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Mark Heard: Key to the Change in Pat Terry?
(02/09/2008)

Related articles: A Visit With Pat Terry, Pat Terry Group Reunion Concert: "First Love"

2 Corinthians 11:3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

1 Timothy 6:20,21 O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called “knowledge” which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith.

I didn’t become aware of all this until many years later when God whacked me upside the head with a 2 x 4 to make me realize that I had been denying the truth of His Lordship. I began to get interested in Christian music again and begun to look up whatever happened to Pat and it seemed that he had just dropped off the face of the planet. However, I heard rumors that he was a songwriter in Nashville and that he was now writing hits for country stars like Travis Tritt, Tanya Tucker, Kenny Chesney, and Alan Jackson. Then, of course, I heard him in Roswell and at the Pat Terry Group Reunion Concert.

But I never could figure out why the meek and mild Pat Terry who had such a powerful music ministry changing the lives of so many had wound up writing country songs for secular artists. His songs had been so filled with such poignant, honest, love for the Savior and a desire to see others come to know Him. What changed? Although I have probably only said a dozen words to him over the decades, I couldn’t believe that the Pat which I had come to know through his songs and his concerts was not the real one. You can’t fake that kind of sincerity for that long. So how did he get from there to here?

Now let me be clear, he has NOT rejected Christianity and totally forsaken the faith. You can read his own words at his website (http://www.patterryonline.com/) where he speaks to this. But his music priorities and focus has changed from ministry and evangelism to just writing good songs about life in general.

But I still never could understand what happened to bring about such a dramatic shift. But I think I may have stumbled upon part of the answer: Mark Heard.

I never met Mark Heard since his popularity began about the time of my self-imposed exile from Christian music. He was born in 1951 and released 16 records during a period stretching from the early 70s until his death from a heart attack at age 40 in 1992. He studied with Francis Schaeffer (considered by many to be the greatest Christian philosopher of our age) at his L’Abri school in Switzerland for a time. Mark was a philosopher, a cynic, and a songwriter who was often compared to Bob Dylan. He influenced a great many musicians in his time resulting in a tribute album as well as a book about his life. Pat Terry became close friends with Mark in the early 70s and was instrumental in establishing Mark’s music career. Later on, Mark co-produced three of Pat’s solo albums (Humanity Gangsters, Film at Eleven, and The Silence).

I have performed a good bit of research on Mark (read some of his writings, read what others have said about him, listened to some of his music) and I wish I could have known him. Judging from his sense of humor and what I can tell of his temperament, I think I would have liked him. Given the opportunity, I think we would have had long, intense conversations into the wee hours of the morning.

But we would have disagreed fundamentally (again, pun intended) on the role of music in a Christian’s life. But instead of me telling you what he thought, allow me to let Mark’s own words speak for themselves. The following quotes are from liner notes, interviews, and his own writings. I think it will become obvious how such views could impact others who were close to and respected him. Afterwards, I’ll tell you my take on them.

“On The Tip of His Tongue,” Mars Hill Review, Issue 6: pgs 112-117, Fall 1996 (as found on http://www.markheard.net/)

Heard defined his “mission” as a poet clearly in the liner notes of his 1983 acoustic album, Eye of the Storm: “I prefer to see myself as a writer who is a Christian, and I prefer to let my faith flavor my observations rather than dictate them. I prefer for my pen to act as a nerve receptor and write about the world - the real one - that exists outside society’s and Christian society’s simplistic, plastic, media-fed notions of what life is and what is important.” Heard concluded by emphasizing, “I prefer not to excommunicate myself from either the ‘secular’ world or the church, in favor of attempting to write in a way that is communicative to both but calculated towards neither.”

“I think it is a mistake to set up rules and stereotypes for Christian musicians to follow. It seems like there is pressure from the Church community on a Christian musician to use his abilities ‘for the Lord,’ and by that, some type of evangelism, or some type of service to other believers is usually meant. I think the concern is good, but just because a person has musical abilities does not mean he is properly equipped in the areas of evangelism or ministering to the Church in ways that are expected and needed. I know this isn’t the popular thing to say, but I don’t believe God wants every Christian who plays an instrument to try and form a ministry from it.”

