May 6, 2002
Texas Baptist songwriter's work
named Dove's Song of the Year
___NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) --A Texas Baptist took top honors this year at the Gospel Music Association's Dove Awards.
___Bart Millard, staff evangelist at Highland Terrace Baptist Church in Greenville, wrote the worship song "I Can Only Imagine" that was named Song of the Year at the April 25 awards ceremony in Nashville.
___The 29-year-old Millard, a former high school football coach, is one of five members of the contemporary Christian ensemble MercyMe.
BART MILLARD (left), along with other members of the band MercyMe, speak to reporters after their win at the Dove Awards. (Morris Abernathy/BP)
___"I always said it would be cool to write songs that would outlive us," Millard said in a Dove Awards interview. "And I don't want to sound arrogant, but I've thought it would be such an honor to be a modern-day psalmist--to write songs the church will sing long after we are gone. I'm just floored by the response from people."
___"I Can Only Imagine" tells the story of a son trying to understand his father's death. And it's a story straight from Millard's own life. While Millard was a freshman in high school, his father was diagnosed with cancer. His father died in 1991, Millard's freshman year in college.
___"There's this cliché out there about when Christians die if they had the chance to either go back or stay in heaven they would stay in heaven," Millard said. "The song came out of why Dad would stay in heaven instead of coming back to be with us.
___"I wasn't being super-spiritual," he said. "I was just asking the question, 'God, what is it that will make it so wonderful he wouldn't want to come back to me and everything else?' It was kind of a selfish question."
___After his father's death, Millard found himself writing down the phrase, "I can only imagine."
___"I would write it on scraps of paper, notebooks, whatever I could find," he said. "I knew there was a song there, but it just didn't come together."
___Until 1999, that is, when Millard was writing for MercyMe. Suddenly, the words came to him, and the song was written in five minutes.
___The success of the song has another tie to his father as well.
___As a child, Millard desired to play in a band or have a wider music ministry, but he never dreamed he would be able to make a living at it. But his father encouraged him to follow his dreams.
___"We had worked out my dad's finances for when he was gone," Millard said. "His retirement allowed me and my brother to receive income for 10 years from when he passed away. One of the last things he told me was that he was trying to take care of me."
___His father's estate did care for him for 10 years. And then the week his inheritance ended, the song inspired by his father hit No. 1.
___Millard also believes he has a spiritual inheritance as a Southern Baptist. Three of MercyMe's five members were raised in Southern Baptist churches; the other two were raised in charismatic churches.
___Millard believes God has called him to remain in a Baptist church, even though his home church uses a worship format far more traditional than the music his band performs.
___"My church sings old hymns, but every now and then the music minister might try to sing a contemporary song, like an Andre Crouch tune," he explained. "We still have the choir and the senior adults sing on Sunday night, and the guys wonder why I still go to church there.
___"There's nothing wrong with that style of worship as long as we are in the presence of God. I realized that along the way we've lost the focus of what to stand up for."
___Christians who traditionally have worshipped in a more emotional style can learn from traditional Baptist worship, just as Baptists can learn from others, Millard said.
___"The Bible says we will all worship in spirit and in truth," he explained. "Our drummer, who is charismatic, says he came from a background that is full of spirit but lacking in truth. ... I come from a background that is deep in truth, but sometimes we lack the spirit.
___"Praise God, there is a time that we are seeing things coming together in worship. It's going to be a very dangerous thing when that happens."
___
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