Finding Faith in Secular Grace

Originally published at https://www.splicetoday.com.

I still love Rich Mullins. The late Christian singer/songwriter may be best known for the dreadful “Awesome God” (which even Mullins admitted wasn’t one of his best songs), but the rest of his catalogue is much better. His music mixed elements of classical (“Sing Your Praise to Lord”), Celtic (“The Color Green”), and African music (“How Can I Keep Myself from Singing?”), which made him stand out from most garbage Christian music. He was also brutally honest; at concerts, he stood onstage barefoot and unshaven, shared his thoughts between songs about how the Church had strayed far from Christ’s message of grace, and openly talked about his own flaws.

Brennan Manning’s book The Ragamuffin Gospel was a huge influence on Mullins. Manning was an ex-Franciscan priest whose lifelong struggles with alcoholism led him to a deeper appreciation of God’s grace. “To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark,” he wrote. “In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means… My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” It’s this message of radical grace that I miss the most about Christianity.