“Most Christians would say that the music should in some way glorify God. Obviously, one assortment of notes on the scale can’t glorify God more than another. Neither can certain assortments of words. Most Christians seem to think the words themselves do the glorifying, because so many Christian songs contain theological words. If you are an up and coming Christian singer and you have to sing for a Christian audience, you’d better throw in as many words like ‘saved’ or – ‘Hallelujah’ or ‘Sweet Jesus’ as you can, otherwise your spirituality will be discussed behind your back.”

“I can’t judge a song by a Christian or a non-Christian. I listen to and really enjoy a lot of music written by non-believers. When I hear Jackson Browne lament man’s inhumanity to man, it makes me mourn too. By the way, Browne seems to do a better job of exposing evil in the world than most Christian writers. When I hear a Paul Simon. or a Don McLean, or a James Taylor, there is much truth to be gleaned, regardless of where they stand with Christ, because they are true artists. I enjoy and appreciate their creativity, even though I may or may not agree with the things they say.”

Do you think there is a danger that a Christian performer can fall into pride about his work?

“Anybody can fall into pride. There are a lot of warnings about it in the Bible to everybody. It can be a bad thing when we forget Who gave us creativity in the first place. I think because of that, however, there is an unnatural phobia about pride today in the Church. The twisted pride that causes men to be arrogant to God and one another is a sad consequence of Man’s Fall. But there is another side to pride. It can mean to have proper self-esteem, or true self-respect. This part of pride has been lost many times by Christians seeking to rid themselves of the bad forms of pride.”

Isn’t ‘Christian doubter’ a contradiction in terms?

“No. I think many Christians have doubts but are afraid to admit it. We Christians like so much to appear full of faith to others that we can suffer with unexpressed doubts. But doubt and questions are not sin in themselves, rather they can act as a warning system that lets us know our roots aren’t deep enough. Reason and faith are not opposed to one another, they should go hand in hand. We shouldn’t be afraid of our intellect-it’s another part of God’s image which He gave us in creation. I have heard people say that reason leads to agnosticism, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. It was the other way around for me - it led to faith.”

“I think that for most questioners, there may always be some element of doubt, but if God tells us to love Him with all our hearts and souls and minds, then surely that must be possible. Surely the axiom of seek and ye shall find must apply satisfactorily. That has been my experience.”

“In my days as a skeptic, standing on the outside of the Christian circle, whenever I heard Christian music to me it was pure gibberish, and I don’t mean theologically - it was so wrapped in Christian culture. It seemed like the artists were speaking only to those already in the Church. They thought they were reaching people like me, but I saw them as reaching only themselves, and then patting themselves on the back for it.”

“It’s too bad that so much of today’s mass evangelism fails so miserably on these points in its efforts to siphon souls into the Kingdom. If every Christian would treat just one other person with real love, I’m sure more would come to faith than do at present, with all our mass harvesting techniques.”

[A Christian record company executive who was considering signing him told him over lunch that “I’d like to just hear you say, ‘God has called me into the ministry of music.’” Mark writes:]

“I told him that that would probably not be my choice of words, and I would feel presumptuous saying something that implies I’m on a first name basis with the Almighty. I told him that I’m not sure what ministry really is, and that whatever it is, God seems to be kind enough to wrap it into our efforts and sometimes wise enough to bestow it in spite of them.”

[Mark’s describes one evening at a coffee house:]

“Tonight I played at a coffeehouse/club. It was in an old building, and there were what I must assume were paintings of the Holy Spirit or something on the wall, done quickly in bad tempera. The dressing room was an office of some sort, I think. There was no place to sit. I tuned my guitar and was looking through a possible set list when the man in charge walked in. He said it was time to pray, as the concert was to start in five minutes.”

