Canter Bridge

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To call Keith Green a prophet may seem the product of an unguarded moment, particularly if ‘prophet’ is up there beside ‘flawless’ on your conceptual shelving. Yet a slow-and-steady listen-through of this two-disc compilation does more than take me back to my teenage years, when Green plausibly had as much influence as anyone on the shaping of my adolescent faith. It reacquaints me with his prophetic impact on a generation of mostly young Christians in this country and the United Kingdom.

Like many prophets, Keith Green saw matters in black and white. Like many, his preference for the short, sharp shock over against conversation and process galvanized many of his listeners into a depth of commitment to Christ that might not have happened otherwise. It alienated others, who might have become friends.

Like many prophets, his impact was for a moment. Like many, he died suddenly and young.

Like some, his legacy endures—arguably—because its more extreme impulses were not allowed the years in which they might have grown into something uglier, something destructive, something vain.

In consequence, his songs wash over this reviewer with a potency that is difficult to reduce to description. Time and again, Green picked up on a theme, set it to music, and brought it across in a more relational, intimate, transparent mode than seemed possible. In that way, too, he was a prophet. Like one of those wandering ‘men of God’, his proximity to the divine mind and heart are almost spooky. Like them—his mission accomplished—he was quickly gone.

If there was a more powerful influence on what we now call Contemporary Christian Music, I cannot imagine who that would be. Keith Green handed us a precedent made of words, expressions, a penchant for exhortation while there is still time that continue to flow into the work of artists as diverse as Twila Paris, Delirious?, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Chris Tomlin.

Green pushed at every boundary that ever appeared around him, driven by a near obsessive hunger to see others love Jesus as he himself did. He did not worry about offending if only some poor, homeless wretch might still be brought in.

He would have been hell to work with. Keith Green at faculty meeting? The horror …

But when he spoke, back then, lots of us listened. Many of us chose. Many are still living out the implications of that choice, realizing in retrospect that God used an imperfect spokesman to say something better to us than even this passionate troubador knew he spoke.

Like prophets do.