I recently updated my blog post on the powerful song, “In Christ Alone” by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty. Modern hymns, like that one, have been such a blessing to me over the past few years. Nothing will replace the grand old hymns, for sure. But many modern songs are coming very close. And they meet me where I am, and speak to me in fresh and lively ways that the old hymns sometimes cannot.
Anyway, the updated post now has all the broken links fixed, and several new links to the story behind the song, and other such helpful resources. In the process, I rediscovered Stuart Townend’s short description of authoring this song, which was likely the most wide-reaching and impactful new Christian song of the past decade. I thought I’d quote Stuart here, and then show an example of the impact of this song.
In November 2000 I was at a worship conference in Eastbourne, and introduced through a mutual friend to Keith Getty, who I had heard was a terrific melody writer. We met up for a coffee, and he promised to send me a CD of song ideas.
I didn’t really think any more about it. Then a CD arrived in the post containing three song ideas played on a piano. I didn’t get past the first melody, because I was so taken with it — it was quite hymn-like, but with a beautiful celtic lilt – I immediately started writing down some lines on the life of Christ.
Often lyrics come in quite a haphazard way. You write loads of couplets, then re-write some, then gradually piece it together to give it continuity and shape. The process for “In Christ alone” was much more linear. Once I’d worked out the rhyming structure (it felt like the song had better shape if lines 1 and 3 rhymed as well as the more usual 2 and 4), I started working on the first verse, setting the scene with a fairly subjective exploration of what Christ means to the Christian. Then I as I worked through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, I was getting more and more excited and emotional, and verse 4 kind of spilled out as a declaration of the impact of these amazing events in our lives.
Within a couple of days I had the whole lyric, sent it to Keith, he suggested a couple of changes, and “In Christ alone” was finished.
I think maybe one of the reasons the song is so popular is that it can stir up our emotions (I still often cry like an old softie when I sing it) — but the emotion is not the central feature of the song. Because the lyrics stay fixed on the unchanging truths of our salvation, it not only provokes emotion, but engenders faith, strengthening our spirits, not just stirring our souls.
The ability of the song to stir up emotions and move people is on display, oddly enough, in a recent reworking of the song by a popular secular musician. Adam Young of the Owl City band talks of how the song moved him to tears, in this post. He uses the song to make a testimony of his faith in Christ, too. He also gives us quite the melodic and artistic rendition of the song, available in full on his blog. I encourage you to check it out, if you haven’t already.
For more on “In Christ Alone”, check out the lyrics and links I’ve collected in my post.
My pastor, John Piper, made some interesting comments on the concept of a “new song” in this week’s sermon. He made an important observation of how Ps. 96, which is a missions psalm, is also very much concerned with singing. I was encouraged as he shared how the global church is having a revival of singing to the Lord, in our day.