There is a Redeemer

There is a rare poignancy in this joint composition by the American husband and wife team of Keith and Melody Green. Melody is often credited with authorship of the whole piece; in 1977 she certainly wrote stzs 1 and 2 with chorus. On hearing it, Keith expressed his delight, but since he felt it was incomplete, offered to contribute a 3rd stz. This he did, and the complete item (tune, THERE IS A REDEEMER) has since appeared in many collections of songs and hymns around the world. But Keith was to ‘stand in glory’ sooner than he expected; as Paul Davis has written, ‘those prophetic words … were peculiarly fulfilled’ when he and two of their three children were killed instantly as the small plane carrying them crashed in July 1982. One change in the text has been incorporated into several books; 2.3–4 formerly read ‘precious Lamb of God, Messiah, O for sinners slain’. But the key word is clearly ‘Redeemer’, a divine OT title and (by implication in the NT) appropriately given to the Lord Jesus Christ as in many other hymns and songs.

b Brooklyn, New York 1953; d 1982. Born into a showbusiness family, he began on the ukulele at 3, piano at 6, and wrote his first songs at 11. Rejecting the Jewish faith of his parents and the Christian Science of his upbringing, he played and sang in hippie clubs and bars until the mid-1970s, involved with drugs and the occult, writing songs about searching and need but steering clear of church. Married to Melody, with her he became a Christian and found deliverance from his addictions. He became a keen Bible student and evangelist, and a trenchant critic of the worldliness and weakness of much American Christianity including the cult of ‘evangelical’ celebrity stardom and self-promotion. On Christian rock music he said ‘It isn’t the beat that offends me, nor the volume—it’s the spirit. It’s the “Look at me!

b USA 1946. See entry for Keith G, whom she met in the 1970s; together they renounced their hippie lifestyle and travelled widely across the USA, singing, recording and ministering within a wide range of Christian churches and other groups. No.334*.