The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Keith Green
1953–1982 · American
Gave his records away for whatever people could pay, preached against comfortable Christianity, and died at twenty-eight in a plane crash with two of his children.
The life
Keith Green was a child performer in Los Angeles with a record contract at eleven, and spent his teens looking for God in eastern religion and drugs before he and his wife Melody came to Christ in the mid-1970s. His music was blunt in a way Christian radio was not used to - songs that told comfortable churchgoers they were asleep while the world burned - and his preaching between songs was blunter.
In 1980 he did something the industry had no category for: he arranged for his album to be sent to anyone who asked, for whatever they could pay or for nothing, and tens of thousands took him up on it. He and Melody ran Last Days Ministries from a property in east Texas, pushing young people toward the mission field. On 28 July 1982 a small plane taking visitors up over the property crashed on takeoff, killing everyone aboard: Keith, his three-year-old son Josiah, his two-year-old daughter Bethany, and nine others.
He was twenty-eight; Melody was pregnant.