Graham Kendrick
October 22, 2013
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143,
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graham_kendrick
Graham Kendrick (b. 1950), one of the most prominent names in Contemporary Praise Music, is the author of popular songs such as “From Heaven You Came,” “Meekness and Majesty,” “Shine Jesus Shine,” and “Such Love, Pure as the Whitest Snow.”

One of his objectives is to break down denominational barriers and create ecumenical unity. He was the co-founder of the ecumenical March for Jesus, which has brought together every type of denomination and cult including Roman Catholic and Mormon. A biography at Kendrick’s web site boasts: “Crossing international and denominational barriers, his songs, like the popular
Shine Jesus Shine, have been used from countless small church events to major festivals--including Promise Keeper rallies, Billy Graham crusades and a four million-strong open air CATHOLIC MASS in the Philippines capital Manila, where THE POPE ‘SWUNG HIS CANE IN TIME TO THE MUSIC.’”

Kendrick is a charismatic of the most radical sort and promotes the heretical “kingdom now” theology and Word faith doctrine. He is a member of the Ichthus Christian Fellowship which welcomed the so-called Toronto Blessing with its meaningless gibberish, spirit slaying, hysterical laughing, barking, braying, rolling. Kendrick claims that he was “baptized with the Holy Spirit” in 1971 after attending a charismatic meeting. He says, “It was later that night when I was cleaning my teeth ready to go to bed that I was filled with the Holy Spirit! ... and I remember lying at last in my bed, the fixed grin still on my face, praising and thanking God, and gingerly trying out a new spiritual language that had presented itself to my tongue with no regard at all for the objections thrown up by my incredulous brain! ... That was a real watershed in my Christian experience” (Nigel Smyth, “What Are We All Singing About?” - site and report have been removed).

To bypass one’s thinking and to refuse to test everything by Bible doctrine is blind mysticism.

The following is excerpted from an article by Alan Morrison entitled “The New Style of Worship and the Great Apostasy.” Used by permission. The entire article was available on the Diakrisis web site but now has been removed.

As a graphic illustration of the kind of ‘Christianity’ which lies behind the new hymnody, consider the following interview with that veteran of the New Style of Worship, Graham Kendrick, conducted by the supremo of the cult-like Jesus Army Fellowship, Noel Stanton:

NS: “What are the landmarks in your life?”

GK: “I remember when I was about five years old my mother reading us a bedtime story which included a simple explanation of the gospel and asking us if we wanted to invite Jesus to forgive our sins. I remember kneeling down by myself and praying. I felt an excitement deep inside me that surprised me. During teenage years I began to examine if it was first hand or second hand”.

NS: “You were a rebel?”

GK: “It was the 60s and I tended towards the cynicism of the time. Certainly I was determined to discover more”.

NS: “Did that lead to Baptism in the Spirit?”

GK: “I’ve never been a crisis person but I came out of one particularly drab Christian Union meeting at college thinking ‘There must be more than this’. So I set out to seek for more of God. I had met one or two people who seemed to have been profoundly affected by the Holy Spirit. I tracked down a housegroup and knocked on the door, not knowing anybody there, and asked people to pray for me afterwards. It was later that night when I was cleaning my teeth ready to go to bed that I was filled with the Holy Spirit! That was a real watershed in my Christian experience”.

NS: “When was this?”

GK: “It was about 1971, when the charismatic renewal movement was in its early days and was quite controversial. Lots of people would warn you off and say it was of the devil! Tongues were as controversial then as the current manifestations of shaking and falling are now” (
Jesus Life Magazine, from the Jesus Army Fellowship website. Article since taken down.) This interview was also reproduced on “The Graham Kendrick Website” under the link “Graham’s Christianity”).

This brief testimony displays all the inadequacies and dead-ends of the modern understanding of what it means to become a Christian. While we are aware that such interviews do not necessarily contain every facet of a person’s conversion, the fact remains that — having been asked to identify the landmarks in his Christian life, Mr. Kendrick places the emphasis not on the holiness of God, the demands of the Gospel or the atonement of Christ but on his own feelings and experiences. This is symptomatic of a grave crisis in the modern evangelical scene, and one which has worked its way into churches through the New Style of Worship songs which they sing today. We have no desire to enter into
ad hominem contentions, but it is surely valid for us to highlight what we believe to be unhealthy and even dangerous ideas in the testimony of a keynote composer in the New Style of Worship scene, who plainly wields considerable influence over gullible and vulnerable young people.

