Who's writing the new Christmas carols?

For the past 15 years, Andrew Peterson and a circle of musical collaborators have toured the country with a Christmas show called Behold the Lamb of God. The program tells not just the Christmas story, but the full arc of the first and second comings of the Messiah. Singer and songwriter Keith Getty and his wife, Kristyn, have become fixtures in Christian music over the past decade. Their Christmas tour, Joy—An Irish Christmas, made its debut this week in Carnegie Hall in New York City. I spoke with both Peterson and Getty this week about their Christmas concerts.

Andrew, I want to talk about your Christmas show. I tried to get tickets to the Ryman Show this year, and I made the mistake of waiting 30 minutes after tickets went on sale. That was just long enough for the thing to sell out. Did you imagine that was going to happen? No, not at all. You always hope that something you do is going to strike a chord with people. It wasn’t an immediate success. … The best things in life are the ones you have to work for and be diligent, patient. The work of the Holy Spirit isn’t always this overnight thing. With music, I know that I would have probably quit years ago if it wasn’t for the constant encouragement and friendship of the community around me.

I think 2000 or 1999 was when the idea for the first song started showing up. We were in a van driving around the country with four people, trying to make the songs work. We didn’t have a [drummer]. Nobody was getting paid or anything. We were just trying to make this work because we all believed in the story that we were telling. At the back of our minds, we would go, gosh, wouldn’t it be cool to play a national [tour] and do a big show at the Ryman Auditorium for our friends and our family, for our community? It took a long time before the idea began to sink in with people because it’s a pretty unconventional Christmas concert or record.

By unconventional you mean it’s not a Christmas cantata, and it’s not Christmas carols either. It’s a story. Would you call it a song cycle? I think a song cycle is a good way to put it. I grew up on Pink Floyd records and these rock albums that told stories. I loved that idea that if you sat and listened to a 45-minute record it would take you somewhere. I still try to make my albums that way so that they’re not a bunch of singles stacked up. But with this, the attempt was to try and convey the epic nature of the story of Christ coming into the world with new songs. I love Christmas music, but I also know that we’ve heard the songs enough to where they’ve lost their wonder for us. If we could dust the cobwebs off the Christmas story a little bit and come at it from a different angle, musically and lyrically, then maybe it would ignite a little bit of wonder in people’s hearts.

So one of my pastors, Russ Ramsey, said it’s not a Christmas album, it’s an album about the coming of the Messiah—the need for and the coming of the Messiah, which happens to be the Christmas story. We’re singing about Christ himself, but not just his birth. We’re singing about his sacrifice and his resurrection, too, for that matter. It’s an unintentional Ebenezer stone in my life, the fact that every December, for 15 years now, I’ve gotten to put away all the songs about Andrew’s story and we get to aim all of our gifting at the story of the coming of Jesus in the world, and it’s a great blessing.

Keith Getty, unlike Andrew Peterson’s show, your concert blends traditional carols with original material. Your song “O, Savior of Our Fallen Race” gives an ancient song a modern feel while connecting modern songs to ancient roots. It is actually a little known, 6th century Latin Christmas carol with lyrics and melody rewritten by your wife and you. It’s quite unusual, but one of the few things in life I never kind of pushed towards. We started to write Christmas music, my wife and I, in 2010, really because we were struggling so much with our own writing we felt, let’s do something different. Along the process, Tom Bleso suggested doing a 30-minute event up at The Cove, the Billy Graham Center, with Cliff Barrows and George Bev Shea and Billy Graham. And Billy Graham actually spoke for the first night. We ran it for three nights there, a 30 minute set, and then we turned it into a 60-minute set for a few more church services at Christmas. We so much enjoyed doing it that we made an album the next spring. That’s what people do in Nashville in springtime; they make Christmas albums. Then we did a Christmas tour the next year and it’s just grown steadily each year. We took a sabbatical, took a hiatus, last year because we were blessed with our second child, Charlotte, but this is the third year of the full tour, and it’s really just grown from there. It’s been a very exciting, unexpected opportunity in life and we’re just thrilled to do it.

I’ve always believed that the Christmas production, or any church service in the Christmas season, should come out of the rich heritage that the church has. When we think about these Christmas carols, they are the true crossover music. The best modern Christian music has to offer in crossover are songs that occasionally get on mainstream radio or have good numbers on the Billboard or occasionally get on the late night chart show at a very quite time. And yet, these carols, when you think about it, influenced education for hundreds of years, were sung by every child in Britain and America for hundreds of years. Influenced books of Charles Dickens, some of them have been sung literally in hundreds of movies. Because of the faithfulness and the brilliance of the generation of people who have written these carols, they have given us an incredible heritage that has become part of our broader culture.

No matter how hip or contemporary or modern or post-modern we get, every year when Christmas comes around, we want to hear those Christmas hymns, don’t we? That’s right, and while there’s no form of music that is everybody’s favorite—that’s always been the case—the majority of church and the majority of unchurched and the majority of young and the majority of old look forward to singing Christmas carols, and they tell the Christian gospel so well. I was just in a class talking about “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.” [The first stanza says,] “Born to set Thy people free / From our fears and sins release us. / Let us find our rest in Thee”—the rest that Christ brings to so many of our friends who are feeling a lack of rest, who are feeling a lack of rest or feeling restless at Christmas.

My favorite American carol is “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem.” The verse says, “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given! / So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven. / No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin / where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.” The number of friends, relatives, neighbors I’ve had who live in regret and feel life is passing them by, and, yet, this message still is there this Christmas. These carols have a truly radical and a truly beautiful message.

Whenever you do these Christmas tours, I’m guessing people still want to hear your hit song “In Christ Alone.” Don’t they? It is actually included in the program. In the second half, Kristyn reads John 1, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” To me, that’s the most beautiful piece of literature that was ever written. So that leads into a carol we wrote one year ago, “Fullness of Grace,” which leads in doing “In Christ Alone.” … We still include it because it is about, “In Christ alone, Who took on flesh, fullness of God in helpless babe."

There are definitely verses in that song which could be Christmas verses. Actually, there are some genres of church musicologists who would call “In Christ Alone” a carol. Among the strictest definitions centuries ago, hymns were songs that taught about God, and carols were stories about the faith. So, technically, “In Christ Alone” is probably closer to a carol, but that’s just a unique kind of twist on culture.

Listen to Warren Smith’s conversations with Andrew Peterson and Keith Getty, along with many of the songs they mention, on Listening In: