Richard Wayne Mullins: RIP
Kenneth R. Craycraft Jr.
October 1, 1997
Late in the evening of September 19, 1997, Rich Mullins died in a car accident, en route to do what he loved best: to sing his songs for the spiritual (and financial) benefit of someone else. With his death, contemporary Christian music lost its most original and courageous songwriter, and among its most enigmatic characters. He is perhaps best known for his songs "Awesome God" and "Step by Step," staples of evangelical retreats and worship services. But his best known song is "Sing Your Praise to the Lord," which helped to launch Amy Grant's career in Christian music and laid the foundation for her crossover into secular pop (and which Rich recorded in its restored original version on his album Songs). I was very familiar with the Jeep Rich was thrown from on that dark Illinois night, for his death was also the loss of a close friend.
Over a friendship that spanned nearly twenty years, I saw Rich Mullins's love of God and his church take surprising turns. His evangelical fans might not be aware of the strongly Catholic accent Rich's faith had recently taken. But over the past three or four years, on his visits to my home, Rich expressed a growing interest in Catholicism. Over pints of Guinness at Durty Nelly's on San Antonio's Riverwalk, Rich quizzed me incessantly about my own pilgrimage from the very American Church of Christ/Christian Church to the Church of Rome. While he was still reading and quoting the C. S. Lewis books that we had read together in Cincinnati—where I was in high school and he was a (sometime) student at Cincinnati Bible College—his interests had moved to such Catholic apologists as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Moreover, his newly discovered love for the southern Catholic novelist ...
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