Home : The Voice : April 2002  

Church Music

by Bob Millard

How I Missed the Boat,
and Why I'm Glad I Did

In the colloquial, the phrase ‘to miss the boat’ has to do with being in the right place, at the right time, but doing the wrong thing.

‘I’m here to tell ya,’ as my father liked to say, I’ve missed more than a few boats in my time; and caught some I wish I hadn’t. We’ve all missed the boat on things we desperately wanted at the time and only later — sometimes much later — do we realize that the prayer we thought went unanswered was actually answered with a ‘no’ for a very good reason.

The boating analogy and its existential implications reminded me of the story of Jack Johnson, in 1912 the first African American heavyweight boxing world champion, being denied a berth on the Titanic because of his skin color. This apocryphal black folk tale immediately became a folk song, “The Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic,” credited to Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter.

While the story was untrue, the song was well received as it had Jack Johnson standing on the dock doing a dance called the Eagle Rock after hearing of the fate of a ship that, in fact, carried no black passengers. Some boats are better missed.

One of the many boats I’ve missed for the better was the Contemporary Christian music boat.

I attended Peabody College in Nashville, only a couple of blocks from Nashville’s Music Row, the epicenter of the country music industry. It was also only a couple of blocks from the Koinonia Christian Bookstore, adjacent to the Belmont Church, a soon-to-be influential Charismatic breakaway from local Churches of Christ.

I was writing my first good songs as the days grew short and the nights grew cold at the end of 1969. A class in recording studio operation drew me off campus, where I met several earnest young Charismatic musicians associated with the Belmont Church. They told me about the nascent Christian music scene starting to percolate on weekend evenings at Koinonia.

I had already wrestled with a seemingly fruitless desire to write and sing of my Christian faith the summer before. There was no market for them, and it never occurred to me to simply go out and create one. During lulls in our all-night studio class I got to know, as well as one not-of-the-sect could get to know, a couple of these young ‘spirit-filled’ musicians.

The young man was a pianist, tall, bespectacled, laughless, yet talented and obviously deeply committed to something. The young woman — Elizabeth — had the longest silky brown hair and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. She wouldn’t even speak to me when I tried to befriend her — okay, okay, when I tried to put the rush on her.

She and the young fellow were not romantically linked, but they had a bond between them based on an ecstatic religion and shared vocabulary: the conceptual buzzwords of their belief system. They sometimes whispered to each other; other times Elizabeth, especially, seemed to use mental telepathy powered by an intensity so palpable you could have moussed it and combed it into a pompadour.

I came to understand that there was a mighty religious experience and an incubator for a whole new kind of musical religious expression just a few blocks from my dorm room. I was on fire with my desire to write songs, and had only just come out of a stunning summer flirtation with Campus Crusades for Christ. If anybody was ready to be swept into a new mould, it was I.

And I guess I very nearly was.

Much as I hate to sound as callow as hindsight shows I was, Elizabeth was probably the deciding factor preventing me from being sucked into a new, white, middle-class gimme Pentecostalism, and the hypocritical manipulation of its new sounds by music industry slime balls who were even greedier and more cynical than their country and rock counterparts, if only because they pretended not to be.

“You ought to forget about Elizabeth,” said the pianist as class ended one night in the studio.

“But…” said I, whose chemical composition in those late-teen years was two parts gristle, three parts testosterone, and the rest pained confusion. (In those days you could take those ingredients, add beer and, voilà: instant college boy.)

“You don’t understand,” he told me with a serious hush as she stood across the room, near the door, and pretended she wasn’t watching us with that same four-barrel intensity with which she did everything.

I remember having that kind of intensity when I was about five and believed that if I shut my eyes tight enough and willed it hard enough I could jump out of the elm tree in the backyard and fly like Superman. That should have been my first clue.

“You don’t understand her; you can’t possibly; she could only kiss a Christian.”

“But, I am a Christian!” I told him. “The elders tried to talk me into going to the Lutheran Seminary.”

“It’s not the same thing,” he told me cryptically. “She means a real Christian.”

Years later, when my biography of Contemporary Christian diva Amy Grant was excoriated by a Charismatic reviewer, I got another taste of that difference. “Millard is obviously not a Christian,” the reviewer venomously wrote, “though he may be a Catholic.”

Interesting perspective.

Back on campus I was being rushed by a fraternity. The brothers introduced me to any number of fine upstanding young beauties for whom a mainstream Protestant was plenty Christian enough to kiss.

Gristle and testosterone won out.

I sometimes in hindsight see clearly that had Elizabeth-with-the-sad-eyes not been so exclusionist about mere Protestants, I might have gone down the same road as some of those young Contemporary Christian musicians who got lost in that strange world where religion provides little retreat and solace because you’re busy packaging and selling it. I’ve seen some fall into dangerous, perverse, and ultimately career- and life-destroying behaviors. I’ve seen some crash and burn.

Not to name any names, but Gospel singers aren’t any more immune to illicit sexual liaisons, drug addictions, and alcoholism than the rest of us. God must not have needed me to go down that road; otherwise I would have. I’ve made plenty of other bad decisions, and plenty of mistakes, so I’ll not cast the first stone; or the second, for that matter.

I believe God turns our actions — good, bad, and indifferent — to serve his own purposes. In faith, I wish to know His will and make it my own, but I’m only human. About that, I can only say it’s a good thing for me that ‘God so loved the world…’

Yes, I’ve missed plenty of boats in my life. Jonah missed the boat to Nineveh, too, but that turned out all right in the end. Some boats you are simply meant to miss.

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