“After a ten minute prayer, the gist of which was, ‘Oh Lord, just sing through Mark tonight and keep him out of the picture altogether,’ I considered the prospect of lining up a great number of such concerts, then staying at home and sending a cardboard likeness of myself for God to sing through.”

“I felt like, ‘why even bother writing songs?’ why consult your heart and soul in order to expose it, why subject yourself to the gristmill of life and then try to bleed through a pen when it is all so easily reduced?”

“Why pray to a god who would rather speak through say, a stone? Too bad that God made so many people who are interested in music and so few stones who are.”

“Needless to say, when I arrived on stage, I was not in the best of all possible moods. I went through twenty two songs, opting between each not to say anything. I just sang. Having spent over an hour in this manner, and having for the moment quieted the rage inside myself through the therapy of re-living my life on six steel strings, I exited the stage back to the dressing room/office.”

“Here I was met by the red-faced man in charge who didn’t say much, although I heard him clearly. He proceeded onto the stage where he intimated to those present that the man who had just performed could not possibly be a Christian because of the questioning nature of some of the songs and because of the obvious fact that he had not SAID anything, and after all, what is any musician worth who doesn’t talk between his songs.”

“After this information, he proceeded to make up for all I had not said by a gospel presentation seeming to last half a lifetime. He returned red-faced to the dressing room/office, where I still stood, and uttered words to match the color of his face.”

“Since I had another 13 gigs to play on the tour, he had decided to take it upon himself to call each of the promoters for those gigs personally and inform them of my infidel status. I knew it would be useless to argue. I know I can be stubborn, but I kept asking myself, as we walked through the cold to his dented yellow Pinto, ‘what good is music if you have to talk about it?’”

“Ten years later, I was playing guitar on tour for another artist, staying in a hospitality house in Washington, DC. A young girl was serving us a lunch of chicken and rice with fruit and herbs, and handed me a note at the end of the meal. It turns out she had been present at the concert at that coffee house/club and had listened to the songs and remembered them, and had forgotten what the red-faced man had said altogether.”

[Speaking of his dislike for interviews with Christian magazines, Mark wrote:]

“It’s the smell of the interview that seems to matter to them, and if you read between the questions, the primary question seems to be: ‘But are you really a Christian?’ The interview becomes a litmus test. It strikes me as people greeting like dogs.”

[He goes on to write about how he played many bars and found one non-Christian couple whose life dream was to open a bar where they could hear the kind of music they liked. Mark wrote:]

“Why is it that I felt closer to them than I have with most promoters at Christian colleges I’ve played? Perhaps we have more in common by virtue of our common humanity than we have differences by virtue of our religions.”

[Mark talks about songwriting:]

“But increasingly, writing brings about a catharsis of my own terror and pity. It is something I have to do. Dare I say that it becomes an experience of worship for me at times?”

“When you can see through the fog for an instant, and you understand haltingly and briefly what good is, and how God is connected with that, it cannot help but put a hell of a perspective on things you perceive as problems, and help you discover multiple ways in which you have been numb. For that brief moment you feel that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.”

“Skepticism doesn’t have to be viewed as a liability . Unfortunately, most of the time Christians see it that way. I have had hard times in the past because of that -- my questions were equated with sin by most of the believers around me, and that caused still more questions, like, ‘well, shouldn’t God’s people be concerned enough about me to help me instead of crossing their arms and waiting for me to see things their way?’ It bothered me for a long time. When a person has no rational basis for his faith, or feels that he has lost that rational basis, it is quite painful. It’s hard to believe with your heart if there is conflicting information in your mind. To ignore the mind and brush off the questions is wrong, and is more an Eastern idea than a Christian one. So finally I figured, ‘well, if Christianity can’t stand up to questioning, it’s not the truth, and if it’s not worth scrutiny, it’s not worth believing.’ So my skepticism continued and led me to look deeply into the matters in question. Most of my answers came from quiet study. Skepticism was an asset to me in that it forced the roots of my faith to grow deeper.”

