PIANIST AND SINGER-SONGWRITER KEN MEDEMA primarily performs his music in churches and at Christian colleges. While he readily admits there is a biblical message inherent in his songs, he also notes that it may not be as obvious as it once was. Although his older albums on Word and Glory Sound Records were steeped in what Medema calls "God-talk," they nonetheless challenged listeners to examine their Christianity in light of the biblical imperative to have compassion for the oppressed and to work for peace and justice.
On his 1980 Kingdom in the Streets album, Medema confronted the safe and secure image of Christianity with songs such as "Corner Store Jesus": "Do you want a corner drugstore Jesus passing happiness pills?/Do you want some kind of magic potion that will cure all your ills?" Another light melody, "Those Love Songs," challenged Christian piety: "I'm sick of those: I-am-his and he-is-mine/and doesn't-it-make-me-feel-good love songs ... /We need a few more: We-are-his and he-is-Lord, /He-calls-us-to-his-service work songs."
These days Medema has his own record label in San Francisco, Brier Patch Music, and still sings about dissatisfaction with the traditional church world as well as about refugees from Central America and Christian activists working with the poor in Nicaragua. He was born in 1943 and brought up in the Reformed Church tradition, however, his restless intellect led him to take leave of the church when he was still in high school. He says, "I always felt good about being on the heretic fringe -- an outsider intellectual who asked questions about everything."
Medema met his wife, Jane, during his second year at Michigan State University, where he was studying music therapy. (Advisers in college discouraged him from aspiring to be a professional musician because, they said, his blindness would interfere with performing.) He recalls, "Jane had a mind that appealed to mine, and she made me begin to feel comfortable talking about religious things. She was not the kind of Christian who said, 'Don't ask questions, just be sweet and nice.' Rather, she was a person who loved to ask questions. She was the same kind of person I was: a rebel, doubter. The difference was that she did all that from the position of being inside the community of faith."
Since that time Medema has struggled with understanding the relationships between Christianity, the church, and the sociopolitical world. During an interview with him several years ago, he told me, "We struggle with the same thing that a lot of American Christians struggle with. We know that our lives somehow must be given in service to the needy of the world, but we don't know how to break out of our middle-class American molds -- and we don't even know if we want to."
I met again with Medema more recently in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife (who is associate pastor of Dolores Street Baptist Church) and 10-year-old daughter, Rachel. Their 21-year-old son, Aaron, is currently in Tokyo pursuing a modeling career. This time we discussed his continued commitment to Christianity, social issues faced by him personally as well as by the church, and the ways in which his music fits into his faith journey. -- Dan Ouellette
Dan Ouellette: How did you originally become involved in connecting social issues with art and Christianity?
Ken Medema: I have to go back to when I became conscious of how music and social issues were linked together. I graduated from high school in 1961 and college in 1965. I was in my early 20s during the flower child and hippie days. The music during that time was very appealing to me. It dealt with the process of coming to grips with war, greed, and the problems of capitalism, while envisioning a new image of the world.
After finishing graduate school in 1969, I began to work as a music therapist in a psychiatric hospital. I worked with what people called the real losers, men and women who were either screwed by the system or who were unavoidably mentally ill. I recognized that the hospital was a dumping ground, a place where few people cared about the patients. All the issues presented in the music I was listening to were represented in the wards I worked in; the hospital was a microcosm of the world. At that point, I started writing songs for my patients.
As far as how this connects with church, it was my dissatisfaction with the status quo mentality from my own Christian Reformed background that led me to write songs that would reawaken churches. I went to a conference in Houston in 1973 put on by Word Books, where I heard people speak who really turned my head. People such as Tom Skinner, Keith Miller, and Carlisle Marney talked about the notion of the church as a new creation, which meant the crashing down of racial and social walls.
Soon after that I became acquainted with books such as Ron Sider's Rich Christians in An Age of Hunger. I also began to get a new perspective on church by becoming familiar with Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C. My wife, Jane, was studying for her master's of divinity at Union Theological Seminary in New York City at the time, and through her I became exposed to liberation theology. I realized that the life within a church would relate to how willing or unwilling it was to be a radical community, a community of caring that would resist greed and power mongering. It came together for me with the idea that the church potentially represents a departure from the status quo. Now I can't envision the gospel without a commitment to a radical new community.
You have said in the past that you focus on performing in churches as a way of calling believers to wake up to a deeper commitment to Christianity. Has that goal changed in the last few years?
For the most part, I'm doing the same thing -- trying to get church people to listen to the gospel they've been hearing their entire lives and see if they can hear something there that they've never heard before. I really hope my music can get people thinking and create dialogue on issues.
