Keith getty in christ alone
Getty and his wife, Kristyn, who perform together and tour with their four kids in an Irish-themed band, are back in Nashville, Tennessee, after nine months on lockdown in Northern Ireland, where they have a home. “If we’re going to build a generation of people who think deep thoughts about God, who have rich prayer lives, and who are the culture-makers of the next generation, we need to be teaching them songs with theological depth,” he said in a 2016 interview about his approach to hymn writing.
It arrived and I wasn’t expecting anything.” “He said he’d send me a CD with some of his song ideas. “We got together, we had a coffee, nothing particularly eventful happened,” Townend recalled. In a 2016 interview recounting the origins of “In Christ Alone,” Townend said there was nothing memorable about his meeting with Getty. The song also helped launch a new era of modern hymn writing.Īll of which came as a surprise to the song’s authors. That melody became the basis for “In Christ Alone,” which was released in 2001 and has become one of the most popular songs in Protestant churches, according to Christian Copyright Licensing International, which tracks songs sung in churches. So he sent a recording of the melody on a CD to Stuart Townend, an English songwriter he’d met a few months earlier at a church conference, in hopes Townend might be able to turn the melody into a serviceable hymn. This isn’t great, he thought at the time.īut it was the best he could come up with. The melody that changed Keith Getty’s life was first scratched out on the back of an electric bill in a humble flat in Northern Ireland. Keith Getty (left) and his wife, Kristyn.