Firstly, while there is a verbal mention of sin and forgiveness in this interview with Kendrick, there is not the slightest indication of true repentance and an understanding of what sin is all about. Surely this is the most important aspect of a conversion experience, as shown in those examples in the Early Church, when folk were “cut to the heart” (e.g. Acts 2:37). While we do not at all deny that small children can be regenerated and converted — recognising that their understanding of the Gospel will not be identical to that of a university professor — there must surely be a real awareness first of the need for forgiveness and a subsequent desire for repentance, otherwise conversion becomes a mere mental assent.

(It should be pointed out here that there are two equal and opposite errors into which we can fall on the experience of conversion. One is what is known as ‘Sandemanianism’ — named after Robert Sandeman, 1718-1771, the Scottish minister who first publicly propounded this doctrine — which involves the idea that a person merely needs to give verbal assent to the propositions contained in the Gospel in order to be saved, without any evidence of a heart change or regeneration. The other is what we can call ‘Preparationism’ — whereby a person is persuaded of the need to enter into a massively over-prolonged (or even indefinite) period of intense preparation for conversion, during which he must go through the most oppressive heart-searching rigours, without which he cannot be saved. We must always be sure that our evangelism does not encourage either “easy-believism” or its opposite: bondage-making preparationism. They lie at contrary ends of the spectrum, but both are deadly, conversion-stifling errors.)

Secondly, a child who is genuinely regenerated will surely not subsequently become an adolescent rebel, with a tendency to partake in “the cynicism of the time”, as Kendrick puts it. It seems to be taken for granted in so many evangelical churches today that even youngsters who profess Christianity will still go on to be teenage rebels who need to express themselves in rock music, foppish clothes, and the raucous multi-media experiences of the world. But such out-and-out rebellion belongs to the fallen nature and should not be a feature in a believer’s life of any age.

Thirdly, in this testimony, there is that typical feature of neo-evangelicalism: the desire for increasingly exciting experiences. Regardless of what Mr. Kendrick says here, he was indeed a “crisis person” who was seeking a “crisis experience”. Is there not a link here back to that early prayer of his which engendered “an excitement deep inside me” but which apparently failed to kindle godly sorrow and contrition? The Christian Union meeting, he believed, was not good enough for him. But instead of seeking out some orthodox Christians who promote sound doctrine to point him in the right direction, like so many immature, misguided seekers he goes in search of sensational “pyrotechnics”. From the present writer’s experience of this kind of complaint, that “particularly drab Christian Union meeting at college” could easily have been made up of godly youngsters singing hymns in the old-style and bowing quietly in prayer before the Lord (without the almost mandatory trance-induced arm-waving and gibberish kind of “tongues-speaking” one finds among most university and college Christian Unions today). This is considered dull and boring in the kind of circles where CCM is extolled and especially among carnal youngsters who have been processed on the easy-believist conveyor belt of evangelism.

The housegroup scene has always been a pastoral minefield, and if you go down that pathway, you are far more likely to wind up in a cult rather than a sound assembly!

Fourthly, the account of being “filled with the Holy Spirit” is decidedly suspect. Christians are certainly instructed to “go on being filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18) throughout their Christian lives; but it is so typical of the sensation-seeking, crisis-loving evangelicals of today to highlight one incident as their supposed “baptism in the Spirit”. And is it not strange that what Kendrick describes as “a real watershed” in his Christian experience should occur entirely as an incidental experience while he happened to be “brushing his teeth”? Frankly, we find it hard to credit the fact that in a serious interview, designed to display the testimony of the work of God in his life and his faith in the Son of God, we should read such a flippant narrative. This is entirely in keeping with the superficial nature of the New Style of Worship as a whole; and the question must be asked here: Is it right for churches to worship God from a hymnbook of which almost 10% of the songs were written by a man whose testimony would not even obtain membership for him in our churches? (
Mission Praise contains 8.5% of Graham Kendrick songs. Songs of Fellowship contains 10%.)

Surely there is a clear connection between the truncated “Christianity” of this “conversion” experience, and that which the New Style of Worship is promoting in churches today. This is a plain example of “easy believism”, with a subsequent psycho-religious catharsis masquerading as an “infilling of the Spirit”. Such phenomena form the undergirding theology which governs the style and content of the New Style of Worship songs, which are deliberately manipulative of a bogus spiritual experience. A person who has had a superficial “conversion” experience will always spend his or her time seeking a more profound “second blessing”. Consequently, in place of the simple desire for reverential praise of the Triune God, we find that the search for an ever-greater “high” also becomes the goal of worship. Hence, these songs are often used to bring a person into what is known as an “altered state of consciousness” (Alan Morrison,
“The New Style of Worship and the Great Apostasy,” Diakrisis International).



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