I worry sometimes that my attitude of saying I have something important to say to the Christian church is a wee bit presumptuous. But I do feel confident writing songs about peace, justice, the gospel, and Jesus. If anyone wants to listen, I'll play them.
My songs have less God-talk in them now than they did in the past. I'm writing about a broader spectrum of issues. Even though there aren't a lot of God-words in these songs, I feel they are more charged with the gospel than many of my older tunes.
For example, one of my recent songs doesn't mention God in it at all. It's the story of a young college kid who is preparing to go to grad school for an MBA [master's in business administration]. But instead he impulsively gives up his business school opportunities to go to Nicaragua to work with the poor.
The song never asks the question, Why? It never states that God called him to the work, or even that there is any connection to Christianity. It simply ends with him getting off the plane in Managua to be embraced by waiting friends. The chorus goes like this: "Arms of love, hold me tight/This is a lonely place tonight/I've seen the young boys trained to fight in Nicaragua." For me there's more gospel in that than a lot of my Jesus songs.
I want to be able to sing songs like that in or out of church. We're trying to perform on university campuses as a way of broadening my audience. We've done a couple campuses so far that have been successful. I also played at a Christmas party for an architect in Florida. It was an interesting experience being there and playing songs about peace and justice.
In the past you have been very involved with nuclear disarmament as well as with hunger issues and Third World concerns. What other areas of concern have you been involved in lately?
I worked on an album with some other artists as a benefit and consciousness raiser for Habitat for Humanity in Georgia. I have also performed benefits for Bread for the World and done some work for a Seattle outfit called World Concern. Locally I've been active in my parish, Dolores Street Baptist Church, in its shelter program for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees and in the church's housing project to find temporary and low-cost housing for people in San Francisco.
Other than that I just try to be supportive and do whatever consciousness raising I can. I can't do too much more because I already feel over-committed.
I understand you traveled to Nicaragua as well.
Yes, I went there in September 1986 as a result of an invitation from the Baptist Convention of Nicaragua. I performed concerts in and for Nicaraguan churches as a show of support for them. In a way, I felt I was supporting Nicaraguans in the same way Witness for Peace does.
Another part of the agenda involved producing an audio and video cassette of a festival called the Day of the Bible, a Protestant version of All Saint's Day. The celebration was like a big revival meeting with preaching, music, and food. Several music groups performed. We made a cassette of the event that my record company, Brier Patch Records, is selling. The video is intended to be shown in evangelical churches in the United States, in order to dispel the myth that the Nicaraguan government doesn't tolerate a Christian witness in that country.
When did you first get interested in issues related to Central America?
When Jane attended Union Seminary, I used to sit in on some of her classes, where I heard guest lecturers make the connection between Christian discipleship and social justice issues. That, in combination with everything else I was being exposed to at the time, called me to explore a discipleship that had something to do with the Bible's bias toward the plight of poor and oppressed people in the world. I've been struggling with that in one way or another ever since.
Since you perform a lot in churches, have people in conservative congregations expressed concern over your travels and political sentiments?
The response varies from church to church. Overall, I'd say the response has been positive. Most people view what I say and sing about as a very interesting perspective. Many people respond by saying that the music has caused them to think. Those are the middle-of-the-road reactions.
Of course there are also the extremes. On the one hand, some people come up to me after my shows and say, "Oh, I've been waiting for someone to say what you said tonight for a long time." Their opinions or feelings get confirmed by what I sing. On the other hand, there are those who call me a fool and a dupe, who say I'd better get right with God or I won't have a career or a witness left.
Your church in San Francisco is located on the borders of the predominantly gay Castro district and the Latino Mission district. How does your church minister to the needs of those communities?
I've already mentioned the housing projects we work on for refugees who enter this country through the Mission district. As for the gay community, while we don't have an official program on paper concerning AIDS, we do have an active task force called Acceptance. Its primary focus is to be a loving and caring presence in our relationship to the gay community.
We want to be caring and helpful in whatever ways we can, and that includes being in touch with people who have AIDS. Our church has a large gay contingency. As a matter of fact, most of our new members are gay.
The church feels that rather than make a big deal "ministering" in the gay community, we should simply be open to all people. We should be open to gays, straights, refugees, any people. The word gets around on the street about our church, how it makes people feel like they belong.
How would you categorize yourself musically?
