Rich Mullins - The Legacy of a Ragamuffin

When I still owned a car, I was one of those who annoyingly never shut off the radio. Whatever I was listening to when I exited the night before was generally what greeted me when I started the car in the morning. On September 20, 1997, I started the car and was greeted by the voice of Sean Herriott, then the morning show host on 103.5, WMUZ, from Detroit, Michigan. I noticed an odd note of sadness in Sean’s voice that day, and turned up the volume slightly in order to closely focus on what he was saying. As I released the knob, Sean’s words hit me like a steel pipe to the gut.

“Last night, singer and songwriter, Rich Mullins, was killed in an automobile accident.”

I sat, stunned, feeling the sting of hot tears welling up in my eyes. It wasn’t long before they spilled down onto my astonished face. Rich Mullins was one of the people I happened to admire a great deal at that time in my life. He was a contemporary Christian songwriter and recording artist that I had discovered long after he began his career, and as it turned out, very shortly before it ended.

For years, Rich had written songs for more well known Christian artists like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith. He is the songwriter behind two of the most well loved worship songs of all time in contemporary Christian music: Awesome God and Sing Your Praise to the Lord. What people knew about Rich was that he had been a songwriter for years, and eventually became a recording artist as well.

Much of what people did not know about Rich came out after his death, as is often the case with brilliant artists and saintly men. My eyes were opened to who Rich really was after his death as was the case for most of his “fans.” What came out about the man that was Rich Mullins did nothing but confirm what I had thought him to be. You see, when I discover a new music artist (well new to me, anyway), I often go digging for as much background information as I can about that person. I read every lyric inside every set of liner notes, I go hunting for biographical information about the person who wrote these amazing lyrics.

If I’ve discovered nothing after a lifetime of being a musician and a music lover, I’ve discovered that there is a great deal of depth in the person who can write a lyric or string chords together in such a way as to make me laugh, cry, yearn, or simply wonder at what (or in Rich’s case WHO) he is writing about. When I heard one of the songs from Rich’s collection titled “Songs,” I thought – “Wow, this man is brilliant.” Later, I would find out that he was responsible for songs I was very familiar with – Awesome God and Sing Your Praise to the Lord.

So, of course, as is my way, I started on a journey to find out who Rich was, because the rest of what was on Songs was a trillion times better than those two songs. I didn’t find out much. Rich’s career as a Christian recording artist never really took flight the way of others like Michael W. Smith or Amy Grant. He was, however, a well known songwriter in the contemporary Christian music scene. The rest of his history was fascinating to me as well, though, because Rich was what I thought of at the time as a “real” Christian.

He was born in Richmond, Indiana to farming parents as Richard Wayne Mullins. He had two brothers and two sisters. His mother was a Quaker, and that is the Christian tradition in which Rich was schooled as a child. The Quaker tenets of peace and social justice were very important to Rich, later leading him to a respect for another of my favorite people in history, St. Francis of Assisi. In 1997, Rich recorded an album that retold Francis’s life (Francis, by the way was a 13^th century Italian saint) as though it had been lived in the Old West. The album was titled Canticle of the Plains and, as you would expect, only deepened my admiration for Rich Mullins. Drawing inspiration from a book entitled The Ragamuffin Gospel by Fr. Brennan Manning, Rich eventually formed a band called A Ragamuffin Band and recorded an exceptionally successful album entitled A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. He also cofounded a ministry entitled The Kid Brothers of St. Frank, Co.

Leading me to an even greater respect for Rich was finding out that he was a huge champion of a Christian child sponsorship organization called Compassion International. That was nice, I thought, but when I found out that he championed the USA project, I was completely won over. After completing a music degree at Friends University in Kansas, Rich moved with a friend and fellow musician named Mitch McVicker to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico in 1995, where they lived in a hogan teaching music to children until Rich’s death.

