Falwell asking me,
"I've heard some stories about the lifestyles of some of the artists.
Are they true?"
I said, "Probably are."
I said, "Jerry, if you're waiting for me
to get a roomful of unflawed artists...
it's not gonna happen.
These are human beings
who have been gifted in a special kind of a way
and they're trying to work through it in these earthly bodies,
and sometimes they make mistakes."
[pensive music playing ]
[Styll] Artists become artists for a reason.
They have something to say and they say it in a unique and special way.
And that's why we love them.
But we have to remember, these artists are humans, too.
They feel things as we do,
maybe even more deeply than we do.
So when they have loss, they really feel that loss.
When they have grief, it's a very deep grief.
[Grant] Whoever's struggling the hardest,
whoever's way out on a limb, whatever's going on,
I'm just gonna trust that that is the sheep
that the shepherd left for,
because I have been that sheep.
[reporter] Contemporary Christian music
has become a billion-dollar-a-year business.
Small Christian record companies are being bought up
by the giants of the recording industry.
The fascinating part about the 2000s is,
you see the peak of the music industry.
Peak music industry sales,
money, cultural influence, off the chart.
[Taylor] When Christian music first started out, it really was about artists
just wanting to minister to people through their music.
But when money gets involved, it's really hard to keep that focus.
[Thompson] So now the industry deserves to be called "the industry."
But the problem is, I'm not sure that as it grows into that thing,
it's really gonna retain a whole lot of the DNA of what it started as.
It's gonna kind of become something else, for better or worse.
There were a lot of people that felt like we'd lost our way.
It's all about celebrity.
It just seemed to be a lot of egos,
and there seemed to be a lot of, who's number one,
and, who'd sell the most records,
and it feels like a little showbiz.
People said, you know, "I think we've lost our way.
We need something to help us refocus."
[piano music playing]
Okay, so here's where I just feel like
that this has gotta be a component of what we stand for and what we believe.
"I can't stand your religious meetings.
I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals.
I'm sick of your fundraising schemes,
your public relations and image-making.
I've had all I can take of your noisy ego music."
That got my attention.
"When was the last time you sang to me?
Do you know what I want?
I want justice, oceans of it.
I want fairness, rivers of it.
That's all I want. That's all I want."
I'll never forget it.
It was a night back in early 20 0 1, and I was dead asleep.
All of a sudden, I wake up in the middle of the night.
And I hear the voice of God saying to me, "For such a time as this."
And it felt like God was telling me to make this album,
this Worship album.
And I remember wrestling with God.
I remember just going, "I'm not doing it. I'm not gonna do it."
Because I was working on these pop songs,
and worship was not really on my radar.
And I just blew it off, and a week or two later,
I woke up literally wide awake
and heard these almost audible,
"For such a time as this."
[piano music continues]
I just wrestled with it and I blew it off,
and three weeks later I heard it again,
in a really, really loud voice,
"For such a time as this."
Doggone it. All right. I'm gonna do it.
I said, "I'm gonna make this first worship album."
I said, "Here's my idea.
I want every artist who will do it, to drop their egos at the door,
and come and be in the choir."
And so we all went to Lakeland, Florida,
chartered three private planes and flew all these people down there.
Amy, Phillips, Craig and Dean, Cindy Morgan was there.
We got halfway through it, I was just hanging on.
I was not in charge. [laughs]
I'm literally... I don't have the reins in my hand.
I do not have the reins in my hand.
[Corzine] The recording of that record was
the most powerful concert experience that I've ever been a part of.
It was just... Phew.
Everybody knew we'd captured something really, really special.
[Smith] I remember going backstage
and sitting down with everybody,
and we all just started to cry.
It's kind of like, "What just happened out there?
What just happened out there?"
The crazy thing is, is that record came out on 9/11.
Slated release for Worship was...
September 11th, 2001.
[interviewer speaking]
I think it was.
There was something about that record, 9/11.
I think it was a go-to for people.
[Smith and choir] ? I'm coming back?
♪ To the heart of worship ♪
- ? It's all about you? - ? It's all about you?
