Ragamuffin Honesty Under Grace

In the closing years of the twentieth century, when Christian music in America was growing slick and polished, there was a songwriter who refused to wear the mask. His name was Rich Mullins. You may not know the name, but you almost certainly know his words. He wrote a song that millions still sing. "Our God is an awesome God, He reigns from heaven above." Yet the man behind that anthem was no shining celebrity. He was restless, barefoot, awkward in the spotlight, more at home with the poor than the powerful. And he gave the church something it had nearly lost. He gave it permission to be honest before God.

Mullins called himself a ragamuffin. The word stuck to him. A ragamuffin is a beggar in tattered clothes, a person with nothing to offer, hands empty. That was how he understood himself before God. Not respectable. Not finished. Just thirsty. His songs carried dust and longing and ache. They had room for need, for awe, for the unanswered question whispered in the dark. People who felt out of place in smooth religious rooms found in his music a door they could walk through just as they were.

He lived the way he sang. At the height of his fame, when he could have grown rich, Mullins arranged for his earnings to be sent to his church, and he lived on a modest wage, an ordinary working man's salary. The rest went away from him. He taught music to children on a Native American reservation. He drove old cars. He resisted the polish and the branding that surrounded him. He wanted grace to look like what it was. Mercy for people who know they cannot save themselves.

Then came September of 1997. Rich Mullins was forty one years old. He was travelling at night along a highway in Illinois when his vehicle overturned. He was thrown from it. Another car could not stop in time. And in a moment, on a dark road, the voice that had given the church its language for honest worship fell silent. No grand stage. No farewell concert. Just sudden grief, and a thousand unfinished songs, and a question mark hanging over the night.

The shock of it ran through churches and college rooms and quiet bedrooms where his music had played. People wept for a man most of them had never met. Because his lines had gone where sermons could not. A melody he wrote could surface in a hospital ward, in a car at midnight, at a funeral, in the moment a tired believer had no words of their own. He had handed them words. Words for thirst. Words for wonder. Words for coming to God empty handed and being received anyway.

What Rich Mullins left behind was not a polished legacy. That was rather the point. He gave the church back something the Psalms had always known, that you can bring your whole truthful self before the Lord. Your guilt and your joy. Your anger and your trust. Your poverty of spirit, the very thing Jesus called blessed. Mullins never pretended that brokenness was a virtue to be admired. He knew grace was not permission to stay where you are. Grace was the welcome of God that begins exactly where the truth begins, and then refuses to leave you there.

He sang of a God who reigns from heaven above, and he died believing it. The ragamuffin had no fine clothes to offer when he came to the end of that dark road. He had only the thing he had sung about all along. Mercy for the empty handed. And in the end, that was enough.