by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Knott wrote rock operas, sang with honesty and conviction, called out hypocrites, and bucked the norms of the Christian music industry.
Michael Knott, whose music and influence helped cultivate the Christian alternative music scene of the 1990s and 2000s, died Tuesday at the age of 61. He is survived by his daughter, Stormie Fraser.
Knott was the founder of the label Blonde Vinyl and later collaborated with Brandon Ebel to launch the highly influential Tooth & Nail Records, known for bands like Underoath and MxPx.
His raw, innovative, and controversial music pushed against the norms of the industry and laid the groundwork for contemporary communities around Christian alt music.
“Knott helped prove that Christian music could be something legitimate, rather than running two to three years behind mainstream trends,” said Matt Crosslin, who runs the site Knottheads and has become an unofficial archivist of Knott’s work.
Even with his reputation for bucking standards, Knott’s sense of mission was earnest and singular.
“He wanted people to come to Jesus and be saved,” said Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer University. “He seemed to offer a way of holding faith and raw authenticity in tension.”
Knott was born in Aurora, Illinois, and grew up with six sisters in what he described as a modern “von Trapp family.” They were constantly singing and immersed in music through their father, a folk singer, and their mother, a church organist.
When Knott was in second grade, his family moved to Southern California, where he began to take piano and guitar lessons at the YMCA. He started writing songs in his preteen years and would bury them in a folder in his backyard, convinced that nothing would ever come of his private creative life.
Despite his early shyness about his songwriting, Knott …
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by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
How groups like Hillsong learned to let go of the literal in favor of creative collaboration.
The refrain “He is for you” doesn’t translate neatly into Spanish. In the English version of Elevation Worship’s song “The Blessing,” the phrase repeats and builds with each repetition. But in Spanish, the line is “Él te ama” or “He loves you.”
“I’m glad the translators did that,” said musician and translator Sergio Villanueva, who pastors a Hispanic congregation at Wheaton Bible Church in Illinois. “To convey that idea in Spanish—‘He is for you’—you would have to use a lot more words. Spanish is a beautiful language, but we use more words and longer words.”
The translation choice in “The Blessing” (“La Bendición”) reflects a growing interest among English-speaking worship artists in producing thoughtful, singable, and culturally informed translations of their music.
Often, artists are intent on using translations that are as close to word-for-word as possible. But as influential songwriters and megachurches expand their reach, teams of translators are helping produce new versions of popular worship songs that are faithful to the originals without trying to replicate wording that isn’t as accessible or evocative in another language.
“You have to honor the intention of the original songwriter, even if that means changing exactly what the words are saying,” said Villanueva, who has translated for Keith and Kristyn Getty, Sovereign Grace Music, and Kari Jobe.
The international distribution and transl ation of English-language worship music has accelerated over the past four decades, but not consistently.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, Integrity Music began releasing …
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by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
A Christian reconciliation group in Israel and Palestine warned that war would come. Now the war threatens their relevance.
Just before sunrise on October 7, 2023, Salim Munayer’s wife, Kay, shook him awake at their apartment in Jerusalem. His cellphone was popping with alerts.
“WhatsApp is going crazy,” she said.
Munayer reached for his phone. His extended family was anxiously reporting hearing air raid sirens, not uncommon in Israel and often short-lived. But this time, the alarms kept blaring.
It didn’t take long to learn what had happened: Hamas militants from Gaza were launching thousands of rockets into Israel. On the ground, they had breached the border and were massacring hundreds of civilians. Munayer had awoken to the bloodiest terrorist attack in his country’s history.
He leapt from bed and ran to rouse his sons.
Daniel Munayer, Salim’s second oldest, remembers his father storming into his room and shouting, “Daniel, it’s happening,” adding, “It’s war.”
Daniel clutched his head. “Oh, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.”
Salim, 68, is the founder of Musalaha, a faith-based peacebuilding organization that works to restore relationships between Israelis and Palestinians using what it says are biblical principles of reconciliation. Daniel, 32, is the executive director.
Founded in 1990, Musalaha is the oldest and most well-known Christian peacemaking organization in Israel and Palestine. Its name means “reconciliation” in Arabic, and for more than three decades its faith-based approach has set it apart from secular peacebuilding groups.
Neither of the Munayers was shocked that Hamas attacked Israel, though they never foresaw the sophistication and brutality of a rampage that murdered about 1,200 Israelis or the devastation of Israel’s military response …
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by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Are churches moving to an egalitarian model truly embracing female leadership?
Imagine that it’s a Sunday morning and a church is getting ready to announce its transition to an egalitarian model and commit to include women in pastoral leadership. The leadership gathers behind the stage to pray and review their communication strategy before the service begins. The pastor who will be sharing the news from the pulpit paces, with a burning question filling his mind: How will the congregation respond to the announcement?
The months leading up to this day proved to him that on matters of women in ministry, his congregation was not of one mind. Yet he is convinced that embracing an egalitarian approach is the way forward for his church, so he gathers his strength, steps into the auditorium, and delivers the news.
The statement goes well, all things considered. The congregation doesn’t cheer, but no one boos or walks out the door—and that feels like a win. Everything seems to be under control. The service ends without much tension, and the pastor along with the rest of the leaders breathe a sigh of relief.
This, of course, is an imagined scenario. But it’s not vastly different from what happens in reality when previously complementarian churches transition to egalitarian models: Oftentimes the people involved in the process are so exhausted from all the work it took to move the church to an egalitarian ministry philosophy that changing the church’s official statement on women seems to be the victory, the destination at the end of a long road, when it is just the beginning of an arduous journey.
Every church handles this process differently. What’s undeniably true in all situations is that no matter how careful and intentional a church might be in its approach to this transition, …
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by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Scott W. Sunquist calls the American church to observe the diversity in ecclesiologies around the world.
The recent revival of interest in biblical gender roles—how men and women serve in the church and function at home in relation to each other—seems to be focused in the Western church, especially in the US. Christianity Today reached out to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary president Scott W. Sunquist, who is also a missiologist with expertise in non-Western Christianity, to ask about the global context around gender and the church.
This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
How have the terms of the gender roles debate come to be defined in the evangelical church?
Two prefatory comments: First, “evangelical” has become a contested category, so whenever we ask about “the evangelical church,” we need to further specify which family or tradition we are talking about. Secondly, much of the “debate” regarding gender roles occurred when my family was overseas, so we missed the initial formation of the discussion around the words complementarian and egalitarian. They were new concepts that began to spread in the late 1980s.
The evangelical debate around this has been very different from the larger and broader ecumenical discussion regarding the roles of men and women. The Orthodox church does not ordain female priests and neither do Roman Catholics. Protestant mainline churches began opening all offices of the church to women in the wake of the great missionary movement, where women dominated the pioneering work. Pentecostals from the earliest years of the movement recognized the equal function of women and men and so, in that tradition, women were planting and pastoring churches in the early 20th century.
The bifurcated (“either/or”) view of gender roles …
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