Did becoming a Christian change your approach to music at all?

“Well, in the late Sixties when Christian music was becoming popular, it was ‘in’ in the secular world to inundate your songs with a message. You know, revolution and all that. So Christian Rock got off on that foot, and of course most Christians began to see music as a tool with which young people could be reached evangelistically. I always kinda resented that idea. It is valid to say that music can be used by God, but it’s unfair to put a limit on the number of ways in which music can be valuable to a Christian or to someone who isn’t. I hate to see music be only a podium on which one stands to voice his convictions.”

Do you think Evangelism means more than telling the simple gospel message?

“We modern Christians live in an age in which Evangelism enjoys a high position on the totem pole of Christian activity or at least theology. But I’m not so sure we know what evangelism is anymore. We have told ourselves what it is thousands and thousands of times, and we have believed ourselves. It has become a creed unto itself, and the rules of if are usually structured to lump the ‘unsaved’ together in a general heap, and then to ‘witness’ to them according to a prefabricated plan. Once you’re a Christian, it’s easy to tell other people that they should be too. It seems so obvious and easy to you that you can forget that it may not seem that way to someone who is not yet a Christian himself. It’s too easy to believe that everyone realizes his need for a Savior, but just will not accept Him. I tell you, that’s not the case in our society anymore, and it’s becoming less and less the case. What does our message mean to these people? Usually nothing. We have become an ugly sort of non-human in our noble efforts to take the message (the one we have told ourselves is the best form of the message) to the people, and we have failed miserably.”

What advice would you give to someone who writes songs and is thinking of getting involved in Christian music?

“Well, you know there’s always the problem of pinpointing just where you fit in. Do you feel that you are to be a minister, and the music is secondary to you, or are you primarily a musician who is a Christian? The spectrum for involvement seems to he broadening, and I’m glad to see it because it’s wrong to force someone who could be of value on one level to be committed on another level.”

Do you think that there is any value in secular artistic endeavors for the Christian from either the aspect of the artist or the listener?

“Yes, because God made man in His image, and that image includes creativity. So I think any truly creative act has value, intrinsic value, because God put it there. It is a shame for Christians to reject art done by non-Christians (though it’s also a shame that these creators don’t know the origin of their creativity). When I look around today at the art that is being done, looking past the hype, I’d have to say that the ‘secular’ art does exhibit a higher quality than does the corresponding ‘Christian’ art. It hasn’t always been that way -Christians in the Renaissance period were the ones setting the trends which everyone else was following, the opposite of what is happening today. I think it’s time we started really listening to what some of these ‘secular’ artists have to say; they are the true spokesmen for the society of which they are parts and prophets.

Shouldn’t the worsening of the world’s condition only serve to remind us of Christ’s imminent return?

“Christians sometimes seem to me to have a warped enjoyment in attesting to the fallenness of the world, so much so that sometimes they go to great lengths in books to correlate all the horrible things that happen daily with Biblical prophecy. They get so excited about it, as if it were wonderful that people are going to Hell under our very noses. Often I wonder why Christian leaders do not realize what is happening around us as the meetings go on, hoping to draw new believers out of the world like a rescue operation on a sinking ship. Is there any hope to help make the world slow down in its demise? Some are so sure of Christ’s imminent return that society around them goes to the dogs as they continue in their emergency salvage operations. Pessimism about the future, even if based on eschatological theology, is no reason to refuse to accept responsibility for what the future turns out to be.”

But why all this concern with society? Isn’t someone who preaches social concern just preaching a ‘social gospel’ instead of a spiritual one?

“Isn’t it nice that we have terms like that, and pigeon holes too, so we can classify things and rob them of their depth and complexity? When Jesus healed the blind man, or when He drove the money changers from the temple, or when He shed tears for Lazarus, was He preaching the ‘social gospel?’”