Now, just to give you an idea of who Rich was, and why I loved him so, let me explain something. Rich Mullins was a very successful and well paid Christian songwriter. He may have never achieved the success of recording artists like Michael W. Smith or Amy Grant, but he did achieve some success recording as well. But, when asked how much money he made, he wasn’t able to tell anyone for certain. His money was paid to his church, and to a committee that sort of headed his ministry to Compassion. Every year, Rich was paid the salary of the average working man in the U.S., and the rest of the money was set aside for his retirement and distributed to his various ministries.

For the last two years of his life, he never wore shoes. People thought he was a little eccentric, but what’s new about that? Haven’t great artists and saints over history been thought of as eccentric, some even crazy? His final album was recorded as a demo, on a cheap tape recorder, in an abandoned church. Rich Mullins had never recorded a demo in his life. For every album prior to this one, he’d taken a guitar and a handful of Diet Coke into the record exec’s office and played the songs from memory. He figured they’d love them or not.

Perhaps they thought him eccentric because despite his fame and riches, he not only chose to minister to the poor, but to become one of them himself and live among them. In a concert shortly before his death, he said this, “Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if 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. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken....”

He routinely said things such as this that the average evangelical Christian found difficult to accept, sometimes even scandalous. His final album was a concept he’d worked on for quite a while. The purpose was to “…unfold the Jesus that we quickly gloss over on our way to church or Christian concerts. He wanted us to see the raw, rough Jesus who had dirty fingernails and who hung out with all the wrong people and loved them just as they were. It was a record, he said, that was ‘needed,’ because for too many of us, Jesus had become domesticated, ordinary, and predictable. And necessary because those who believed Jesus to be otherwise often felt abandoned and alone in their convictions. Such was the nature of Rich’s work; he sought to at once challenge and heal, stir and to confirm, agitate and settle.”

Interesting, I think. That’s what Jesus came to do.

The album was eventually released with a total of ten tracks on the recorded version and nine on the demo, released just as it had been recorded by Rich that day in the abandoned church. The tenth track was written by another member of Rich’s Ragamuffin Band named Rick Elias. He had written it for Rich to include on the album, but Rich could never perform the song without breaking down. He eventually told Rick that if he wanted it on the album, he’d have to sing it himself. The album was released as “The Jesus Record” and “The Jesus Demos.”

A hubber asked in a forum not too long ago about what songs make me think about God, or tell the story of my relationship with Him. Both of the songs I spoke of came from this album – the one by Rick Elias that Rich could never sing all the way through, and one from the demo by Rich himself. There is no live version by Rich of “Hard to Get” as recorded on the demo. The demo was recorded nine days before the accident that took his life. The album was a huge success, and Rich Mullins was posthumously awarded the “Songwriter of the Year” Award by the Dove Awards (the Contemporary Christian Music version of the Grammies).

Rich was a character. He was a quiet man who led a quiet life. He was, however, quite the rabble rouser in the Christian world. He was schooled as a Quaker for the majority of his Christian life, but he followed Jesus wherever He led. He even completed the classes leading to adult entry into the Catholic Church, although he did not get the chance to actually enter the Church, if that was, in fact, his plan. It’s quite possible that he only went through the classes to understand. Rich’s journey to follow Jesus left him living among, and ministering to the poor in the United States and South America. He never married. He’d had his heart broken quite brutally in the early eighties, and believed that was the Lord’s way of calling him to a celibate life.

There is so much that can be, and has been said about Rich Mullins. I may sound a bit eccentric and crazy to say that I loved this man. He led me, through his music mostly, but also through his history, to a REAL Jesus that I could learn to know and love and be brutally honest with. Spiritually, I grew through Rich’s music and through watching him be the kind of Christian I wanted to be. Musically, the man was a phenomenon. He sang, played the piano, the guitar, the hammered dulcimer, the lap dulcimer, and the Irish penny whistle. His music was as diverse as his spirituality. There is not a Rich Mullins song that isn’t as rich musically as it is lyrically. Listening to Rich’s music from the beginning to the end takes a person on an amazing, honest, and open spiritual journey the likes of which most of us will never see. It’s as though he wrote his own Gospel. Would that we could all do the same, and leave it behind for the world to read.

*In loving memory of Richard Wayne Mullins – October 21, 1955 to September 19, 1997**