The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Keith Green
1953–1982AmericanEvangelical
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.
Summary
- Lived 1953–1982, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Revivalists and The Hymn Writers.
- Tradition: Evangelical / Jesus movement.
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.
What was happening while he lived5 moments · 1930–today
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Keith Green at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Sent his records to anyone who asked for whatever they could pay, told sleeping churches so, and died at twenty-eight with two of his children.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed. Hangs on The Hymn Writers: The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.