[I wholeheartedly agree with what he said concerning selling Christianity as the way to achieve ‘ultimate happiness:’]

“We do not become followers of Christ in order to feel good or to have peace. We become followers of Christ because His message is the Truth, regardless of how we may ever feel. We bow to the Truth because it is the Truth, and we bow to God because He is God. Our faith is not a method for our satisfaction - it is obedience to the Creator regardless of the consequences.”

Allow me to summarize what he said in the above excerpts. He saw himself as an artist/musician/writer first and a Christian second. He worshiped his craft and it was only when he was writing that he felt connected to God. He wanted friendship with the world and with God. He was more at home with secular musicians than with brothers and sisters in Christ. He felt that the quality of secular “art” (i.e., music) exceeded anything put out by Christians today and that we need to listen more to what they had to say. He treated with contempt any direct communication of the Gospel preferring innuendo and resented the idea of music being used to evangelize. In fact, he claimed that direct evangelism made us “non-human” and “meant nothing” to non-Christians. He felt that it was irresponsible to focus on saving people due to Christ’s imminent return and that we need to put more effort on improving the world we live in. He admitted having no idea what ministry is and felt it was presumptuous to claim that God had called him into a music ministry.

Does that just about sum it up?

How terribly sad. Can you hear the doubt and despair and pride behind his words? How horrible to have such a hunger for truth and to be so close to it but to never be able to make it your own. As a friend once said, he “learned how to seek but never learned how to find.” Although he always claimed to be looking for the truth he appeared to refuse the truth when it was offered to him because it seemed too simple. He held onto a vain intellectual elitism which treated with contempt simple faith or simple answers whether they were true or not. He was obsessed with the truth but seemed utterly incapable of trusting it. For him, doubting God’s Word was in practice the highest, noblest, and most wise of all the virtues. Although he sometimes mouthed the right words about the Bible being the absolute authority concerning truth, ultimately, he remained unwilling to let go of his unbelief except on a technical basis. Therefore, he never found what he was looking for. The result was a depressed, despairing, shadow of a man who was thoroughly in love with his pain and doubt.

Mark held his identity as an artist, musician, and a skeptic higher than his identity as a child of God and he resented the fact that most Christians could detect right away that there was something out of whack in his faith. He never really grasped the idea of denying yourself and his fierce individualism was just another form of self-assertion and pride. Basically, he was unwilling to answer God’s call to subject his ideas of self (i.e., his life) to His Lordship where it conflicted with the image he had created of himself.

When it came to telling others about Christ, he operated under the misconception that it’s only by fully understanding non-believers and speaking to them in a culturally relevant indirect way was it possible for them to become a believing doubter like himself.

Mark was one of the first within Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) to hold to this point of view. However, his concepts have become accepted axioms now within the industry. I wonder how he would feel if he had lived to see his vision of CCM implemented and the fruit which it has wrought? In any case, I think anyone can see how such views, if accepted, would change a committed music ministry geared towards reaching others for Christ to a secular-oriented career more interested in producing “good art.”

I know that this probably isn’t the whole reason for the change in Pat, but it seems likely to be at least part of the reason. I’m saddened that Mark Heard passed on so early in life and that he never was able to enjoy the fruits of faith that God intended for him. His writings from shortly before his death appear to confirm this:

“Second Hand” Liner Notes (1991) (as found on http://markheard.net/)

“Most usual are the days you wish you could feel anything. You wish that you could care more than you seem to be able to, or could focus on something beyond the mundane little dance steps involved in the busywork of subsistence. At least there is the impulse to ask yourself, ‘Why?’ There are reasons to be thankful just having something to keep you busy. Songs written by those so inclined to busy themselves in these days tend to become a simple documentation of feelings in the waxing and waning of our awareness of events on the planet, both near and far. But the clock seems only to remind you that there’s more to do and you’re behind in whatever it is you’re already supposed to have done. Your children are loud. Things could be better. Things could be worse. Luckily a few things never change.”

2 Timothy 3:7 always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth

Hebrews 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

Jeremiah 6:16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.