RICH MULLINS HAD a museum of a personality. The singer-songwriter, who died in a car accident in 1997, loved to show off anything he found interesting, his friends say. From music to movies to the places he traveled, Mullins loved “for you to experience what he loved,” his friend and collaborator Mitch McVicker told Sojourners. And more than just about anything else, Mullins loved Jesus.
Mullins’ career tracked alongside the evolution of contemporary Christian music (CCM), which went from marginal in the 1970s to a powerhouse genre that sold a combined 31 million albums in 1996. Best known for the modern hymn “Awesome God,” Mullins wrote his fair share of songs that fit Christian radio. But more often, his music was a kaleidoscope of faith and humanity, offering a tour of human frustration and failure.
On “Hard to Get,” Mullins, as modern psalmist, asks God, “Do you remember when you lived down here, where we all scrape to find the faith to ask for daily bread? / Did you forget about us, after you had flown away?”
In other places, Mullins plays minor prophet. “I wrote this for the Religious Right,” he declared before singing that Jesus “came without an axe to grind [and] did not toe the party line,” during a performance of “You Did Not Have a Home.”
A Midwestern man inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, Mullins sang a tapestry of nature, feeling “the earth tremble beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves” and the “fury in a pheasant’s wings.”
Mullins was a contemporary Christian music misfit, unafraid of making a mess of the white evangelical faith that still dominates the industry. In his 30s, he took informal vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. “[I]f I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers, but they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong,” Mullins said in concert in a Texas church in 1997.
Twenty-six years after his death, Mullins’ life and music stand as a prophetic witness against a Christian music industry that is policing, puritanical, and performative. He resisted the idea that Christian artists needed to lead kids to Jesus to reinforce abstinence from sex and drugs. Instead, Mullins said evangelism “has nothing to do with their sexual conduct or with the management of their bodies or their minds. It has only to do with God so desperately wanting us to know that he loves us, that he incarnated himself.”
Born in 1955 to Indiana farmers, Rich was the third of six children. David Mullins, Rich’s younger brother, said their parents had very different faith journeys, and the range in each shows up in Rich’s music.
“My mom had Quaker roots. ... Her faith was quiet and peaceful and seemed very natural,” David said. “My dad, he had roots in the noninstrumental Church of Christ. And he was for sure rougher, and his faith was rougher. But I got to grow up watching him fight for his faith and with his faith.”
Rich left Indiana for Cincinnati Bible College, where he was known for loudly playing any piano he could. One day, Beth Lutz, also a student at CBC, sat outside a window to listen in.
culture.rich-mullins.inline.jpg
“The songs and their lyrics began a storm of wrestling and restoration in my heart,” Lutz told Sojourners in an email. “The man was relentless and unafraid to fight his angels and demons, and if you were in his space, your own doubts and faith were not without challenge and wonderings.”
The two formed a friendship and (with others) the band Zion. In 1983, Mullins moved to Nashville and signed to Reunion Records. Soon after, he bought a small farmhouse in Bellsburg, Tenn. David McCracken, who became Mullins’ friend while interning at Reunion, recalled how radically untethered Mullins was from earthly possessions.
“Did you bring a coat?” Mullins asked McCracken after their first dinner together. When he replied no, Mullins “brought out this long overcoat and said, ‘Here, you can just have this one.’” And when the two left the house the next morning, McCracken couldn’t find any locks on the door. Mullins reasoned, “I just figure if somebody [broke in and stole everything], they must have needed it more than I did.”
Mullins was equally unattached to his paychecks. Reed Arvin, a producer for Mullins, recalled in the documentary Homeless Man: The Restless Heart of Rich Mullins that Mullins’ checks were sent to his church elders, who paid him the average U.S. worker’s salary, put some away for his retirement, and gave away the rest.
Over time, Mullins detached himself further from mainstream CCM. He loathed that artists were expected to align with the Religious Right, be publicly sinless, and carry pastoral burdens.
The “Christian music industry is a capitalistic endeavor, period,” Mullins said during a press conference at the 1996 Creation Festival, a large annual Christian music event in the 1990s, he moved to the Navajo Nation Reservation and was often asked about his “mission to the Natives.” Mullins adamantly rejected this framing and reiterated that he went not on divine command, but primarily to teach music at a local school.
“It was sort of for my own salvation that I went, not to save anybody else,” he said.
In concerts, he spoke against racism, nationalism, war, and homophobia — a feat for CCM artists in any decade, but especially in the 1980s and ’90s. And he did it all with a laugh, smile, and wink, never saving himself from his own criticisms or hiding his sins (genuine or perceived). Mullins prayed for sanctification, not sanctimony.
In observance of the 25th anniversary of Mullins’ death, Old Bear Records released two tribute albums and an unearthed live concert recording over the past year.
For the first album, artists gathered in Mullins’ old Bellsburg home (now owned by a friend) to record covers. Friends like Ashley Cleveland, Amy Grant, Kevin Max, and Mitch McVicker — and artists Mullins inspired, like Audrey Assad and Derek Webb — contributed songs.
“It felt like a family reunion more than it did anything else,” Anthony Hoisington, Old Bear’s co-founder, told Sojourners.
They recorded songs in the living room on physical tapes without care for perfection. The house was full of people for multiple days, and laughter and conversation permeate the edges of songs.
“I just need to be in the ballpark, tuning-wise. Because this is, after all, a Rich Mullins song, and that was not a priority to him and we know this,” Cleveland says on the recording, causing an uproar of laughter.
Mullins would probably be glad to hear that his work still calls people toward Jesus decades later. When asked at the ’96 Creation Festival if he minded that a punk cover of “Awesome God” had been recorded, Mullins responded: “I feel very honored by that, I suppose. Knowing that anybody wants to sing your song, it’s kind of a big surprise,” he said with a huge grin.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