♪ It's all about you, Jesus ♪
♪ I'm sorry, Lord, for the thing I've made it ♪
♪ But it's all about you ♪
♪ It's all about you, Jesus ♪
[song ends]
[audience cheering and applauding]
["Freedom Is Here/Shout Unto God" by Hillsong United begins]
[rhythmic clapping]
[Reeves] You look back at artists like Larry Norman
and Sweet Comfort Band and Rez Band.
♪ Freedom ♪
[Reeves] I think you'll find elements of praise and worship
even in the Jesus Music.
[Laurie] It's interesting that the first wave of Christian music
was called "Jesus Music."
That says a lot, right there.
It was a Jesus movement, and there was Jesus music.
And then it became contemporary Christian music.
But what I love about worship is, it's really going back to Jesus.
[David Crowder] All the Vineyard stuff and the Calvary Chapel stuff,
the stuff that laid a foundation,
it felt like it was building on what they captured in that moment.
[Joel Houston] I just thought every church played music and wrote their own songs.
But the songs in our church, I guess, started taking off around the world.
And I don't know, there was no grand plan there.
It was just... there'd be rumors of people hearing our songs from our church
being played all over the world.
These songs were making their way into churches,
and it was this real beautiful thing of, like, this grassroots thing.
It wasn't publishers and labels and all these things.
It was just churches passing the songs around.
We had heard about Hillsong because "Shout to the Lord"
had become the biggest song in the church.
And then all of a sudden,
we started realizing, there's something percolating in England.
This Delirious? band is on the scene,
and they're doing something no one's ever done before.
They're creating, like, a band sound.
[Stu G] It was an extraordinary time of,
like, this awareness of the presence of God
through worship, through music.
And, you know, it felt like there was no rules
on what we could do with our music.
The sound of the people
singing over the top of us was deafening.
And I remember stepping back from the microphone
and just watching these people sing these songs,
like, so loud that I didn't have to sing.
I remember just going, "Okay."
It just felt, like, God was like, "I got this."
[audience]? Voice of triumph?
♪ We lift Your name up ♪
♪ Shout unto God with a voice of triumph ♪
[Giglio] Where hearts were hungry
and where people were desperate,
and where people were tired of the status quo
and wanted a fresh encounter with God,
worship was becoming this new gateway.
[rhythmic clapping]
[audience cheering]
[soft piano music playing]
[Giglio] And I remember Chris Tomlin knocking on my door.
We were in adjoining rooms in the motel part of this big campsite south of Dallas.
And he goes, "Hey, are you still up?"
And I'm like, "I am now."
And he says, "Hey, can I play something for ya?" And he walks in, he's like...
♪ We fall down ♪
♪ We lay our crowns ♪
And I'm just sitting there going,
"I need to get down on my knees right now."
["We Fall Down" by Chris Tomlin continues]
♪ The greatness of ♪
[Giglio] You know, these were not formulas,
this wasn't a plan, this wasn't business,
this wasn't record labels.
This was two guys trying to lead a couple thousand kids to Jesus at a camp.
I'll never forget it. He gets to the end and he says,
"Do you think maybe we could do this tomorrow night?
Sing it here at camp?"
And I just looked at him and I said, "Chris,
people are gonna sing this song on every continent."
[Thompson] Chris Tomlin's songs
are much bigger stars than Chris Tomlin.
Time magazine did a story
that more people on Earth were singing Chris Tomlin songs
than had ever sung songs
by one songwriter in the history of humanity.
[Laurie] Everyone knows these songs
and they're singing them with passion.
Hearing 100,0 00 people worship together,
well, that's something to be a part of.
[Tomlin] I think that's what the worship music...
an explosion of it on those early days,
it became songs that weren't driven by personality,
but just like, "Oh, these are really connecting me to God.
I don't even know who wrote these songs.
Don't know who does them." It wasn't about that.
Those early days were so special in that way.
Worship music has often times a movement connected to it.
And it's bigger than any one person, or one artist.
