April 23, 2001
SONGS ON THE SPOT:
Christian singer Ken Medema
___By Ted Parks
___Religion News Service
___GARDEN GROVE, Calif. (RNS)--He couldn't make out the crowd sitting beneath the soaring steel arches and glass, or, for that matter, distinguish the face of the speaker pacing the glistening rose-colored marble of the Crystal Cathedral stage.
___But Ken Medema "saw" in ways the audience could not.
KEN MEDEMA
___The sermon over, blind-from-birth Medema broke into song, spontaneously translating the words of Bill Hybels, pastor of Chicago's Willow Creek megachurch, into music and reinforcing with keyboard and voice the core motifs of the night's message.
___Medema's job was to provide improvised musical codas to the addresses at the Robert Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership at the Crystal Cathedral earlier this year. It was one of about 220 gigs on Medema's 2001 schedule as a Christian performer.
___Medema, who has released 25 albums, began his concert career in 1973. Recording at first on such well-known Christian labels as Word Music, he later felt the music establishment was trying to dim the social vision he wanted his songs to convey.
___"We wanted to sing about things that were uncomfortable to the church," he said. "I got told that if I sang in the churches about justice, about hunger, about poverty, about the biblical demand on the church to care for the homeless, to open its doors to people who have previously been unacceptable, that I would not have a recording career."
___The message was, bluntly, "justice doesn't sell."
___Looking for fewer creative restraints, he launched his own company, Brier Patch Music, in 1985. Medema's website (www.kenmedema.com) links the name of his recording company to Brer Rabbit in Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories. "Brer Rabbit lived in a place not comfortable for anyone else," the site says, "and we have decided to follow him there."
___Dave VanderMolen works for Brier Patch in Grandville, Mich., as booking agent, designer and office manager, with Medema living in San Francisco when not on the road. VanderMolen said Medema's music, though undeniably Christian, defies pigeonholing.
___"He doesn't fit into the traditional mold," VanderMolen said. "It doesn't always have to have the Jesus words in it to make it a Christian piece of music."
___Medema explains his ability to instantly turn speakers' words into inspirational lyrics as "a combination of natural gift and study, training." Though he studied music at the university level, the talent to compose goes way back to his childhood in Grand Rapids, Mich.
___"I've known ever since I was a little kid that I could create songs," he said. "I did it when I was a little boy."
___In addition to assigning pieces to practice, his piano teacher would insist he mimic what he was learning by making up something similar. "I learned how to improvise with a lot of different styles," Medema remembered.
___He recalled many hours spent "listening to wordsmithing," enriching his own inner repertoire of words and melodies by taking in poetry and music.
___"When high school English teachers told us about alliteration and onomatopoeia, I took those things seriously," Medema said. "I used to practice speaking in iambic pentameter."
___And in his dating days, Medema used his knack for singing just the right words in just the right way "to considerable advantage," he quipped. "Whenever I had a crush on a girl, I would make her up a song on the spot."
___Despite the awareness of his gift, Medema said that for many years he saw little connection between his ability to spontaneously generate music and his own life of faith. That changed in 1971, when he blended performance skill with improv after an unexpected burst of inspiration during an evening church service in New Jersey.
___Sitting at the keyboard of the New Jersey church, it was his task to underscore the evening message with an appropriately selected song. "It wasn't a very good sermon, either," Medema said, the topic that evening being a comparison between Jesus and Judas Iscariot.
___"This little inner voice said, 'Improvise something,"' Medema recalled. "Was it an epiphany, was it ... a prompting, was it a dumb idea, was it a deranged mind? I had no idea."
___But he started singing: "Stop right here, there's a fork in the road. I don't think you want to get lost. One way leads to a Potter's Field, and the other way leads to a cross." Pleased with the first line, the rest flooded into his mind. "I mean, it flew out of my brains."
___Both Medema and the audience were stunned, he said. "This was not a church that was inclined toward ... charismatic rapture and prophecy. This was a ... rational, Baptist kind of church" in a prosperous suburb.
___Mouths agape, the crowd just sat there until dismissed.
___Echoing Medema's social concern is his work with Jim Wallis, Christian activist, editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Sojourners magazine and founder of the Christian social justice movement Call to Renewal.
___Medema accompanied Wallis in a series of cross-country appearances throughout the 1990s called "Let Justice Roll," which Wallis described as a "concert, a revival and a rally, all together." The joint appearances were sponsored by faith-based ministries ranging from advocacy groups to soup kitchens.
___Wallis said he and Medema would engage in a back-and-forth banter of preaching and song, Medema's improvisations keying off Wallis' stories and word pictures. "People would be ... dancing, they'd be singing, they'd be clapping, they'd be crying, they'd be laughing," Wallis said. "It's a whole range of emotions through the evening."
___Medema put a different spin on the commonplace notion that losing one sense enhances another when he connected his lost physical sight to a deepened insight.
___"The blindness has made me ... want to hear the voice of the not-included," he said.
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