I've always been interested stylistically in melding my classical piano training with my passion for jazz and rock. My personal style has to some degree followed current styles. Back when rock groups were writing long songs that lasted forever, I was writing long songs. My tunes presently have a Latin beat. I'm trying to keep current, but there's always a nucleus that I call "essential Medema," which is the classically tinged jazz and rock style.
I used to play only piano in concert. Now I use synthesizers and a drum machine so that I can approximate the sound of an orchestra or a rock band. I can blast the roof off a place or be gentle.
Lyrically, the issues I've been dealing with are similar to what I've always been involved in: human needs, whether they be related to hunger or relationships; my hatred of war; my love of children. I also sing funny songs about strange people who mean a lot to me, tunes about the mystery of divine love, and songs that dream about what the day of Jubilee will be like.
A good example of my lyrical journey comes from comparing a song from 1975 with a few from 1988. The key line to "Lead the Way," one of my older tunes, is, "But as long as morning breaks another day/Lord, I'm yours, I'll follow, lead the way." A newer song called "Tomorrow's A Mystery" reads like this:
Every time I look before me
You're always out of sight.
But I know that you have been there
'Cause I see the rocks and flowers shine.
Every time I look behind me
I know that we have walked this road together, you and I,
I can see your footprints next to mine.
Tomorrow's a mystery and yesterday's a sign.
Another song I've written recently has a much more powerful social and political theme. It goes:
Give me all your tired, your poor,
The harbor lady cries.
But power's been her friend too long
And her mouth is full of lies.
She'll step across the foaming sea
Like an angry, vengeful God.
She'll crush the poor on foreign shores
Till her feet are bathed in blood.
Do you ever perform with others, or do you always play solo?
I'd love to work with other musicians, but I can't find the time to work it out. So I play solo.
Who has had the biggest influence on your work?
I like a lot of different artists for a lot of different reasons. I like the classical composer Bartok for his primitivism and his vehement and virulent sense of rhythm. His rhythmic accents pound into my awareness in a way that passionately expresses life to me. I also like Laurie Anderson a lot because she opens windows to me as a performing artist, broad spectrums of life that are fragmentary yet also magical. I like the sense of movement in Dylan Thomas' poetry and the rhythms of Vachel Lindsay's poems.
Sting inspires me to be more adventurous. I think he's the most adventurous pop musician and most sophisticated pop lyricist in the business at the moment, and I love the way he connects his pop sensibilities into classical and jazz roots. Bruce Springsteen is also a big hero. I appreciate his passion and his ability to reflect on life experiences in his music. He's a significant influence because he's an artist who writes about gut-level stuff. He's straightforward, non-sophisticated, earthy, and somehow speaks to my inner self.
Bruce Cockburn has also had a big influence on me in that he's doing music in the way that I aspire to. He writes with a clarity, a sense of purpose, and a breadth of experience that I'd love to have. I'd also like to have the opportunity to sing to the broad audience he has.
Another very important influence was Benjamin Britain, an English composer who died just a few years ago. He wrote a lot of vocal music that was influenced by the great harmonic and melodic traditions of Western music. He wrote both church and secular music, but his monumental piece for me is War Requiem. That piece literally changed my life. I had known something about World War II, but I never felt so appalled, resigned, responsible for, forgiven for, connected to, and regretful about World War II until after I listened to that choral piece with orchestra. The power of his music swept me away.
You've often described how important involvement with a local community of believers has been to you and your family in the past. How have your views on that evolved over the years?
Community living for me has been wonderful but frustrating. We've lived in extended family situations with people for quite a while, but we've never quite gotten the handle on community living. I think the idea of acting as a community as opposed to making only individual decisions is a dream to be held up, an image to strive for. Realistically, however, we've discovered that ideal community circumstances never quite happen.
For example, my local parish is not community intensive. The people don't live together. Sometimes we're not even a very good example of how we should relate to one another. We're a small bunch of folks who fight sometimes, who unfortunately antagonize each other and alienate each other. Yet we know that if we didn't have that church community we'd be much worse off.
I think it's crucial for people like me to remember the vision of the Jubilee, the vision of the day when God will restore and reconcile. That's something to work toward in our relationships with each other.
A friend of mine, David Matthews, wrote the text for a musical called "The Gathering" that I wrote the music to. One of his lines is, "The church is no different from the world except that it's knocked to its knees by the sound of grace." I'm really committed to sticking with my church community despite the squabbling and arguing that sometimes goes on.
I'm driven by the dream of better days and by God's divine presence. I can live with that. I'm not looking for perfection here on earth.
Dan Ouellette was a freelance writer and a teacher in Berkeley, California when this interview appeared.
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