What kind of love is this

Bryn and Sally Haworth’s joint composition is dated 1983; it entered the MP series in the 1990 books. Though differently structured it has clear similarities with My Lord, what love is this (434), which it predates by some years. Apart from the similar first lines, phrases such as ‘I am the guilty one/ yet I go free’ may have suggested to Graham Kendrick his own ‘that I, the guilty one, may go free’. Both are labelled ‘Moderato’. A further complication came with the 1999 Spring Harvest book, featuring Dave Bilbrough’s What love is this that took my place; ‘you bore my guilt and shame …’ etc. But the Haworths use the pattern of rhetorical questions, repeated with variation, rather than a refrain. Bryn writes ‘The Bible gives rise to the unique revelation that God in his very nature and essence is love. Indeed, God not only loves; he is love! … Christ died that we might know for ourselves personally the love of this great God, as individuals’. Their music is simply WHAT KIND OF LOVE IS THIS.

b Darwen, Lancs 1948. At 11 he was given his first guitar and has loved the instrument ever since. By the age of 16 he had moved from classical to electric guitar and was touring with Cliff Richard among other performers, while also writing songs of his own. He sees himself as having been a professional musician since he was 17. In the late 1960s he moved to London, playing blues guitar with Fleur de Lys until 1969. He was influenced by the stars of rhythm and blues and says that he has recorded with many top musicians, touring N America ‘with Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane and the Moody Blues’. He and Sally (see below) became Christians in the mid-1970s, after his 3 years of wondering how to get to know the God he had come to believe existed, at a tent mission led by the Brethren evangelist Dick Saunders. In the early 1990s he was on the staff of the Vineyard Ch in Putney, SW London, and in 2002 joined the CofE parish church of St George’s Ashtead, Surrey, where he has a recognised and distinctive role and continues his wider prison ministry. He leads guitar workshops, specialising in the slide guitar but also fond of the mandolin; of his own compositions he says, ‘I tend to write a whole load of songs at one time, then select and retain the best ones’. No.449.

She became a Christian in the mid-1970s and now teams up in concerts together with husband Bryn, working as his manager and sometimes as a co-author—see above, and Blanchard and Lucarini’s Can we Rock the Gospel? (2006). No.449.