GCU TODAY • 1 3
“That’s what we were going to do tonight!”
Frederick said from the front of the room.
“I was just writing down some of those very
same thoughts on New Year’s Eve!” Millard said
from the back of the room, and he felt so moved
that he, like Timmons, gave an equally long,
equally impromptu talk centering on, “You don’t
have to be perfect. You just have to trust.” It felt
therapeutic to Millard because during a concert
he never gets more than two or three minutes
between songs to talk about his faith. The brutal
honesty was riveting.
“I was the overachiever trying to make sure
God was OK with me,” Millard said afterward.
“Everything was kind of in chaos. I hit this wall
that was like, ‘There has to be more or I’m done.’ I
was just done. It couldn’t keep up. And then a friend came back into my
life and said, ‘Hey, just in case you’ve forgotten, there’s nothing you can
do to make Christ love you more than He already does. There’s not one
ounce more you can do.’
“So it’s like I’m trying to get God to be OK with me and the whole time
He’s screaming, ‘I’ve been OK with you since the day you called My name.
I’ve never stopped.’ I don’t know how I missed that after all these years.”
Days later, still shaking his head about the experience, Frederick
said, “When something like that happens, you see that there is a
deeper spiritual governance to this. That’s the cool thing about
teaching theology — you’re on the journey yourself. It creates a sense of
camaraderie with the students.”
Positively together
That togetherness was evident in the first Worship Arts Showcase,
during which students performed 20 songs they had written during the
fall semester. When they weren’t performing, the participants and other
students clearly had a good time cheering on their peers.
“I’m blown away by how close they’ve gotten,” Millard said. “At the
end of the night they were all together saying, ‘This was one of the
greatest semesters of my life.’”
One of the students who performed was Caleb Keck from Newark,
Ohio, who sang a solo, “The Love You’ve Shown,” and said of the
experience, “I’m speechless just to be in the program and to be able to
perform for people like Bart.” Keck left active duty in the U.S. Air Force
after seven years to come to GCU. “Something I’ve told people lately is,
‘This is the most unsure thing I’ve ever been so positively sure of,’” he said.
Frederick is sure of one thing: He wants the students to write music
that is authentic, reflecting the journey they’re on with the people
leading them — and, down the road, the people they’ll be leading. The
way Frederick put it to them in one session was “Create from a place of ‘I
don’t care if anyone likes this.’”
“It’s easy, actually, to make people excellent musicians and to
manipulate lights and sound to make people feel good,” he said. “But
I think all of us on the faculty feel like it needs to come from a real
authentic place, what Eugene Peterson calls ‘A Long Obedience in the
Same Direction.’ It’s almost like marriage — that’s your commitment
to a local people. It’s not just incidental. And I think the students are
starting to breathe that air. A lot of them are walking that path already.”
Newcomers certainly can see it.
Kim Nielsen and her high school daughter Michaela, visiting from
Omaha, Neb., made the Worship Arts Summit part of their campus tour
and were taken aback by the spirit of it. Earlier in the day, Michaela felt
gratified to see several male students reading the Bible when she walked
into the Student Union.
“You feel such unity — it’s safeness,” she said.
Kim was moved by the talks Millard and Timmons gave and also liked
what she heard at Chapel, where Brian Mueller, the University’s president
and CEO, was the speaker that day. “Just to hear the heart of the people in
leadership has been impressive to me,” she said.
Timmons picked up right away on what Millard, Frederick and Dr.
Jason Hiles, dean of the College of Theology, bring to the table: “They’re
so focused on the students that it’s as if they’re being changed themselves.
I love their knowledge and heart and spirit. I think it’s exciting just being
friends with these people.”
Studio will be great addition
So what now? Continued growth, obviously. “We have people left and
right trying to sign up for it,” Millard said. The effect of the Worship
Arts program can be seen in tangible ways on campus, such as the fact
that a third Chapel band is performing this semester.
Millard and Frederick both talk excitedly about the new recording
studio for the program being built on the fourth floor of the University’s
new classroom building facing Camelback Road. It is scheduled to be
ready in August.
But one lesson they have learned in this first year is how much they
can accomplish anywhere with the right group of people. Frederick
thought back to the time, years ago, when he was shopping at Target and
came across one of Millard’s first albums. He bought it, took it home and
loved it. Now he’s working with him.
“I feel like his heart is in the same exact same place as Jason and
mine and all of us involved with this program, which is to make really
authentic, intentionally discipled worshippers and to leave legacies in
the church for Jesus,” Frederick said.
The road of faith? Sometimes you need a map, and sometimes you
intuitively know you’re headed in the right direction … and you can’t
explain why. You just know.
Bart Millard, director
of the Center for
Worship Arts, says
he’s “blown away”
by the students’
togetherness.
photo by darryl webb
