Keith Green and the Cost of a Free Gospel

In the late 1970s, when Christian music was just beginning to fill the airwaves and the record bins, there came a young man who refused to let the gospel be sold like soap. His name was Keith Green. He was a Jewish boy from California who had chased fame as a teenager, signed a record deal at eleven, and spent years wandering through drugs and Eastern religion before Jesus Christ took hold of him. And once Christ had him, he did not do anything halfway. He sat at a piano and sang like a man who had seen the edge of the cliff and wanted everyone else to step back from it.

Here is what set him apart. The music industry around him had learned that faith could be packaged and priced. Keith Green looked at that and felt something close to grief. So he made a decision that startled the whole movement. He told his own record company he wanted to give his music away. His album would go out for whatever a person could afford, and if they could afford nothing, it would still go out. No price tag on the call of God. He and his wife Melody opened their home to the broken and the addicted, sometimes filling house after house with people nobody else wanted.

And his songs did not flatter. They named the gap between what believers sang on Sunday and how they lived on Monday. He sang to the comfortable, and he asked them why so few would go to the mission field when so many were lost. He sang to the church and asked whether its worship was leading anywhere at all, or whether it was just a feeling that faded by lunchtime. People wept at his concerts. Not because the melodies were pretty, though they were, but because a young man at a piano was asking them to mean what they said. He did not want admirers. He wanted obedience. He wanted the song to become a life.

Then, in the summer of 1982, it ended without warning. Keith Green was twenty eight years old. On the second of July he took a small plane up over his Texas ministry land with two of his own young children and several others on board. The plane was overloaded. It went down shortly after takeoff. There were no survivors. A father, two of his children, and friends, gone in a moment. Melody Green was left at home, pregnant, with a daughter still living, to bury a husband and two children at once.

It is a grief that does not tidy up. There is no neat lesson hiding inside that crash, and it would be a kind of dishonesty to pretend there is. What can be said is what his short life left behind. In barely a handful of public years, Keith Green pressed a generation of believers to take Christ seriously, to give without counting the cost, to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, and to refuse the slow drift into religious performance. The ministry he and Melody began kept sending people to the nations long after his voice was silent.

He had sung that the world was sleeping in the dark that the church just couldn't fight, because it was asleep in the light. He had asked, in song, whether anyone would go. The strange and sober truth is that thousands answered after he was gone, some of them only because a young man had refused to make the gospel cheap, even as he made it free. His zeal was not the point. His zeal pointed past itself. And the question he kept asking still hangs in the air, gentle and unanswered: not whether the song moves you, but whether your life is being handed back to God.