Small World (The True Story of How I Learned that John the Baptist Used the King James Version)

A number of years ago, when I was young(er)…I was volunteering as a worship leader for a youth group in a large Assembly of God church in Cincinnati. One day, the youth pastor and I were bumming around in his office. He started digging through his desk looking for something, and pulled out a cassette tape he didn’t recognize. The words “Hymns My Mother Never Sang” was handwritten on it. So we popped the cassette into the player and started listening.

About a half hour later, our stomachs were sore from laughing so hard.

On the tape was this primitive recording in four-part southern gospel harmony (if you could call it that)–two guys and two girls, singing with a twang and largely off key. But it was the “hymns” they were singing that were so hysterical. To give you a hint of the lyrics, here are just a few of the song titles:

“If Your Hair’s Too Long, There’s Sin In Your Heart”
“Heaven Yes, Hell No”
“If John the Baptist Used the King James Bible (then It’s Good Enough For Me)”

Yep.

We had no idea how the tape wound up in his desk, but the other guy surmised it was just some Bible college students with too much time on their hands. I never forgot that experience; it was one of the best belly-laughs I’d had in years (and not nearly as much “belly” back then).

Almost ten years later, I was living in Tulsa, and every Tuesday I was going to lunch with a loose-knit group of pastors. One of the regulars at the lunch was a particularly good friend, and had even offered us the use of his church youth room for meetings, free of charge. I particularly enjoyed him because he had a dry sense of humor like I do. So one day he starts telling us the story about how he had recently gotten a large royalty check from The Tonight Show because during the “Stump the Band” segment, an audience member had sung a song he’d written. He didn’t see the show when it first aired, but a friend had told him about it. So he called The Tonight Show to say, “Hey, that was my song.” They told him, yes, the song had aired twice–once during the original taping, and once during a “best of” segment–but they did not know who owned the song. A short time later the royalty check came.

The name of the song? “Heaven Yes, Hell No.”

He went on to tell us that over ten years prior, while he still pastored in the Assemblies of God, he’d written some parody songs in the old-time southern gospel style, and had them recorded for fun under the title, “Hymns My Mother Never Sang”. Before he knew it, these songs had made their way through the A/G denomination, all across the country–including that youth pastor’s desk in Cincinnati.

So…after all that time of remembering those songs and wondering where they’d come from, here I was, sitting across from a guy I’d been friends with for two years–and come to find out he’d been the one to write them!

Small world.

Do you have any “small world” experiences like that?

P.S. When he told this story, this pastor also bemoaned the irony that The Tonight Show had set royalty money aside for him, without even knowing his identity, and quickly paid him as soon as they found out; but the Christians in the Assemblies of God had bootlegged his songs all across the nation, gave him no credit, and never paid him a dime. But I guess we’ll save that one for another post…. 🙂