Singer-songwriter Rich Mullins won lasting fame with a series of contemporary Christian hits in the 1980s and 1990s. In less than a decade, he won a dozen Dove Awards. His anthem “Awesome God” remains a staple of evangelical praise.
Mullins’ early music was influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which was austerely anti-dogmatic, as was his “Independent Christian” young adulthood. The Bible college he attended grew out of a movement whose foundational slogans touted “No creed but Christ.” Reading in Christian history, he was attracted to the figure of St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate this month. Francis was, like Mullins, a poet given to spontaneous praise, a lover of spiritual freedom.
Yet, as Mullins learned, Francis drew his poetry from a deep well of Catholic doctrine and liturgy — from a tradition crystallized in creeds: the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed.
Mullins’ study led him to love the creeds, so much, in fact, that he checked himself into RCIA classes at a Catholic parish in 1997. He died in an automobile accident that September, on the very eve of the day he was to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church. The music he produced in that homestretch shows the change in his interior life. Among his most mature works is the song “Creed,” with its mighty chorus:
“And I believe what I believe
is what makes me what I am.
I did not make it. No, it is making me.
It is the very truth of God and not
the invention of any man.
I believe it, I believe.”
Recently, “Creed” has been covered by several artists and is once again a staple on Christian radio. That’s a good sign.
What was true for Rich Mullins is true for you and me as well. What we believe is making us what we are — and what we hope to be for all eternity. It is a grace from God. You and I and Rich Mullins and St. Francis have been pleased to pledge it, to confess it, in the Church’s creeds.
