NI couple can’t wait to host global Christian music event
A NORTHERN Ireland hymn writing couple are preparing to bring sweet music to over a quarter of a million people tuning in to their groundbreaking global online conference this weekend.
Sing! Global, organised by Keith and Kristyn Getty and hosted by Nashville’s iconic Grand Ole Opry, is the world’s largest Christian worship event.
More than 100 speakers and artists are scheduled to participate, including John Lennox, Joni Eareckson Tada, John Piper, Trip Lee, Andrew Peterson and David Platt.
The Gettys, who transformed the art of writing hymns and garnered a huge international following along the way, believe the Tennessee-based event has the potential to reach tens of thousands of individuals and families unable to attend in person due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking ahead of the fourday extravaganza, father-of-four Keith (45), who grew up in Lisburn, told the Belfast Telegraph how he got to where he is today by being able to “reinvent hymn”.
“Traditional churches sing hymns, modern churches sing pop praise songs and I’ve tried to roll down the middle and create modern hymns,” he said.
“The first one, which was written in converted pigsty in Lisburn on the back of a Northern Ireland Electricity bill in 2000 and was called In Christ Alone, became the most recorded hymn in the world.
“That was the breakout thing that changed my life and allowed me to focus on being Mr Hymn.”
In 2004 he married “love of my life” Kristyn (40), who is from Glengormley, and they moved to America in 2006 to pursue their dream of “building a music organisation all around hymn”.
The now world-famous couple have four daughters - Eliza (9), Charlotte (6), Gracie (4) and twoyear-old Tally – and they divide their time between Nashville and their Co Antrim home, located between Ballymoney and Bushmills, where they usually spend two months every summer.
Although coronavirus put paid to this year’s vacation, Keith said they hope to be getting back to Northern Ireland from September to November “just to get the kids out of America for a few months”.
“America isn’t much fun at the minute,” he said, referring to recent civil unrest created by the killing of black man George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis.
Nashville was one of the cities affected by shocking violence following the incident, which led to the worldwide Black Lives movement.
But Keith said: “Our home is in a safe area. We live in a gated place off the road; we’re very much in our own cocoon here which has been kind of nice. We’ve been careful.
“I grew up in Belfast during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.. but given the division in America, Northern Ireland’s divisions seem tame by comparison.”
Revealing that the Sing conference, which the couple created, “became the largest church worship conference in north America within three years”, Keith told how he refused to be beaten by Covid-19 this year.
He also revealed how the last few months were spent planning “how to expand this event online to enable more families, pastors and churches around the world to connect together and be part of deeper congregational worship”.
“Singing is banned because singing is not cosher right now and everybody expected that we would be the conference that would be worst hit by the pandemic,” Keith said.
“But I basically decided ‘no, we’re going to buck the trend’ and we decided to rebrand it as Sing Global and we’re going to create the first six continent worship conference in history.
“It has never been done before. We’ve got speakers musicians and worship leaders from all six continents.
“We recorded half of the music at the Ole Opry at the end of July and that music all went online so that everybody who was registered could sing into their phones and send their parts in.
“There was a mass choir for the conference as well and they all sang their parts in and so we created these tracks.
“When you click on you see us at the Ole Opry playing but what you’re hearing is Kristyn’s voice and thousands of voices from all over the world singing. It really is cool.”
Six of the guests during the first main day of the global conference are from Northern Ireland, including the hosts, artist Ross Wilson and Professor John Lennox.
He said there are “over 15,000 full registrants for our conference itself this weekend” adding that one of the highlights will be Kristyn’s evensong concert with country singer Vince Gill”.
Aside from Sing! Global, Keith and Kristyn perform a selection of their favourite hymns along with their young daughters around a piano and an iphone at their US home every Tuesday night, reaching more than a million people each week.