Take My Life and Let It Be Consecrated

Danny and I grew up as brothers in a missionary family of seven serving in Honduras and Chile. During our formative years we learned to play a variety of instruments including guitar, piano, charango, and zampoña (pan flute), focusing mainly on guitar. As young adults we moved back to the United States in order to continue our education and attempt to determine a direction for our lives and how we could best serve God and his people. We ultimately settled in Springfield, Missouri, and during our years there became deeply connected to a small church in the nearby town of Fair Grove where we began serving as musicians. During the course of our research and work preparing the musical portion of weekly worship, we became acquainted with hundreds of the best hymns composed through the centuries by saints for the worship of God and the advancement of good character among God's people. As our familiarity with these hymns increased over time, we developed a sense of the true value of a well-composed lyric and the strengthening effects a good, doctrinally rich song can have on the heart and mind of a believer. Out of this grew our vision to encourage God's people to more deeply value the vast collection of solid, enduring hymns which was once an essential component of the Church's worship experience and daily devotion. Danny and I have been particularly interested in focusing our work on restoring the ancient hymns of the past while still celebrating the fact that God’s musicians today are also writing many good, doctrinally sound songs which ought to be equally valued and preserved for the future worship of God. We firmly believe that an in-depth knowledge of God as presented in carefully written songs can help to produce a people whose actions and words become life and light to a dying and blinded world. We were attending college at the time we began fitting hymns with our original melodies and were surprised by how many young people took interest in what we were doing. Many of those who heard us sing were so unfamiliar with the great standard hymns of the faith that they wondered if we ourselves wrote the words to hymns such as “O for a Thousand Tongues” and “How Firm a Foundation.” So in the years that followed we began to slowly and determinedly steer our lives in a direction that would allow us to expose our brothers and sisters to the riches of grace contained in the vast body of Christian hymns. The response to our music around the world over the past few years has been very positive and has encouraged us in our hope of some day becoming a trusted resource for those in the Kingdom who are looking for pleasant, doctrinally rich, culturally diverse, and uncomplicated songs to enrich their journey through life. Our ultimate desire is that our music would be useful in congregational worship and serve to bring biblical truth to bear on the listener’s mind for the encouragement of godliness. We continue to serve as musicians in our local church in Springfield. I live in Springfield with my wife Marisha and have five children, Roma, Anessa, Quincy, Tilley and Knightly. Danny also lives in Springfield with his wife Lauren and their two children, Poppy and Jack. —Steve