There's nothing more beautiful-sounding to me than the people of God
singing the praises of God. I think it's just, like, something unmatched.
[Coomes] Here's what I really believe.
I think there could be another Jesus Movement today.
Part of what is the same between the late '60s into the '70s now,
people were desperate, hopeless.
We're a couple generations removed from the Jesus Movement.
And I think the faith doesn't get passed on automatically.
Every generation's gotta fight for it.
[Crowder] It was a reflection of God's breath on the planet.
You feel like something's in the wind.
[Degarmo] It just was like a tsunami.
And I think part of that is the people.
The people were hungry for it.
[Kari Jobe] Music could shift the whole atmosphere of a room
and help people get on their face before God.
See, 'cause we're created for the eternal,
we're created for the sacred.
[Houston] Worship, it's an opportunity to create a space,
to connect with the deepest of deeps within us.
[Tomlin] What we're doing tonight is eternal.
And let's not forget,
music is God's idea.
Let's not forget where all this came from.
[Giglio] I think it just was one of those moments
where the spirit of God globally was answering the prayers of the people.
["Oceans (Where Feet May Fall) by Hillsong UNITED playing]
♪ Spirit lead me ♪
♪ Where my trust is without borders ♪
♪ Let me walk upon the waters ♪
[audience]? Wherever You would call me?
♪ Take me deeper ♪
♪ Than my feet could ever wander ♪
♪ And my faith will be made stronger ♪
[song fades]
[Matt Redman] Sometimes when God moves,
He's accompanied by a soundtrack.
And so often it's not the soundtrack that releases the thing,
it's that God's moving and then there's this kind of musical outburst
because of what God's doing.
♪ Take me deeper than ♪
♪ My feet could ever wander ♪
♪ And my faith will be made stronger ♪
♪ In the presence of my Savior ♪
[audience cheering]
[Taya and audience] ? I will call upon Your name?
♪ Keep my eyes above the waves ♪
♪ My soul ♪
♪ My soul will rest in Your embrace ♪
♪ I am Yours ♪
♪ And You are mine. ♪
[audience cheering]
[sweeping orchestral music playing]
♪ Our love ♪
[sweeping orchestral music continues]
♪ I'm sorry, Lord, for the thing I've made it ♪
♪ It's all about You ♪
♪ It's all about You, Jesus ♪
There's something about those songs on that first Worship album,
and what they say, uh, like "The Heart of Worship."
I think was one of the greatest songs that Matt Redman has written.
[interviewer speaking]
Twenty years later.
Yeah.
[slow country music playing]
[Grant] Do you remember the year we bought this place?
- [Smith] 1994. - [Grant] That's right.
When I first came out and saw it, I thought, "This is it."
I certainly couldn't afford to buy the whole thing and my friend, Amy...
[both laugh]
That was back when concert tickets were really selling.
[both laugh]
- You were selling some CDs. - Yeah, yeah.
[Grant] These cabins, they were moved here probably in 1896.
We know that because the date is etched in a couple of the cornerstones.
Seven years ago, I wanted the farm to not just be a personal retreat.
It's beautiful to have a place, but it's more beautiful if you share it.
And so, this is our fifth year to do this thing called "keeping the fire."
In 2017, we lit a fire on January 1st,
and I created this invitation that just said,
"Hey, we're trying to see how long we can keep a single fire lit.
Would you like to come keep the fire for 48 hours?
Just bring a sleeping bag, a two-day picnic,
and keep the fire going.
But, maybe look at life from a different perspective
and be reminded of fires in your own life that need tending."
[interviewer speaking]
[Grant] Since January 1st.
And if it's gone out, nobody's fessed up to it.
That very first year, I took a really beautiful journal
that somebody had given me, and I just scribbled out,
"This is kind of why we're doing this.
I'm not really sure what it means,
but things become beautiful because you nurture them."
You can open up anywhere. A dad will say,
"This is the first time I have freely openly grieved
the death of my 21-year-old son.
I had no idea I needed this kind of space."
I think it's amazing when people
will actually say something about their lives.
That's pretty vulnerable.
Now, have you kept the fire yet? Come on.
- Will you? - Oh, I will keep the fire.
- [Grant] Okay. - [Smith] Yes, I will.
- [interviewer] A few last questions. - Okay.
[interviewer] One more question.
After this, I've got one or two more questions
- and then begin to wrap things up. - Okay.
[interviewer] I'll combine my last two questions.
Okay.
[interviewer] Is there anything else you wanna cover?
All right, I just have a couple more questions and then we'll wrap up.
That journey of being a trailblazer, would you do it over again?
Oh, yeah.
[Smith] Amy and I have talked about this a lot, even on this last tour.
Every night we get ready to walk out to this big orchestra,
and we're in these arenas, and I grab her hand and I say,
"Can you believe we get to do this?"
I mean, I love music. [chuckles]
[Houston] Music can sustain us in the toughest of times.
That's a gift from God.
[Smith] There's something about a song.
There's something about a song or a piece of music
that I believe touches the soul like somebody talking to you can't.
I'm honored to be a part of Christian music.
I don't take it lightly. I think we've come a long way.
I still think we have a ways to go in really becoming family.
[Tobymac] God uses people that are broken
to write songs that reach out to the broken.
[Grant] Now there's every kind of recordable music imaginable
with people singing about their faith,
and it's beautiful.
[Giglio] We're now in a transition zone
of wanting to pass the baton on to a new generation
to say, "Okay, you run, and you go
and watch what God can do."
[Chapman] And shifting into a role
of really just encouraging and cheering on
those who are taking the baton and running.
[inaudible]
[instrumental music playing]
[Tobymac] The beauty of what's happening today is,
artists are just going out,
the Lecraes of the world, the Lauren Daigles of the world.
These people are just out there.
They're not put under the category "Christian music."
[Daigle] There's a reason why we use songs to worship God,
and then feel this connection with Him through that.
[Grant] I really like Lauren.
Right as her rocket ship was igniting, I was going,
"Hey, do you wanna go take a walk and sit in the woods?"
[Grant laughing]
[Daigle] She told me once, she said,
"The first purchase you need to make is a piece of property,
because you need the place for solace."
And I think it's because she probably recognized
that she and I are wired so similarly.
I've been to that cabin.
And you play games,
and you write a note,
and you say, "I was here and I was stoking the fire today."
I hope that I can blaze a trail
for people to be bold about what they care about, about what they believe in.
Bold, for the sake of the Gospel.
I've always struggled with having an artist
who could take me under their wing and say,
"Let me explain how this goes
and let me be a source of wisdom and guidance for you."
The only person who has reached out,
made themselves available, was Kirk Franklin.
And Kirk has been,
man, a godsend in so many situations, so many cases for me.
Every setback, there would be a glimmer of hope.
Every time you're like, "the walls just keep coming up,"
a brick would fall.
[Mandisa] Toby has paved a way for me,
and he has opened up so many doors.
We find him championing artists that are people of color.
Like, he's done it time and time again, and he certainly did it with me.
I wouldn't change my journey for anything.
[Smallbone] My profound hope is that this music
continues to reach out around the world
more than ever in history,
and offers people a sense of hope,
and a sense of togetherness, and a sense of joy
maybe that they've not experienced.
[Chapman] I'm seeing more and more artists that are just saying,
"Hey, we want to make art that's illuminated by our faith. Great art."
Let the light be so beautiful, so bright
that the world just can't deny it.
[Grant] There's always a much bigger story to everything.
Always.
You know, God is good.
And you're just another one of His messy followers telling people how good He is.
[interviewer] All right, we're rolling, guys.
So, let's just start at the beginning, like...
- Cool. - Come on, dig out the gold.
Whew.
[applause]
Don't use any of that. [laughs]
["The Slam" by Tobymac playing]
[instrumental break]
["The Slam" continues]
[dramatic music playing]
Well, how do ya feel about that, Devil?
I'm a-feelin' mighty low.
Good.
[horse whinnies]
[man] Hi-ho Silver, away!